No cop tanks waited at nearby corners, only fleeing pedestrians beneath structures filled with living things. The chop-chop of helicopter blades threatened from afar. More helicopters, and they might wear bigger guns, faster and stronger than before. Pointless when she’d already adapted for worse.

She rooted herself around the dead machine’s cooling steel, a center for her foundation tree, and stretched her limbs in every direction. Spread to her thinnest, no city street lay beyond her limits. There was nothing left to stop her from eating everyone she found.

Time eased her into a healing half-sleep, almost hibernation in the cold.

Rooted, she let herself disconnect in feeling as her limbs reached Sunnyside Fertility, Jumpies locations, the neighbors to Pandora’s Aquarium, Doc’s apartment building, police stations, suburbs, and Yaya’s old home where half the Gemini mural patterned the brick.

The city was a soft blanket, and Magenta drew it close. New flesh warmed her at sunset.

As every structure dimmed and the people-free streets went quiet, her eyes locked with a glass pillar, alone above the dark city. Sparse light flickered between its windows. Some small remnant of AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical still drew breath above Newark.

Magenta let herself dip again into her orchard. ABP could keep no intellectual property rights on chimeras once she erased their property and all hints of intelligence.

The dead owned nothing.

29

Doc promised herself to never look at the time. If she looked, she would be distracted. Minutes and hours, morning and evening, each a hypothetical measurement of Magenta’s catastrophe outside. Best to prioritize chemicals over clocks.

Lab techs understood. Doc was no biochemist, but she monitored the technicians’ tasks while they shut themselves inside the labs. They warned she would need protective gear, more than anyone had said to her nine years ago, but Kentucky’s damage was done. There was no going back.

She hadn’t expected Magenta’s return to the skyscraper. Or part of her.

Diagnostic sequences were still wrapping up when the first tentacle breached the lab’s outer wall and sent a pink pseudopod hunting prey. Doc caught it from the corner of her eye—a yellow suit careening out the sliding doors, the woman inside shrieking through an anonymous gas mask. Who was she? Doc would never know. She went silent once the tentacle dragged her around the corner.

Doc went from overseer to guardian. Each time a pseudopod shot through door or vent, she rushed to bar the way between Magenta and her prey.

Sometimes Doc was fast enough. Sometimes she wasn’t.

The synthesizing program faltered. Doc’s plan meant recreating the October 12 injection, observing its exact process, and then creating a chemical to reverse it. But the programs didn’t understand, and the lab techs lacked active Yaya tissue. Blood samples weren’t enough. To test the original injection’s effectiveness, they needed the body of a woman who no longer existed. Even with a reversal chemical, they had no way to test it except apply it to Magenta. If it failed the first time, there wouldn’t be a second. She would adapt before they perfected it.