Doc wondered if she’d be making the world a better place. The words felt hollow. Improvement was multi-faceted at best and subjective at worst. What made the world better to the Board and Magenta were two wholly opposite ideals.

The leading tentacle thickened at the next turn. No buildings remained here; Magenta had leveled the block and now ruled monolithic over a land of rubble.

The Kentucky Incident crawled across Doc’s thoughts. What an easy moniker for that awful night nine years ago. What would future ABP agents call Magenta when they whispered her in warning to their children? Doc couldn’t see them as people right now, only gas masks that carried food home to other gas masks and told them bedtime stories of making their world a better place. Be good little children, or the Newark dragon will gobble you up.

Except Magenta was greater than any dragon, kraken, chimera, every mythical beast. She towered toward the sky. No knight or hero would slay her.

Doc didn’t have a word for this new form, syllables left dead or dying on her dry tongue. Magenta was wet and vibrant. So much like Kentucky, but different.

Doc wouldn’t make the same mistake. She could be different, too. This time, she would close her heart completely. She hit the brakes at the edge of Magenta’s terrain and stepped out of the car with her small black case.

Responsibility meant approaching this bed of monstrous beauty. It meant needles and disease.

It meant the end.

Streetlights glowed in soft yellows around the block. They reflected in wet tentacles set against snow. They no longer seemed the roots of a great tree, but the foundation of a vast fortress. Magenta formed a palace of flesh and bone.

Enormous tusks braced the edges as if containing the carapace-coated outside, an insect’s thick gray exoskeleton. The front opened in a stunted toothy maw. Doc had no way to tell what awaited inside without stepping through.

But she stood in the breath-misting cold a moment longer and marveled at Magenta’s transformation. The shape was wholly hers, immense and near immeasurable in the night. She could reshape herself into anything she liked once she began treating flesh like clay. An adult’s small intestine alone stretched over twenty feet. Absorbing the city’s neighborhoods had given Magenta a lot to work with.

The winter air stung Doc’s nose, ears, and fingers. Inside of Magenta had to be warmer. Her body rippled with heartbeats, and a cloud of white breath pumped up chimney tubes above. She was still a living creature, mortal despite all appearances to the contrary.