Doc looked to the walls, their vessels and muscles faceless and uncomplicated. She had to think about what was right, about her responsibility.

A closed heart would see this done. Her fingers slipped along her black case, and one nail scratched the shaft of a plastic syringe.

“You got something for me,” the Yaya face said. “Nothing good.”

Doc drew one syringe between her fingertips. “That’s subjective.”

“And who you’re doing it for, is that subjective ?” A too-Yaya smile split the puppet’s uncanny face. “Will they give you a biscuit for killing me? Or will you go unrewarded, like Kentucky?”

Doc stormed the throne and thrust the syringe at Yaya’s chest. That was the only way. Quick and dirty, no time for second thoughts.

Yaya split in two gory halves, as if Sibs had taken her at last. The syringe needle struck the throne’s bony backplate and snapped off. The halves of the Yaya puppet sank into flesh, still smiling as they rejoined Magenta’s whole.

“You don’t know, do you?” Magenta’s voice rang from every surface.

“Forget your poison and look to the light.”

Doc’s gaze snapped to an undulating window, where golden streetlight seeped into Magenta’s palace. The city looked dark and quiet beyond.

But there was light in the distance, not as far as Manhattan. Up near the rooftop of ABP’s glass skyscraper, a subtle glow flickered with life. The Board waited there for word of Doc’s success. They only hadn’t evacuated because they couldn’t, trapped by Magenta’s tentacles. Doc was their only way out.

A thunderous crack split the night, so loud that Doc had to duck back from the makeshift window. Distantly, a shadow climbed the skyscraper. A sharp song rang through Newark of a structure bending and shattering. In the dark, Doc couldn’t make out much of the skyscraper’s collapse, only a glittering cloud of glass and dust that plumed up the far side of the city. She couldn’t hear the Board’s screams either, but they fell through her imagination anyway.

She tried to say that someone might get hurt, but her throat turned dry.

Magenta spoke instead. “Many got away. Others didn’t. I don’t know which is which, but now there are no hearts here except yours and mine. We’re alone.”

Doc listened to the empty wind. “Is the rest of the world still there?”

“They won’t touch us yet. We’re not hurting them, and they’re waiting and seeing. Like our me. Like my you. But them, in the glass.” The walls tensed, and heat blasted from every surface. “They deserved a taste of their own medicine.

To taste their mistake.”

Doc turned to the empty throne. “You’re not a mistake.” Now she wished the Yaya puppet was still there. At least it had been a face for Doc to focus on.