A fist beat at the bathroom door, but Yaya couldn’t answer. Part of her body was turning into a dangerous animal, and if the ABP goons knocked down the door, they wouldn’t make any distinction between her and what burst from her flesh.

Scared, the voice said again, a subtle hum.

Yaya grasped the coil at her neck. It wriggled wetly, and its toothy spines bit into her palm. How had they rushed out of her vagina without ripping her to shreds? They might tear her up on reentry.

She couldn’t give them the chance. She doubled over, too close to the mouth stalk. Her fingertips prodded the floor. Cold tile. Damp bathroom rug.

Useless speculum.

There—the scissors.

Scared.

Yaya didn’t have time to loop her fingers through steel. She clutched the blades in a rising fist and then slammed down into the fleshy coil at her neck. It tore loose from her throat. Pain lashed up her body in a blinding shriek, as if she’d stabbed the scissor blades through one of her fingers.

The other coils sprang loose from her body and Aziz’s neck. They folded protectively around the magenta mouth stalk, and before Yaya could brace herself for spines to rake tender flesh, the muscular mass slipped inside her. A not unpleasant tremor slid through her nerves.

Another fist pounded the bathroom door. “Aziz?” That was Doc. “Yaya?”

Aziz lay crumpled on his side, jagged holes dotting his suit’s neck. Had the monster teeth bit him? Yaya hadn’t noticed; she’d been too busy fighting for her own life.

The doorknob jiggled, and the fist turned angry. “Open up,” Doc said.

Angry ABP goons outside the door, a threat both familiar and very real. If they took her, there would be no charming her way into a bathroom this time.

Yaya gritted her teeth and pulled up her pants. Her purse was on the couch, phone on the nightstand. The rest of her apartment stood on another planet right now, and she was here. She tucked the bloody scissors into her jacket’s pocket and shoved open the window. It faced the street, a free drop, the building fire escape climbing outside the studio’s main window.

No time to think. She clambered onto the toilet, put her legs through the window, and slid over the sill and down the brick. She would try to roll into it.

Her right leg gave a painful crack when she hit the concrete.

6

Tweezers in hand, Doc leaned over Aziz. He had regained consciousness and now sat on the rim of Yaya’s bathtub, the neck of his hazard suit torn, his gas mask cradled in his lap.

“Is it bad?” he asked. A needle-shaped lump creased his neck. Only a white dot broke the surface, too small to pinch by hand.

“Hold still,” Doc said. Steel pincers grasped the white dot and pulled.

The lump in Aziz’s neck dotted blood as the splinter slipped free. Two inches long, either cartilage or another non-bone hard tissue. A shark’s teeth sometimes tore loose inside their prey; this might have been similar. Doc slid the splinter into a plastic baggie. She then grabbed a bleach-stained hand towel, doused it in cold water, and handed it to Aziz.