That meant she wasn’t losing it. One less thing to worry about in this nightmarish evening.

Squirming filled her lower abdomen. Scared.

She glared down. “Me fucking too.”

The voice didn’t acknowledge her. Scared. Scared. The squirming ramped up to eleven, her guts full of worms. She felt them coming this time—spiny tentacles poured from between her legs. A cramp forced her back against the tub basin, and ice rained across abdomen and legs.

They slithered out surrounding a muscly stalk, and then their bulk blossomed into a flower, red coils for petals and magenta jaws at their center.

Yaya opened her mouth to shriek, but two red arms snaked up her middle and lashed around her neck. Her fingers dug underneath them, but her nails only scraped her own skin. Bony spines poked against her throat. Had Doc been this

—

Scared. Scared.

—with scissors against her neck?

The flower of muscle opened its jaws and rammed against the tub basin, smearing magenta streaks across the porcelain. Tentacles slapped at the rim, their spines snagging the shower curtain. The rod slid loose from the walls and clattered across Yaya.

She glanced past it to the door. Her clothes sat bunched against the couch, scissors in her lavender jacket’s pocket, far away and useless. She didn’t want this thing to kill her, or to hurt Doc, but how to stop it?

Scared. Scared.

Teeth slammed the tub again. This thing had no eyes, no visible way of breathing. Did it know it was choking her? It brought constant thrashing chaos, a frightened animal caught in a trap. Its body; her body—this flesh didn’t belong to her and never had.

“Yaya?”

Doc stepped halfway into the bathroom, wearing a gray tank top and pajama pants and a green silky robe, face scrunched in sleepiness. Her tired eyes widened, taking in fallen shower curtain rod, drenched and naked Yaya, and the thing that writhed between her legs.

She wanted to tell Doc it felt worse than it looked, but she didn’t think she

could speak again. Whatever thrashed from her vagina, it was terrified. They all had that in common.

Doc darted from the doorway. She would run screaming from the apartment and call the police—no, that didn’t sound like her. She would call ABP. The gas mask gang would pull up in minutes to collect their unique specimen.

Yaya glared at the whips of flesh. Her voice came choked. “You’re killing us.”

The bathroom door banged against the wall as Doc rushed back inside, her robe discarded. She raised one arm, thumb planted over a syringe’s plastic plunger.

Yaya tried to sit up. No. “No!”

“It’s okay,” Doc said. “Settle down, and tell me the last dream you remember.” The needle gleamed in the bathroom’s bright light. She lunged at the bathtub.

One fleshy coil lashed across the fallen shower curtain and whipped Doc’s hand. The syringe went flying.

Doc didn’t watch its descent. Her eyes fixed on the bathtub. “I’m trying to help,” she muttered. She crept closer, into the range of angry flesh ropes. Her eyes flitted back and forth, taking careful measurement. “Breathe. Stop fighting.”