She locked both hands around his wrist, but her arms felt frail, energy sapped elsewhere.

“No wire.” Bryant smirked, let go of her shirt, and took a step back.

“Okay.”

“No,” Yaya said. “Not okay.”

Magenta’s arms spilled forward, a pile of writhing pink spaghetti. Their force pressed up Yaya’s top, where the cleft had climbed, and out of her waistline where the cleft had always been. She felt her pants shimmying down and didn’t care. Her palms splayed over wood and pressed her off the door.

Bryant staggered back. His mouth formed a black hole in his beard.

“Okay? This okay?” Yaya stepped toward him, one hand pressed to her tank top where his fingers had yanked it down. “Tell me what you think she is.”

Bryant’s lips quivered. He had tears in his eyes.

“Don’t hold out on me, man,” Yaya said, taking two steps forward for each of his steps back. “You’re not the type with no opinion, and especially not the type who keeps it to himself. Tell me what you think. For once, I really want to know.”

At Yaya’s next step, one of Magenta’s limbs lashed forward. White barbs glimmered in the kitchen light before slashing across Bryant’s chest. His shirt split open in red tatters, and he fell backward, crying out.

Yaya grasped at the tentacle’s root. Its barbs bit into her palm, but she didn’t want Magenta to go this far.

The tentacle drew back, coated in blood, and Yaya’s lower abdomen swelled open where Magenta’s stalk spilled forward. Muscles knotted across every inch. Her teeth hadn’t grown, but her horns seemed longer than twenty-four hours ago, sharp and black as night. The returning tentacle curled toward Magenta’s mouth, and her jaw snapped open, engulfing the bloody tip.

Yaya’s head went quiet in an instant.

Clouds of thought and impulse faded, a cacophony she hadn’t noticed

before. Weight fell from her mind in an avalanche of stones. She was light now, a feather in the shape of a woman. She couldn’t remember when life began setting stones across her thoughts, crushing her with care and patience, but now blood had relieved the pressure, leaving her with relief she’d never felt before. In this moment of clarity, she could fly.

She looked to her palms, fingertips dotted by blood. Was this how other people felt all the time? Did they just exist? She turned her hands over and then turned them back as if seeing them for the first time.

Magenta’s adaptation hadn’t drawn Yaya to Bryant for sex. They had come for blood.

Bryant rolled over onto his hands and knees. “What did you do to me?” he coughed. His first grunt, an attempt to stand, shoveled a fresh stone onto Yaya’s mind, swollen with guilt. The rest came crawling back.

No, not yet. She needed a clear mind right now, undizzied with sarcastic comments and anxiety and the thick malaise she’d been drowning in ever since she’d first heard of Sibs at age thirteen. She needed blood.