Her muscles melted into cooked pasta, and she sank up to her nose.

After a few minutes, she was hungry again. The stones weren’t coming back yet, but she felt them in the distance, a cartoon boulder teetering atop a mountain and ready to roll after the Roadrunner, only to come looping back around and crush Wile E. Coyote. Yaya couldn’t know her place in this scenario, but she guessed she was the coyote. Her mind seemed self-destructive that way.

She needed liquid anti-depressant. She needed—

Peanut butter. Her submerged lips bubbled an echo: “Peanut butter.”

Her cleft’s jaws opened, releasing pink tentacles up through the water and over the tub. They had grown thick since lashing Bryant in the living room and now had to crush together to fit inside her. She was again unsure of what had become of her old organs, but she no longer cared. Her body functioned. Better, it was thriving.

Bryant lay face-down on the floor, his blood leaking around him. He grunted at Magenta’s touch, but she had taken away his power to move and scream, stripped by barbed tentacles. She sank their tips into blood, coiled around muscle, and dragged flesh into the tub, into Yaya’s chest, into the cleft.

When Magenta finished feeding, Yaya’s fingers went exploring again. No depression, no crushing stones. The boulder atop its cliff settled. Yaya would keep it there long as she could, a day no coyotes would be crushed. Maybe two days, or three. She thought they could make Bryant last that long.

In fact, she had ideas on how to make him last much longer.

12

The ABP offices at 110 Warren Street always felt worn, every marble surface flat and dingy, as if the company had cut the materials from an aging warehouse and placed them inside the skyscraper’s glass exoskeleton. Most windows had to be blocked off for security, making the glass near pointless.

ABP developed everything from anti-viral treatments to skin creams, chemical agents to visceral weapons once only dreamed of in comic books. Life and death sat in the palms of their hands.

Had Doc made different choices on Monday night, or Tuesday morning, she would be visiting Yaya in the analysis lab. Instead, she’d come home to an empty apartment, and now she hadn’t seen Yaya or Magenta in three days. She didn’t know how to process the pair—two pieces or a whole? Whatever they were, they’d vanished in the pre-winter wind.

This ever happen before? Yaya had asked. Magenta had drawn the past screaming back from its nine-year grave.

Doc stepped off the elevator at the tenth floor, which housed the Display Hall. The analysis lab sometimes treated this as their toybox, where they put everything they had broken after playing too hard. Playtime tended to be long.

Doc was relieved that most of what they brought here arrived already dead.

She passed familiar wings, their walls broken in by glass cases and shelves.

Organs floated in honey-colored jars. Nothing whole; samples had already been torn apart, their pieces stuffed here. Bubbles clung to the glass, some having thickened with a scaly crust, but they couldn’t hide the horrors within. Fingers twined in loose spaghetti coils here, a heart the size of Doc’s head there, and all around things with no names but brimming with potential.