Until that night at the school, facing down a teenage girl turned pale, sickly dragon, her every limb having split into dozens of boneless ropes, writhing with barbed muscle. And still, Doc had ordered in the chemicals and fires, solving the problem as far as the statesmen perceived. She had approached the school, disappeared briefly, and then reappeared with a plan. No one needed to know

what went on while the monster let her get close.

After that, ABP turned the town into a black site and wiped it off every database as if it had never existed. The Kentucky Incident became the name because it had no other, no land for that school to have called home. Workers tore open the earth and removed all pipework and electrical lines that didn’t feed neighboring towns. Officially, this was to ensure every piece of the creature was destroyed. In earnest, ABP wanted every piece for themselves.

The Display Hall smelled metallic and stale, nothing like the creature that night. Before the chemical clouds and smoke, she’d had a scent like citrus and fresh milk. Taken from the glass, Doc doubted she’d smell like anything but formaldehyde and rot.

Grime coated the edges of the aquarium where it fitted into the steel wall, and dust dotted the glass, but there were no smudges or fingerprints. Only newly recruited ABP agents and curious scientists visited, their hands sealed in rubber.

They never touched the glass, and they never came back. The Kentucky Incident’s data well had dried long ago.

Doc alone kept vigil. No one else cared.

The aquarium’s corners were compartmentalized, holding several ends of preserved tentacles. The largest piece floated at the center. Once-milky pockmarked flesh had taken on a dingy mustard coating. Within the jagged clump, bound in barbed limbs and wrapped in a damp membrane, there appeared the face of a teenage girl.

Was she sixteen or seventeen when she died? Doc thought she’d known while driving to the school that night on an urgent call, along with the girl’s grade, extracurricular activities, and psychological profile. Now all she knew was a name, Camille. The other pointless facts had seeped down the empty hole in time between when she approached the school from across the outdoor field and when she returned to the waiting statesmen with a heavy heart and a plan.

By morning, the school was gone, and so was the girl.

In the aftermath, Doc had been caught in a cloud of what she’d thought were only chemical vapors. She didn’t learn until later that pieces of organic matter had floated in the wind, spores of the Kentucky Incident. Her DNA was not the same when she left Kentucky as when she had arrived.

She got used to answering uncomfortable questions after that. No, she didn’t have albinism. No, she didn’t bleach her hair. No, sir, she wasn’t interested. Yes, she meant it. Oh, did you know white flakes have grown off her tongue ever since the incident, and sometimes appear in her menstrual—what, you weren’t asking that? But you seemed so interested a moment ago.