When the work was done, ABP footed the bill, ordered the clean-up, and

left Doc twisting in the Kentucky wind for another month before some executive finally approved her transfer request. No gratitude. She was used to that.

Yaya was right; Magenta was not unprecedented. She had intelligence, and whatever had grown out of that poor girl in Kentucky had been intelligent, too.

Pieces of the girl had woven through her barbed tentacles, the pale dragon a manifestation of her repression and resentment. Her metamorphosis might have started out like Yaya’s, and beneath an oppressive presence, she might not have mentioned the beginnings of change to her doctors at the Sibs stations or otherwise. Coincidence, or were she and Yaya two limbs of an alike tree?

Or was ABP’s brew to blame, that last Sibs station shot before the girl’s transformation?

Doc stared into the girl-turned-monster’s long-dead eyes. How long had it taken before they even let her visit that first time? She hadn’t counted. ABP took its time and everyone else’s.

ABP took everything.

Boots squeaked in the hall. Another visitor? No, that sound of hurried shuffling meant someone had come to fetch her. Every day, Doc visited the analysis lab only to find Magenta’s sample had yet to be processed. She would’ve liked to collect samples from different areas, especially from Magenta’s arms, since no one exactly knew which parts of a chimera held which DNA strands, but her mind had been elsewhere the other night.

Yaya’s DNA had to be different now, didn’t it? Something she would’ve passed on to children had she borne any. Same as Doc. Motherhood had never been in her plans, but she guessed her artificial bleaching would find its way down the genetic pipeline were she to donate eggs someday. Worse traits might follow. A baby might not form at all.

Doc recognized Greenwich through gas mask and hazard suit by his slouched gait as he hurried down the hall. His phone glowed from one hand.

Others recognized her, surely, but one of the few non-health benefits of mandatory gas masks was that no one could see her lips curl with annoyance.

“I’m on break,” she said. “Can it wait?”

“Urgent priority,” Greenwich said, his gas mask rasping. “Incident. Public relations, damage control—”

Doc would need aspirin by evening. “Spare me the rhetoric, please.”

Greenwich held up his screen, filled with images of a blood-soaked bathroom. “Can’t assess until on site, but details suggest Yolanda Betancourt.”

13

A false foyer opened into a small corridor, where an inner door led into the house proper. There were no windows. Had it not been early Friday afternoon, with crisp sunlight stretching Doc’s shadow from the front doorway, she might have wandered into pitch blackness.

But the inner door was open, the living room busied over by a uniformed officer. He beckoned Doc and her team to enter.

“Wouldn’t have called, but the body’s in such a state,” he said in a gruff voice. “Orders are, we tell AlphaBeta about the weird ones.” His partner was poking around a hall toward the back of the house, uninterested in speaking with ABP agents.