She noticed Yaya and settled again. “You keep surprising me,” she said, her throat dry.

Last week’s Yaya was a skin she’d now shed, erasing the woman who’d once run from Doc’s side. Magenta had only been teeth then. Now her thoughts and feelings traveled Yaya’s mind, and her sensations traveled Yaya’s body.

Every inch of her had turned sensitive in the best of ways. Even guilt felt better than before, realer and firm.

Doc had her own stones to bear. Not depressed, far as Yaya could tell, but she wished Magenta could help scatter Doc’s burden, too.

“What I am,” Yaya said, sliding an arm around Doc’s waist. “I’m not the first.

What happened to the first?”

Doc licked her lips. “I killed her.”

Yaya’s next heartbeat came slow. “Why?”

“Because they told me to.”

No need to ask who they meant. “If they told you to kill me, would you?”

Yaya asked.

Doc stretched her legs toward the foot of the bed. One calloused heel scraped down Yaya’s skin, barely a paintbrush’s stroke against her carapace patch. Its nerves seemed asleep, the only insensitive piece of her body.

“Don’t make this more than what it is,” Doc said when her stretch finished.

“And what am I making it?” Yaya asked. “What about Magenta?”

Doc didn’t answer, but the air danced between the muscles of her back and the skin and teeth of Yaya’s cleft. If these encounters were only sex, nothing more, Doc would have turned Yaya and Magenta over to ABP already.

No, Doc cared. She could pretend she didn’t, but her assertive mask had slipped between sleeping and waking. Whether she liked it or not, she had feelings.

“Did you know magenta’s not a real color?” Yaya asked.

The corner of Doc’s lips drew over her jaw in a smile. “Color isn’t real,”

she said. “We see light, and that interpretation makes color.”

Yaya traced her finger in warped shapes down Doc’s thigh. At first, they were sloppy triangles and circles, but then they curled like Magenta’s arms.

“She’s hurting,” Yaya said. “In a certain kind of way. We need your help.”

“For peanut butter?” Doc asked.

Peanut butter, Magenta echoed. Big peanut butter.

“Big peanut butter,” Yaya said. “That guy at Jumpies—can you do it again?

But this time, bring him to us.”

Doc shifted as if uncomfortable. The conversation was stirring her brain the rest of the way to waking. “Meaning?”

“Do you need me to say it?”

Doc reached for Yaya’s arm and slid it off her thigh. “You don’t need what you think. There’s a specific amino acid or neurotransmitter, something you’re missing. We can isolate it.”

“In the lab?” Yaya leaned over Doc’s ear. “What happens there, Doc? Do they load me with the double-zero virus like my mom, fertilize my eggs, make ABP

some mega-chimeras?”

“INZ9-00 is never getting out.” Doc sounded weary. If she wasn’t up for an argument, why fight one?

Yaya couldn’t quit. “But they’ll cut me, right? Organ bits, bone marrow. I couldn’t walk out the door after, right? ABP won’t chuck me the keys to my IP