She would’ve killed more had ABP not sent their agent to the school.

Against that wall of pale tentacles, Doc had seen no choice but to put an end to

things.

But Camille had a choice. She let her walls of flesh part, let Doc close enough to talk. Camille could’ve crushed Doc and absorbed her body the same as she’d done to everyone in that high school. Nothing forced her tentacles, after their talk, to let Doc go back to the statesmen, where she betrayed Camille’s trust in a cloud of poison.

That was what Doc had dreamed about last night. Thoughts and memories that Magenta had aroused, a price for their pleasant evenings together.

Doc led Connie to the elevator. “It might be easier to show you.”

Connie nodded again; she was going to get a sore neck someday. Or would she?

The TV was on, running a news program. Doc waved Connie inside and then shut and locked the door. No mistakes, as much as she could manage. If her plan failed and Magenta turned Connie into another battered body? She was young, but she’d lived longer than the girl from Kentucky.

Life wasn’t fair nine years ago, and nothing had changed.

“Still doesn’t look like a lab,” Connie said, taking cautious steps inside. “Is there a lever you pull where the wall opens up?”

“Something like that,” Doc said, fumbling with the zipper of a small fabric case. “Toward the bathroom, it looks a little different.”

Connie turned toward the bathroom and then halted. Doc was about to urge her onward, and then she saw what had made Connie stop.

Yaya stood in the bathroom doorway, only a few feet from Connie. She was topless, and her cleft’s widening maw pressed her sternum open and her breasts to either side, letting red limbs slide out. They danced in a soothing rhythm, a bed of kelp snared in the ebb and flow of unseen ocean waves.

“Not yet,” Doc hissed.

But Yaya—no, Magenta was eager. Her stalk of pinkish muscle prodded the cleft’s edges. Black horns pressed pink folds apart.

“Look at that,” Connie said, her eyes wide with astonishment.

No choice now. Doc tore the syringe of morphine free from her small case.

“Yes, Connie,” she said. “Look at her, and tell her the dream you told me.”

When Connie’s mouth opened again, Doc plunged the needle through her skin.

17

Bryant Peters died an hour before Doc came home. He did not look the same as his body, left to rot in his bathroom. Yaya thought he looked like the bottom of a cleaned-out jar of peanut butter, every spoonful and peanut fragment already devoured.

The stones clambered onto her mind within minutes. They had missed their bed.

If only genuine peanut butter would work. Its protein might fuel changes, but right now Magenta had a craving for something more complex and a bit chunkier. Peanut butter, she hummed.

“We need new slang for this,” Yaya said.