“What am I to you?” Doc asked. Her eyes had turned from steel to the coldest ice.

Yaya couldn’t pierce them. She could only ice her voice to match. “You’re the one who said not to make this more than it is, right?”

“Right. I’ve been wondering, do you even enjoy me? Or is it just Magenta?” Doc didn’t wait for an answer. She shut the door, soft but firm, and her footsteps disappeared down the hall.

Magenta’s tentacles lashed across the living room, but Yaya stepped back to keep them from reaching the door. “Let her go,” she said. “She wants to go.”

Leaving had been Yaya’s usual since long before Doc came into the picture. She didn’t chase. She ran.

And sometimes she staggered, back to the bathroom in this case, to Connie.

Soft breath whistled in and out from her parted lips. A chip cut a slender triangle from one of her front teeth, and Yaya thought that was cute, and then she shook the thought away.

“We can do this,” she whispered. “A little off the top, that’s all. Doc’s right. We don’t have to go all the way.”

But it wouldn’t last. The only way to keep the stones off her mind was to make some permanent changes to Connie’s skull, same as Magenta had done to Bryant’s.

Except Bryant was a bastard, and this young woman—maybe she was terrible, too, but Yaya couldn’t know. Bryant had instigated, made it clear that he had some seedy underbelly, and though Yaya hadn’t had the tenacity to uncover it, she’d seen his eyes when he approached. That was not his first time threatening a woman in his house at night, keeping her sandwiched between his body and a locked door.

Yaya still felt his hand at her chest, and she opened her cleft to rub the sensation away. It was time she and Magenta let him go.

Torso teeth spread wide, and Magenta’s arms lapped at both sides as if bracing a doorframe. Yaya thought again of the bird, but what slid from her insides fell dry this time, a hard lump coated in strawberry jam. It thudded softly on the bathroom tiles.

The husk of Bryant’s brain.

Yaya had grasped his head in her bare hands and cracked open his skull against his bathroom floor. Magenta then took over, opening the egg, gathering

the yolk, drawing it into their organic cooker. The brain had lived inside Yaya’s chest since then and offered a constant supply of whatever the hell made the stones go away. She had spent the last three days with a clear and unburdened mind. Digestion didn’t end until today.

Connie’s brain could give another three days. Maybe more if Magenta adapted to make it last longer. She could do that. She could anything.

“She’ll never miss it,” Yaya said, turning back to Connie. She couldn’t say whether Bryant’s brain had been conscious inside her. Had he felt hers and Magenta’s shared nerves? He didn’t deserve the pleasure. Connie, though?