If Doc hadn’t wanted this, she should have brought that guy from the Jumpies lot or someone like him. His kind filled the city. Yaya would go hunting herself when the stones went away and she could think straight.

Magenta reached for the tub again, and this time Yaya let her. Tentacle tips scratched at Connie’s coat sleeve. Its fabric snagged on Magenta’s barbs and tore away. Her sweater sleeve had bunched up inside, revealing her forearm.

Nothing would stop Magenta this time.

“I’m sorry,” Yaya whispered. “I’m really—”

Connie’s skin burned Magenta, like dry ice, a chewing cold that cut Yaya’s words into a clenched-teeth scream. Eeeeeeee rang in her head, Magenta screaming, too. Only Connie lay silent, the morphine keeping her oblivious to anguish as her skin went stovetop hot under Magenta’s touch.

Red tentacle fused to Connie’s flesh. Not stuck against each other, but mixing and merging, earth absorbing water to make mud.

Through her tears, Yaya couldn’t tell which digested which. She tugged at the tentacle and cut her palms on Magenta’s barbs. Every pelvic and torso limb flailed, slashing at shower curtain, porcelain, clothing, Yaya’s skin. She scrambled back, tugging the tentacle with her.

Flesh stretched in painful strands beyond the bathtub rim. Tentacle lifted from arm, the gap between them a web of moist pink bubblegum, and then Magenta’s limb tore free in ragged ends.

Scared, she squealed.

“Me too,” Yaya said, coughing. She cradled the injured tentacle against her chest. Blood bubbled down her fingers and cleft, into her underwear, onto the floor, everywhere. Her forearm wiped tears from her eyes. What had gone wrong?

Connie remained unconscious. Yaya thought to put a bandage on the bleeding arm, but her muscles were still seizing with Magenta’s agony.

The tentacle crawled inside the cleft. It would heal soon, but it wouldn’t forget.

If there was some adaptation around this, Yaya hoped Magenta would figure it

out quick. Connie wasn’t going to work, her lucky day. They still needed someone.

Tonight.

Yaya splashed water over her face and hurried into clothes and coat, still warm from the dryer. She then bolted out of Doc’s apartment and into the night.

18

The pain was raw. She would be distracted if she didn’t heal, but to heal she needed what she’d be distracted from.

More than anything, she needed to stop the agony. That was the whole point, right? No stones, no crushing, no pain. Pain distracted. She could see clearly when the pain was gone.

Fire surged through her limbs. Adrenaline. The human body had remarkable means for detouring pain into power. That was how she’d come to be in the first place, wasn’t it? Every learned experience was a fragment of pain, and if she’d learned to pull one scumbag to pieces, nothing could stop her from tearing apart every asshole in Newark, New Jersey.

Across one street, a sparrow flitted around a streetlamp. Peanut butter?

No, not that. No birds. That was a rule.