“Sabin.” Yaya tasted each letter, laced with a stranger’s blood. “I like seeing you more when I know your name. When I don’t know, it’s like being buried under anxiety stones.”

Bright teeth shone in Sabin’s grin. “A cairn.”

“Cairn.” Yaya tasted this word, too.

“They bury people under stones so animals can’t dig up their loved one and eat the body.”

“I thought they did it to stop the dead from coming back.”

Sabin covered their mouth with one hand, their laughter a fresh percussion beneath the music.

Yaya swept close to Sabin’s side. “Right now, the cairn’s fallen off, and I’m coming back. Dance with me before I die again.” She opened an expectant palm.

Sabin lowered her hand into it and let Yaya pull them close.

The music thumped a heartbeat through Pandora’s Aquarium. Yaya led Sabin into the dance floor’s deep end, where the throng of dancers flowed thickest. They swayed inches apart at first, but there wasn’t room for chastity here, and Yaya wasn’t into the chaste scene anyway. Sabin pressed their chest to Yaya’s without pause, slid back, turned around, pressed their butt against Yaya’s hips. The dance floor was an ocean, and Sabin was a thrilling squall.

But the stones came crushing again. If only Magenta would adapt to stop caring about them—but then, that’s what Magenta had done about the blood.

The organs. Every adaptation made Yaya stronger.

Lights flashed with the music’s pulse, draping Pandora’s Aquarium in blinking shadows. Still rocking her hips, Yaya lifted her top to expose her midriff and let Magenta’s tentacles stretch out. One found a glass bottle and swept traces of saliva into the cleft.

Nothing. It had to be blood, and more. Yaya had stripped everything she could from Bryant’s body—let Magenta strip, really. She wouldn’t take that much from anyone in Pandora’s Aquarium. Best try Doc’s suggestion, a little off the top, just enough from each dancer to make a difference. A stone cast aside here, rolled off there, and Yaya could feel whole for maybe another day.

Flesh ropes slithered through the dance floor and found gaps between dancers, snakes in this ocean current. They would not ask much. No one noticed, not even Sabin, their eyes closed, their grin ever radiant.

One barbed tentacle scratched the small of a dancer’s back, barely a bug bite. Another scratched an exposed collarbone. Scarce marks, a few drops from everyone. The tentacles returned with meager offerings, dipping into Magenta’s mouth, Yaya’s mouth, her cleft.

Every bit helped. The tentacles slithered out again, one at a time, returning, out again, easily dismissed as a strobe effect beneath flashing neon.

A voice cried out here, and then there. They felt the barbs, Magenta growing greedy. Yaya, too. She cried out with them, at first in pretend, and then in solidarity. Everyone should cry and scream tonight, a communal pain that the

dancers could all talk about later over drinks and tears. One big Magenta bite.

Yaya placed her hands on Sabin’s shoulders, pulling them close, and let Magenta curl one tentacle around their front. “I like you,” Yaya said. She hoped Sabin wouldn’t notice the scratch. Magenta’s arm touched Sabin’s midriff.