Their skin was a hot stove, melting the surface of Magenta’s flesh.

A scream ripped through Yaya’s throat, and she barely sealed her lips in time to stifle it. Fire ate her nerves.

Not again. Sabin was like Connie. Why? What difference did any of it make? It didn’t matter, Yaya decided. The mistake burned and froze flesh to flesh, whatever the reason.

Except Sabin wasn’t asleep like Connie. Sabin was awake and shrieking. The music still pounded, but it couldn’t drown that noise. Everyone turned, some panicking.

Yaya didn’t hesitate with gentleness this time. She urged the barbs to spring from Magenta’s tentacle, cutting the flesh to free it and leaving bloody tissue behind.

Neon and music quit their heartbeat. The lights went up through Pandora’s Aquarium as Yaya and Sabin crumpled to the dance floor, still shrieking. Sabin cupped their middle with one hand and wiped furiously at their eyes with the other. A wet circle flitted past their fingers.

A colored contact lens.

When Sabin looked up, tears filling their eyes, one was the same deep brown Yaya had seen earlier. The other looked much lighter.

Sabin was a chimera, same as Connie.

Yaya cradled tentacles, ragged and screaming as if pried from a paper shredder, and wished to wring the necks of everyone at ABP. Something about the double-zero virus, maybe a surface-level Sibs, made chimeras off limits.

Magenta was allergic to this particular peanut butter, and she hadn’t adapted to it since Connie. Gene-deep, maybe she never would.

Yaya clambered to her feet, dozens of eyes falling on her. Tentacles writhed in all directions, their barbs nicking clothes and scraping skin as they withdrew into their toothy lair.

Screaming filled Pandora’s Aquarium as boots clattered across the dance floor, between tables, out the exit, a stampede that knocked one woman to the side. She caught herself on the bar and kept running. Sabin was among the last, their hand still clutching their middle. They didn’t look back.

“Wait,” Yaya said. Too late; the dance floor stretched empty, its blood well run dry.

Except behind the bar, where Fulki stared with wide, black eyes. “Don’t,”

she snapped.

Yaya turned her way. “You too?”

Fulki’s arm snapped with cobra quickness around the neck of a beer bottle.

She smashed its bottom against the bar and aimed glass teeth at Yaya. “Don’t touch me.”

Yaya extended open palms. “Fulki, please.”

“I’m not into that shit.” Fulki wagged the bottle, biting the air up and down.

“Whatever shit it is, I don’t want it.”

“You know me,” Yaya said, stopping two steps from the bar.

“And?” Fulki’s hands were trembling, and twinkling glass snow rained over the bar. A glower reshaped her face. “You want a pass just because I know you? It’s always been trouble on your end, and I’m not here to make you feel better. Get lost.”

Magenta’s limbs squirmed, a nest of hungry snakes. Yaya could lift her top and let those snakes spill over the bar, glass or not, toward Fulki. They would know each other better then.