One agent ignored her; the other glanced over. “Not up to us,” he said. The steel bed’s wheels unlocked, and the agents rolled Sabin away.

Doc watched them go and then turned to the room. If she hadn’t seen the agents take Sabin, she wouldn’t have noticed their absence from the rows of

steel beds.

Subjects to spare.

She should throw down her gas mask, hazard suit, and clothes, face them naked and confess. “I did this,” she muttered. “I put the thought in their heads.

They had no idea how special Magenta was until I handed them the evidence, and then they thought you were special, too. But you’re not. You’re just people.”

She wondered how a resignation letter might turn out. Not well, she thought. The Board would laugh and say she wasn’t going anywhere.

And she wouldn’t. She’d let them thrust her into that whole Kentucky mess. Quitting would’ve been quicker, and she’d still have her old skin, hair, and eye tones, less worry about cancer, freedom from a mountain of guilt, but she’d stuck around. She was still sticking around.

Doc’s thoughts slid back to that meeting. The Board’s insistence for answers. Connie’s body, lying there in a plastic bag, a ragged tear up her arm, new since when Doc had left her apartment. Now that she thought about it, the wound looked familiar. Yes, she’d just seen it roll out the door from the chimera ward, hadn’t she?

Magenta had tried to consume Connie, same as Bryant, and then backed off. At some other point before or after Connie, Magenta had tried with Sabin, too. She wasn’t choosing to not hurt chimeras, she’d been willing, but they didn’t work the same as Bryant.

So what? Magenta wasn’t hurting anyone now. Doc tried to shake the thought away.

But it clung like her nightmares. So what? So, ABP agents were bringing a chimera up to the testing lab. They were going to stick Sabin in that plastic casket, where one of Magenta’s tentacles hung through, a tighter connection between organisms than any plastic transfusion tubes. Farrow would oversee the connection, and like a good scientist, she would record every interaction.

Doc ran from the chimera ward, fast as her rubber boots and hazard suit allowed, and chased the bed down the hall. She spotted it just as elevator doors slid shut to carry it upstairs, and then she darted for the stairwell.

No one upstairs understood what they had on their hands. Magenta was a believer in second chances. You only got to threaten her one way once, maybe twice if you were lucky. Doc wasn’t feeling lucky today.

Magenta adapted. That was what she did. She would adapt to touching chimeras. When the lab threw this one to her, she’d take her next chance. What would her body do?

Several floors up, Doc bolted from the stairwell and toward the elevator.

She found it already heading down, having deposited its agents and unconscious