Sabin was liquefying. Their body became gel-like, their tissue a blanket of flesh around Magenta’s tentacle. The limb fattened from tip to root, a straw that briefly clogged the connecting tube until Sabin’s flesh passed wholly from casket to shell.

The room stilled. No one approached the shell for a closer look. One technician muttered about the monitors, but Doc couldn’t hear him, and no one was really listening.

A hairline of brown and red tissue climbed the inside of the shell. As it reached the ceiling, new fleshy tendrils sprouted up its sides, leaves to a fern.

Each new tendril fattened, and soon the fern-like effect disappeared. The inside of the shell resembled a circulatory system separated from skin, muscle, and bone.

Magenta was forming a network before Doc’s eyes.

“It’s almost magic,” someone said. Any other day, Doc or Farrow might have scoffed, but today, yes, the lab was seeing magic. Magenta was a biological miracle.

Doc almost forgot she’d come with warnings. “Shut it down,” she said, but her voice was too thin and raspy. She had never seen another human being broken down and absorbed. Neither had anyone else here. She wondered if they could put themselves in Sabin’s place right now.

The shell’s circulatory system swelled. Each strand of tissue thickened against its sisters until the web curtained the interior, obscuring Yaya’s and Magenta’s remains. Their pool trembled, the remains moving harsher than electrodes could manipulate. They were independent.

For a brief moment before the tissue painted the shell beyond sight, Doc thought she spotted Magenta’s red stalk wriggle up from the yellow pool, teeth and horns and all.

An animal moan filled the shell, deeper and louder than the hum in the walls. Agents and technicians stepped back, but their rubber boots were silent for once, at least to Doc. That moan filled her mind. Beneath it came a familiar hum she remembered from nine years ago, the sound of a creature deciding it wasn’t going to stay dead or undead.

Time to live.

24

consciousness was nearly impossible to gestate on its own.

Easier to mimic. Easier still to copy, piece by piece, over time, so much that she had forgotten doing it long before she found herself in this thick fluid between hard, sleek walls. She knew better now. Knowing better was a side effect of having to do it again and again. Every time the knives came, and cut, she forgot.

“Visual mass reduction beneath estimated levels,” a muffled voice said.

“Removal in excess?” They were only ever knives and voices anymore. She hadn’t seen them since the amber light had taken her eyes.

“Weight difference negligible,” another voice said, muffled as the first.

“Appearance difference, no mass.”

The sound of hard, chuffing breath neared her face. She remembered breathing, but she couldn’t say how much time had passed since. She couldn’t say anything.

“It’s changing in there,” one voice said. “Systemic biopsy?”

Rubber boots squeaked on a hard floor, someone shifting from side to side.