She wondered how he might shatter, too, and tried it. A fingerless limb rammed his head against the wall. And again. Again, again, once for every time the knives had come and cut her. How strong was his skull? Would his yellow suit flash amber light in his eyes, the last they’d see?

He didn’t say. Shattering was harder on some than others. The effect was different from Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, freezing in mid-air, and then plummeting to the ground, but not very. Wetter in real life.

“Peanut butter,” she mouthed. She peeled his yellow suit from its meaty banana and began to eat. A little protein went a long way.

Her pupils doubled, and then her irises. Two eyes became four, the new ones having stretched along the sides of her head. Muscle coated her bony limbs.

Her skin stretched and thickened, painted with magenta patterns, a macabre caricature of her old self.

“No birds,” she muttered. Her voice didn’t ring through her hardening skull. If she were cornered again, she couldn’t retreat into a torso cleft. She’d traded hips and beauty and curls for a gaunt and twisted mess of fleshy bone, too mangled by curious men to resemble that unfortunate woman.

Except the face. Eyes aside, she tried to keep Yaya alive this much. The face was both of theirs.

Rubber boots squeaked down another hallway, calling an end to mealtime.

The banana people in gas masks—what had Doc called them? Agents. When

they turned the far corner, they would see their peanut butter and banana friend, peel shredded, butter licked away. If they brought knives, Magenta was ready. If they brought amber light, she wasn’t.

She rounded the opposite corner, where a ceiling vent coughed cool air into the hall. Prying off the cover was easy, and she left it on the floor, same as old Yaya would have done. Best if the gas mask agents thought they were chasing her rather than the other way around. They would think the chase was easy.

Easy, and a lie. Everyone loved an easy lie. Even Magenta had loved them, firm on there being two brains in Yaya’s body, never questioning that maybe there hadn’t been two of them. Where did Yaya end and Magenta begin? Two apart, and then two together. Becoming each other had only felt natural.

“Silly freak who dreams she’s human,” Magenta whispered.

Yaya against Magenta, arguing over diet, Bryant, and Doc. Yaya couldn’t remember Doc’s name that first morning, but Magenta couldn’t forget. On some level, they’d both forgotten and remembered. You didn’t share thoughts and dreams without understanding each other too well to be two instead of one, the line between them thin and blurring.

That line had melted away the night of the amber light.

One, and then two, and then none, and now one again. The brain might have regrown into exactly its old shape had Yaya wanted that, but she could only be herself, and that self could only be human. Becoming Magenta together, they could be so much more. They could be all.