And so, she was Magenta.

The ceiling’s ventilation shaft ended at a narrow chasm within the walls, where the lights of lower levels cast tiger stripes floor by floor. Whirring fan blades spun in every shadow. Beneath their airy, cyclic whooping, Magenta heard a hum. Subtle, soft, planted in the back of one brain or another, almost the way the old Yaya part of her mind used to pick up the old Magenta’s voice when it trembled through their bones.

She was not a climber. Had she been, she would have skittered up a wall on Bruen Street and then bounded off to parts unknown. With extra limbs, she could learn. She stretched her arms and legs to either side and scuttled downward, spider-like, toward the humming. Someone called to her. Down another floor, another, closer.

The hum faded at the next. She found a dark opening above one fan, much like the first she’d clambered through to escape the agents. She wondered if more of them might have clustered into a nearby breakroom and taken off their gas masks. Bananas that self-peeled and dipped themselves in peanut butter—

what would ABP think of next? They really were making her world a better

place.

Magenta descended, but found no breakroom. Monitors glared from one corner. Steel tables formed rows from wall to wall, connected to machines by tubes and wires.

An unconscious body draped each table. Magenta didn’t want to look for long. These people didn’t look like bananas or peanut butter. At a glance, she might have thought someone was growing another garden or orchard, not of mind, but of organs. Bandages covered torsos and limbs where knives had taken their cuts. The agents had subjected every living creature on this floor to the same treatment as Magenta, but unlike her, these people couldn’t bounce back.

She pointed Yaya’s face at them— her face—but there was no one home.

Same in the eyes at the next steel table, and the next. Sedated or worse, they couldn’t see her.

“But they had me,” she said. “Wasn’t I enough?”

Old Yaya knew the answer. After ABP had dropped her remains on a slab, they’d brought in these new chimeras. They had brought in Sabin, who’d only wanted to share a nice night with Yaya, and fed their cells to Magenta. Fusion made her orchard’s strength possible, but Sabin shouldn’t have been there. Not that ABP cared; they owned chimera IP rights, tested injections in Sibs stations, had Congress twisted around their finger, wealth that poured in from around the world, did as they pleased. Magenta understood the difference between hunger and gluttony.

For ABP, there was no such thing as enough. Ever.

What would old Yaya do now? Run and hide, but that was before Magenta, and relief, and Bryant, and death. Old Yaya hadn’t known best. Deep down, there was no absolute answer in most situations. There were only choices.

Magenta was under no obligation to make those same choices. Her mind was her own, its orchard thriving.