Around the corner, waves of heat blurred the air above a floor grate. She tore the metal framework loose and poured herself inside. The opening was narrow and its walls too warm, but better than flames, and she let gravity do the

work. Human-like arms and hands jutted from her middle and helped push her trunk along. Forget the two brains myth—ninety brains reality.

That hum she’d heard at her last descent slithered again through her nerves.

Fearful and desperate, it knew the agents too well. They could do worse than knives—fire, lightning, an amber glow that boiled the world.

And poisonous clouds? Magenta didn’t remember those, but the thought crossed her mind now, her orchard’s newest sapling. Bracing herself between the walls, she descended another ceiling shaft. The hum grew not louder, but more distinct.

She was getting closer.

This floor had no rooms aside from one offshoot housing a sink and toilet.

No one was here. The agents must not have realized she’d descended to this floor. They would figure it out soon enough, and then there wouldn’t be much time.

Shelves broke every wall, lined with jars. Magenta didn’t know the remains that floated behind their glass. Some things had once been people. Others might have only aspired to humanity. Given time, she would have found herself here.

A few too many visits by the knives; that was all it would take. Behind glass lay destiny.

The hum guided Magenta into a wider stretch of hallway. Painted arrow signs, their corners coated in grime, marked a path to the elevator and freedom, but the hum led another way. A window filled one wall, partitioned at its four corners. Beneath it, a plaque displayed a series of numbers. Magenta didn’t know what they meant, but she wished she did. They might have told her who or what awaited her.

An enormous pale torso floated behind the glass, its mass at least twice Magenta’s, much of it formed in plump tentacles. The face of an adolescent girl aimed outward, her eyes closed. They had been closed for a long time, Magenta knew.

And yet something behind them called to her. The hum formed a needle that pierced her brains and this creature’s, threading them together.

She pressed her face to the glass, where its cold bled across her forehead, and then she thrust her entire body through. Shards cracked under bone. Musty fluid poured over her stretching torso and pooled at her feet. The creature sank as the fluid level lowered, but Magenta’s coiling limbs caught and cradled the remains. Tentacles met, red to white.

The agents thought the creature’s life had been snuffed out before they dug their knives into her flesh, but she’d kept fighting through poison clouds and long-term drowning. She hadn’t adapted so well as Magenta, but the fight never left her. She might be remains now, but she had once been a ferocious tentacled