dragon of loneliness and resentment, and that pain never died. Life flickered inside her, a little more genetic material for Magenta to memorize and mimic.

The creature’s pain began long before. Hated, beaten, terrorized, and she’d been expected to take it. She had been alone for so long.

But she had absorbed the pain, fed on it, and let it grow inside her until her personal harvest time, her body distorting faster than she could understand. She hadn’t Magenta’s privilege of a decent gestation time. There had been brief becoming and then swift death. Prevention of the end times, in AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical’s own way.

Magenta understood better now. She hadn’t realized that there was so much more to herself than carapace and regeneration. ABP had underestimated her, and could she blame them? She’d underestimated herself, singing the same tune since that Sibs station injection first brought her to unconscious life inside Yaya’s body.

Adaptation.

Adaptation.

Adaptation was limited on its own, entirely reactionary. Under adaptation, Magenta would only change when needed. The pain came to her; she never gave it.

Facing these dormant remains, still distant from her pursuers, Magenta didn’t need to change—she desired it. Here at last, she found what she had been seeking unaware, what divided imaginative consciousness from basic animal instinct, something adaptation could never provide.

Inspiration.

26

Doc never visited these remains twice in one day, but she didn’t know where else to go. The dead didn’t care. With all hell breaking loose, she wanted to be here.

Something shuffled down the Display Hall, reacting to her footsteps. A hum reverberated through the floor, a storm on the edge of its birth, and Doc followed.

She should have expected the woman dangling from the ceiling on fleshy marionette strings. Cloaked in shadow where the lights were broken, she had one of those faces that could be no one in particular, and yet hers was the face Doc wanted to see most. To call her by name would shatter the moment, and the floor wore too many sticky glass shards already, its steel coated in a thin yellow film.

Safer to watch from afar. The woman from the ceiling didn’t know she was a miracle, but her prey sense told her she was being watched, one of those human instincts that couldn’t be shaken no matter the shape.

Doc should’ve kept walking. To stare was impolite. She couldn’t help it though, not when she knew this woman. That face had crossed death to find her.

“Are you Yaya?” Doc asked. “Or Camille?”

The body descended, much larger than it had appeared. Its mass spread through the Display Hall, thick limbs curling against the walls and crushing priceless samples in their jars. Close now, where Doc could see, the puppet body wore Yaya’s face.

But she didn’t have Yaya’s voice. “We’re Magenta,” she hummed, a musical note in her breath. “You were trying to tell me something, before they hurt me. And hurt Yaya.”