The arm of Crotter comes unstuck from the wall and strikes her heavily. She is knocked from her perch to the floor. Her hand opens and the black-tendriled thing wriggles away from her grip. It flops and squiggles, at first trying to escape, then circling back toward Mia. Scurrying toward her face—her mouth.

Nora has emptied her pistol. She pops out the clip. She finds another in the pocket of her holster. She slams it into place. She aims down the line of the barrel. And fires.

At first she thinks the gun is jammed, because there is only a metallic click. No gunshot. And then she realizes, as the black squid explodes from the impact, that these bullets came from the sarge. And they were made of omnimetal.

With that, Crotter goes still, and all the bodies in the room collapse.

* * *

When the helicopter descends on McNeil Island, the rotor wash churns the fog away so that they touch down in their own spinning sphere. The grounds are slathered with fungi, and the Black Creek Correctional Facility rises up—glopped and warted over—like the nightmare factory that it is.

Isaac says they should wait for backup, but Director Ricketts isn’t speaking to him, so her only response is to charge a round into the chamber of her M9, yank open the bay door, and step outside without him.

Because she can see the three of them. Limping out of the entrance to the building, their arms around each other. The father, the mother, and the girl. Especially the girl. She wants the girl—and what then? Mia becomes, at best, another pet, like Isaac. And at worst? A lab rat in a cage. What was it she called him earlier? Indoctrinated.

“What should I do?” the pilot asks, and right before Isaac rips off his headset and follows her, he says, “Tell all units to swarm. We’ve got our target.”

He curses himself as he climbs out into the murky daylight because he said what she wanted him to. She’s trained him as a mimic, a microphone for her desires. Even now he’s chasing after her, following her path. He belongs to her. He is her. That’s what his mother used to say when cuddling with him in bed: “You’re me. I made you.”

And now she has her arm extended, her pistol ready to fire. He can’t hear her words over the sputtering whine of the helicopter powering down, but he knows she’s yelling for them to raise their hands and drop to their knees.

The three of them hesitate. They are grimed over with what looks like mud and blood. The girl still wears her hospital gown and one side of it is a shredded red. The father is putting himself in front of her. The mother is reaching for something inside her jacket.