She looked ahead to her goal, and in another second that lasted a year, she reached it. Just as she put her hands on the pulse emitter, she heard a ripping sound. She turned around just as Enola finished tearing out Ampersand’s throat, nearly severing his head at the neck.

“No!” she shrieked, leveling the pulse emitter in a panic, but Enola was on her with the speed of a striking snake, smacking away the device and grabbing her around the torso in one swift movement, pinning her arms to her chest with one big hand. His fingers, sharpened to points, the biosynthetic fluid from Ampersand’s body still coating them, sliced the air as they aimed for her neck, but stopped as he touched her skin.

“No,” she repeated firmly, her breath coming hard and fast, looking him dead in the eye.

“JOIN US,” he said. “DO NOT DIE ALONE.”

His fingers were so sharp, she could feel them boring into her skin, sinking into the flesh like needles. “No,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady. “You can’t have me.”

Enola cocked his head to the side, keeping both of his hands in place, his needle-sharp fingers still sinking into the skin of her neck like fangs.

“IF IT PLEASES YOU, LITTLE COUSIN.”

In one movement so fast she could hardly see it, he removed his fingers from her neck, sank them into his own, and ripped his own throat out even more violently than he had Ampersand’s. His other hand released her, and she didn’t waste an instant, running to Ampersand, practically falling on top of him.

He had already stopped moving, and the mess on the floor was staggering. The fluid, his “blood,” a translucent, oil-like substance, pumped from his open neck like a burbling spring. His open wound was a hundred strands of biosynthetic pieces in a puzzle she had no idea how to assemble. “No,” she said, hands shaking as she tried to shove the body parts and blood and effluvium back into his body. “No, no, no!”

She recalled his ability to self-heal; like his telekinesis, it required a great deal of power, but it was possible. She pulled the pill bug out of her jacket and placed the bug on his back, begging, pleading for him to move.

“Please,” she said, pressing it impotently against his skin. It didn’t seem to be working. How much time had passed? Thirty seconds? A minute? A human would be dead by this point, but a post-natural amygdaline?

“Fuck!” She looked around the room wildly, looking for something, anything that might jump-start this goddamn pill bug to do its goddamn defibrillating job. A car battery, a gas generator, fucking anything. She could feel him slipping, feel him losing consciousness. She wasn’t sensing fear anymore. No more pain, no more uncertainty. There was nothing.