Len sighed. “Fine, Ambrose, wear whatever you want.”

Ambrose felt a queasy upsurge in his stomach. Len’s face grew outward from his head and elongated to a point around the nose. His skin stretched to fit the inhuman skull shape. Long red welts appeared, like wounds from a medieval flogging. The welts oozed and broke apart to reveal a new skin of green scales. His eyes narrowed to yellow slits.

Ambrose screamed.

Len grinned, exposing Martin’s impossibly white teeth. His grin widened. All Ambrose could see were rows upon rows of teeth, stretching back into oblivion. The gaping mouth blotted out the inside of the transport. A great wind howled in his ears, as if he were standing alone in the middle of an empty field. He felt—but could not see—a slimy tongue slither around his entire body. It began to squeeze the breath out of him, tighter and tighter, until a rib snapped like a twig. He tried to cry out in pain. The air stopped dead in his throat. It felt as if he were being held underwater. Then it was over.

He opened his eyes, even though he didn’t remember having closed them.

He was sitting across from his brother in the transport. His heart was pounding.

Len was staring at him critically, one eye squinting more than the other. He didn’t look shocked or disturbed. The security team filed past them, out of the parked transport.

“Is this the first incident?” Len asked.

Ambrose blinked away the afterimage of the dragon’s face, burned into his memory like the outline of a bright light. The fear hit him all at once: I am going insane. He took a deep breath and gingerly pressed a finger into his ribs. No pain.

“Let’s just do this.”

He climbed out of the vehicle into a dim, windowless dock that smelled moist and subterranean.

“We’re inside the canopy itself,” Len explained. “Part of the old network of research and development labs directly beneath the UniCorp building.” He palmed a spot in the blank gray wall, and a hidden door slid open. Ambrose followed his brother into a surprisingly plush elevator, like the one in the lobby.

The security team crowded in around them. Ambrose felt the butt of a disruptor press into his back.

“Sorry,” mumbled one of the Associates—the first time Ambrose had heard any of them speak.

As the elevator sped silently upward, Ambrose attempted a quick Process Flow. His ability churned, running on fumes, making him dizzy. He thought he sensed a shadowy progression of events like forgotten words on the tip of his tongue. A single murky endpoint emerged: his likelihood of finding Mistletoe increased in Unison.

That didn’t make any sense. She didn’t even have a login ID. His ability was still haywire.

“Floor three seventy-five,” Len announced. The Security Associates made a few imperceptible shifts in weight. Two or three cleared their throats.

Ambrose had a sudden memory of an American History wiki he’d studied years ago: skinny, grim-faced soldiers not much older than Len, huddled together aboard a primitive steel box of a boat, waiting for the ramp to fall open onto the beaches of France. And then he remembered the next image in the series, the tightly packed pile of motionless bodies that had moments before been young men.