“Take them to the back,” says the distracted man with the clipboard. “The last row could use a little help.”

Tattoo, who is now walking on his own without causing trouble, is the first to be led into the field of water droplets. Alpha’s guard pulls him along next. Until now, my guard has let me walk on my own without touching me. Now, he grips my arm as if afraid I’ll make a run for it.

“Which ones, Doc?” asks my guard.

“Any of them will do so long as they’re in the last row,” says Doc as he walks past us toward an office with a window overlooking the droplets.

We enter the water-droplet matrix. The first row contains people.

As we walk to the back of the room, the people inside the droplets begin to change. It’s like seeing a time-lapsed video of fetal development.

By a third of the way into the matrix, they have tails.

By halfway back, they’ve started to grow gossamer wings.

By two-thirds of the way, they look recognizably like scorpion monsters.

The cavernous room is filled with scorpions in various stages of development.

Hundreds of them.

And they all start from humans.

When we reach the last row, the scorpions look fully formed, complete with hair down to their shoulders and teeth that have gone from human’s to lion’s teeth. The ones in this last row are shifting, alert, and watching as we approach.

This lab is several generations ahead of what I saw in the aerie basement. It’s more systematic, with the fetuses looking more robust and dangerous. How many of these scorpion factories are there?

Tattoo begins struggling against his guards again. There are three of them, and for all his muscles and attitude, Tattoo’s fighting skills are sloppy and untrained.

He yanks his guards, the muscles on his neck and arms straining against their hold. The guards are about to shove him into a droplet when he jerks unexpectedly, knocking one of the guard’s elbows into the droplet.

The thing in the water moves so fast I’m not sure what’s happening.

One second, the guard is holding Tattoo’s shoulder as his elbow breaches the water.

The next second, the guard is halfway into the droplet with his legs kicking the air and the water turning bloody.

We all stare in awe as the guard defies gravity—and I don’t know how many other laws of physics—by hanging there, partway in, partway out. Inside the droplet, the monster pumps venom into the guard’s neck while it sucks on his face. Clouds of blood swirl around them in the impossible droplet that somehow maintains its shape and contains the liquid despite being punctured by the guard’s body.