“Look!” says Senji. “Pegasi!” He points eagerly to where the creatures are swooping and soaring around one end of a rainbow.

Hawthorne snorts. “Crude creatures,” he says. “Ungainly air-wallowers! Nothing like my helicorns!”

“But those, ah,” says Senji, “didn’t those tend to–”

“So they decapitated a few test riders,” snaps Hawthorne. “So what? Grist for the fodder! There are risks to any great invention, and now I know them. My new hanging-basket contrivance solves all that–just you wait and see!”

Senji is watching, later, as Hawthorne–in that very basket–learns the hard way that helicorns don’t come house-trained.

The spilled nerve agent induced acute apotemnophilia in ninety-four percent of those exposed. It was nonlethal. It wasn’t supposed to exist.

In Grosse Pointe, a woman helped her daughter remove six fingers with a knife and pliers. A Bloomfield grandfather sawed off his leg. Few died, surprisingly–the agent accelerated the clotting process. The only populations spared were prisoners and mental patients, without access to sharp enough objects.

Loren’s unsurprised when the bill comes across his desk. They’re only twenty percent, in Detroit, but each could yield four healthy transplants.

He leans on his remaining hand, hates himself, and considers it.

Grumpy Tim Coe finds a Platonic form on his porch. It’s The Circle. It’s glassy white. Its edge is sharp as nothing.

Grumpy Tim Coe shows The Circle to some scientists. “Harrumph,” they say. “Mere philosophy.”

He shows it to some philosophers. “Oh,” they say, “the concrete is for artists.”

He shows it to some artists. “A meaningless exercise in form,” they say. “Go away.”

Grumpy Tim Coe goes home. He takes The Circle out to his back yard. He sets it on a stump.

“Am I not justified?” he asks the world, grumpily, and then smashes it with a bat.

Machine leans on his remaining chainsaw and shudders. His servos are dying. The Maiden appears before him, holding her simple sword.

“I destroyed your home,” he grinds. “I slaughtered innocents to draw you out, but you I cannot touch. Now I decay, and I cannot stop hunting you! Why not end this? Why do you only watch?”

“Observation changes the thing observed,” she says.

“But I can’t change you!” His dorsal flamethrowers belch frustration.

“Then I must be nothing,” she says.

Machine understands, then. “I wish,” he groans, “to destroy nothing.”

She nods. Machine’s cameras flicker, and go dark at last.

“Okay, you say it first,” says Ruth.

“Catholic,” says Rhi. It sounds like a word; it reminds Ruth vaguely of incense.

“Now you,” she says.

“Catholic,” says Topaz, and in her mouth it’s filthy: a shirt untucked and a sullen pout, short plaid skirts, guilt and rulers; cigarettes in a grubby green bathroom–her first tampon, secrets, the hungry eyes of bullies. It sounds like too late on a Friday night, passing around filched peppermint schnapps, bad lighting and whispering the Hail Mary while somebody feels you up.

“See?” says Ruth.

“No!” says Rhi.

“Is my favorite flavor,” Topaz adds, grinning.