Cyclic AMP modulates the interphase cycle of mitosis.

Jonan didn't know which was worse: that I got to become a wyrm, or Letty had. On the one hand, he knew he would have been so much better at that job than I would have been. On the other…

Fucking Letty, he thought.

The basement's hallways thundered with her brash, sadistic laughter.

Ani screamed in pain; one of Letty's psychokinetic spore needles had shot clean through her shoulder.

"No!"

Jonan got out his gun, turned around, and fired. His bullets pumped the approaching spore cloud as it spilled around the corner.

This was why he hated foreplay.

"Damn it!" he cried.

He could hardly bear his own body's weight, and now he had to shoulder Ani's, too.

The things I do for love.

Black ooze trickled slowly from the wound in Ani's shoulder; smoke fizzled off its edges, and the edges of the hole the spores had and were eating into her PPE and clothes.

She whimpered in pain. "Jonan. Please… I… I can't. I can't…"

"—Like hell you can't!" he replied. He nodded and pointed. "Look, they brought the fucking cavalry out to help us!"

Jonan dimly recognized that the double doors at the end of the long hallway up ahead opened onto the Matter Printer lab, though it was the several dozen fully armed Trenton soldiers standing at either side of the doorway that really got his attention—and Dr. Marteneiss was with them.

Angel, Dr. Marteneiss really was the best. Not as good as Ani, though. But, in a situation like this, there was no one Jonan would rather have on his side than Heggy—other than Ani, or himself.

She helped Jonan bring Ani into the matter printer room, and turned back to the soldiers as soon as they were inside.

"Light it up, boys," she said.

The two sleek, white armored soldiers kneeling on the floor fired their laser rifles at the cloud of spores as it came billowing down from the far end of the hallway. The result was fucking spectacular. The green clouds turned brilliant orange as they ignited.

Boom.

Dark smoke streamed down the hallway.

From out of sight, Letty bellowed in what sounded a lot like distress.

Jonan smirked.

Suck it, bitch.

As the smoke and combusted spores cleared, Jonan saw that the explosion had blown open large sections of the drywall, revealing bands and curtains of fungus that had filled the spaces between the walls.

Jonan ran ahead, only to hear Heggy curse again.

"Shit."

He looked back.

Great, just great.

Things were spilling out of the holes in the walls. Angry things that squealed and writhed.

"Help us, Holy Angel," Ani muttered.

Even the fungus in the walls was moving. It peeled off the walls like wallpaper out for revenge, dropping onto the floor and breaking into pieces that sprouted bristly, spindly limbs with which they scuttle down the hallway. Bunches of tendrils and moppy porto-limbs fused together, forming twitching masses that tumbled forward and then set off in a run.

Letty slithered around the corner a moment later.

"Shit, shit, shit!" Jonan said.

"Into the factory, people!" Heggy yelled. "It's more defensible! Let's go let's go let's go!"

"You heard the lady!" Jonan said, bending down to grab Ani by her good arm, help her off the ground, and lead her onto the production floor. The soldiers held their weapons at the ready as they filed out of the control room. Considering everything that was going on, they fired with remarkable coordination, pelting the enemy with bullets and searing lasers. The scampering fungus shrieked as they caught fire and exploded, splattering their surroundings with spores and ooze.

As Jonan and Ani headed into the production floor, a dark blue wyrm came roaring into the room, bursting through a set of double doors off to the side. For a split second, Jonan thought the wyrm was about to kill them all, but then he noticed the wyrm was still wearing the tattered remnants of what was once surgical gear. That gave him a shred of hope.

Then Letty slithered in, flanked by the inundating swarm.

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The two wyrms glowered at one another.

Beast's teeth, Jonan thought.

Were they going to fight?

Whatever the answer, Jonan didn't want to stand around and find out.

Lifting his gun, Jonan fired at a pair of fungus-things that had come skittering up behind him. Thankfully, a soldier ran over and took care of the rest.

"Get going!" he yelled. "We'll cover you!"

"Jonan!" Ani screamed.

"C'mon!" Jonan said.

He ran with her onto the factory floor.

The view of the matter printer production floor through the narrow window at the back of the control room didn't do the place justice. It was massive: a graveyard of sealed, story-tall standing vats where chemistry was brought to life. Some of the tanks held chemicals, waiting to be used, while others were incubation chambers, sites where chemical reactions might jiggle and dance before belching up their glop and feeding to the printers for the final stages of creation. Overhead, crisscrossing catwalks wound their way around the perimeter of the room, accessible by stairs and ladder. Networks of tubes running down from the ceiling and between tanks and the actual printers themselves provided the raw materials.

The printers themselves were like giant looms, only laid flat along the ground, fed by the taut curtains of feeder tubes extruding from above. Robotic arms jutted from the printers' sides like insect legs. The excretion units were at their tips, hooked up to the tubes that brought them the processed slop to squeeze out and weave into the stuff that dreams were made of. Low-walled conveyor tracks purred in wait to spirit their finished goods away to their final destinations. Auxiliary control panels stood here and there on the platforms, next to the vats and the printers, for any who dared to conduct the symphony of being and making.

Jonan had been on the factory floor before. When it was operational, as it was now, it was stupidly hot and loud, and was about as pleasant to be in a metal giant's colon.

Doctors and nurses used the stairs to run onto the catwalks. Dr. Marteneiss climbed up a fucking ladder, despite edging toward death,

That woman was scary.

"There," Ani said, "that way!"

Nodding, Jonan followed her. She'd picked one of the few catwalks whose staircases actually had railings, which he slid his hand along as he clomped up the stairs. The metal-grate steps shook.

Somebody yelled. "Beast and Queen!"

Jonan turned around to look.

Fucking hell… Jonan thought.

It was World War Wyrm.

In the area outside the production floor and the control room, Letty and the dark blue wyrm were locked in pitched combat, striking with magic, spore, and claws in equal proportion. Shockwaves of force rippled from their blows, shattering the windows that looked onto the production floor. The attacks stirred the spore clouds in the room, making them whirl and whorl. The fungus' creatures stuck to the wyrms as if their scales were made of flypaper. They unravelled on contact, spilling loads of flesh onto the wyrms, enlarging the two combatants.

All of a sudden, a large swath of spore cloud vanished in front of one of Letty's claws.

Is that…?

Holy shit. It was a psychokinetic sword. A fricken invisible sword of pure physics.

The horned harridan swept her weapon in a wide, upward strike visible only through the spores it displaced. But the blue wyrm struck back, copying her magic on the fly. Their blades spread ripples through the cloud as they struck, the echoing forces flinging fungus creatures every-which way.

The soldiers in Heggy's group stepped to the front.

"Here they come!"

The swarm broke through the doors, inundating the factory floor with tentacles, limbs, and rage.

People fired with abandon. A tentacle hound leapt at the catwalk railing, but a soldier shot it down midair. Heggy splattered the spider things clambering up the walls.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

Jonan shot a bat-winged horror in the middle of its faceless mask.

But then his gun clicked.

"Shit!" he yelled. "I'm out!"

The soldiers further down the catwalk parted. "Run!"

Jonan grabbed Ani and ran. He could hardly breathe, his chest hurt so much.

Further down the walkway, some of the doctors had almost reached the far side of the production floor. A high platform skirted around the top of the tallest tank, in the middle of the room, accessible only by a narrow staircase that wound around the upper portion of the tank. Some of the soldiers had climbed up there and set up a sort of crows' nest from where they could shoot at the horde.

Hearing a close shriek, Jonan turned, to see a tall, spindly, many-legged thing pounce onto the middle of the walkway directly ahead. Jonan pressed his feet onto the walkway to slow himself, but staggered and slipped, falling forward, dragging Ani down with him. The grate broke his nose.

The blood that dripped through the gaps in the metal to the tanks below was as black as night. Really, really, really not wanting to look at that anymore, Jonan looked away. In the process, he couldn't help but read the warning text on the displays on the tanks' sides.

Warning! Nitric Acid!

Warning! Sulfuric Acid!

Warning! Hydrofluoric Acid!

Material safety data sheets, because Angel forbid someone might make mischief with the freakin' stuff!

Jonan looked up at the spider creature as he pushed himself off the metal. It was lifting up its frontmost pair of legs, likely out of a desire to impale him.

Jonan's life flashed before his eyes, not that he could remember much of it. Perhaps it was because of his continued mental focus on medicine and related scientific details, but the biggest highlights of this curtain-call flashback were the hours upon hours upon why-the-hell-am-I-doing-this hours of cramming he spent jamming everything from anatomy to cell biology to organic chemistry into the mind holes otherwise known as his eyes.

The burning in his muscles, for example: that was due to lactic acid fermentation, which was what happened when aerobic organisms' cells failed to get sufficient amounts of oxygen to phosphorylate ADP into ATP.

Jonan was grateful that the upper half of the spider-thing exploded into glop as it ate a fateful bullet shot by soldiers up on the high platform.

He didn't want his last thought to be ATP.

DNA, though—now that would be sexy.

Shrieking again, the creature leapt toward the high platform, stabbing its remaining limbs through two of the soldiers' chests, whose bodies it began to immediately absorb. Another soldier gave it a face full of laser beams, which sliced the creature in half and sent it tumbling over the railing.

As Jonan and Ani helped each other up, Jonan saw wolf-things spidering up the staircase and onto the catwalks. Several soldiers fell down, overrun by the fungal creatures.

Heggy and the soldiers alongside her made a retreat, firing at the monsters that were absorbing the bodies of their former comrades.

Ani screamed: "No!"

Jonan followed her to the shattered windows at the front of the production floor.

By the Angel…

Letty had trumped her adversary, splitting her force blade into thirds and using one of them to slice into her opponent. The dark blue wyrm had been on the defensive, using invisible force fields as shields to deflect Letty's weapon, but this latest strike had swerved around the barrier altogether. Letty drove the energy blade deep, cutting the blue wyrm down the middle. The blue wyrm bellowed out a mournful chorale that stretched long and sputtered out as its body broke.

The sound made Jonan's hair stand on end.

Letty's other two blades swept in from either side and sliced off the blue wyrm head. The severed head bounced off a wall as the rest of the sectioned body toppled to the vinyl floor.

Jonan hissed. "Shit!"

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