Who would stop Letty now?

Nobody, that's who—and Letty knew it. Jonan could see it in the way she looked down on her opponent's body.

Ani covered her mouth with her hand as Letty raked her claws across the blue wyrm's eyes. The golden orbs burst like water balloons, spilling yellow humor onto the floor.

By a minor miracle, at that exact moment, the double doors on the side of the antechamber opened up, and another wyrm—yellow-green in color—slithered in and attacked Letty.

Did it come because it had heard the blue wyrm's last-minute cries?

Unfortunately, the newcomer was even smaller than its predecessor.

It wouldn't survive for long.

"What I wouldn't give for some dynamite right now," Jonan muttered.

"Wha?" Ani said, staring him in the eyes. "What good would that do?"

"It would be satisfying, that's what!" Jonan replied.

The next medi-fact that popped up in Jonan's head came through the words of Jimmy Houston, his former college roommate and the dorm's resident crazy chemistry guy.

"Always add the glycerin to the nitric-sulfuric acid mix, never the other way around."

In the middle of all that chaos, Jonan ground to a halt. For a split second, his feet might as well have been lead weights.

"Glycerin…" he muttered. He coughed up ooze and spores, burning his lips and throat.

His mind was on fire—and, for once, in a good way.

"What?" Ani asked.

Glycerin. Nitric Acid. Sulfuric Acid.

Nitric. Glycerin.

His eyes went wide.

Jonan grabbed Ani by the shoulders. "Nitroglycerin!" he said.

He looked up and yelled. "ALICE! ALICE!"

But nothing happened.

"Answer me you fucking machine!"

The speakers in the walls played the sounds of a discombobulated voice speaking streams of gibberish patched together from voices the AI had heard. Jonan heard Director Hobwell's voice, and General Marteneiss'. Both men's voices belted out their warnings of old. In between them, Jonan heard the songs and sweet nothings of crooners and actors across the ages. He even heard Letty's voice.

It was nonsense through and through.

Jonan stomped his foot on the catwalk, right on top of a reaching tendril. He sent a tentacle wolf flying with a kick. Bullets and lasers provided back up.

"Shit, ALICE is busted!" he yelled.

"What are you doing?" Dr. Marteneiss asked.

Various nurses and soldiers fired at the fungus creatures leaping through the air.

"Wait, what the fuck is happening…?" Jonan said.

All at once, every sound and movement on the factory floor stopped and then suddenly changed direction. All the critters turned around and headed back the way they came. It was like the tide was going out. The inexplicable sea change caught even Letty off guard, enough so to give her attacker an opening to launch itself at hag-wyrm claw out two of Letty's six eyes.

Jonan didn't care why the creatures were retreating, and it didn't matter.

He looked at Ani.

"Ani," Jonan said, "I know how to stop this!"

"How?" Heggy asked.

"I need to get to a control panel, now!"

"We need to get the hell out of here!" a doctor yelled.

"Shut up, you moron!" Jonan yelled. "People, this factory has everything we need to make nitroglycerin?"

Heggy stared at him in disbelief.

"Jonan," Ani said, "what are you saying?"

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"We'll set the matter printer vats to mix the ingredients," Jonan said. "Chemistry will take care of the rest. Then we fly the coop before it all goes kablam!"

Anti grabbed him by the shoulder. "I'm coming with you."

"No," he replied, "you need to get out of here."

"Mistelann showed me how to use the machine, Jonan," she said. "You need me."

He smiled. "That I do."

"Well, what are we supposed to do?" a nurse asked.

Jonan looked down at the thick metal doors at one of the factory floor's back corners.

"Get as far away from this place as fast you can," he said.

"Ani," he said, "let's go."

She nodded and he ran and she followed. Both of them traversed the catwalk as quickly as they could manage.

"You heard him!" Heggy said. "Let's get these people out of here!"

Her words echoed off the expansive ceiling.

Outside, in the antechamber, Letty had absorbed many of the fungal creatures skittering past her and back down the hallway. All that raw material had fueled Letty's growth to the point that she was now big enough to wrap a single hand around her opponent's neck and hoist them into the air. In desperation, the struggling wyrm shot out waves of psychokinesis that sliced through the spore whorls and cracked the surrounding walls, but to no avail.

Not knowing what the fungus was doing or when the hell it might return, Jonan didn't waste any time and headed to the nearest control panel: the auxiliary panel up on the high platform. Dragging himself along the railing, he clambered up the narrow steps. As he moved around the tank to the platform on top, he saw Heggy lead everyone else down the catwalks and out the back doors.

Jonan glanced at Ani. "C'mon!" he yelled.

She looked deathly pale.

By the time they staggered onto the high platform, Jonan's legs felt like they were about to give out. He had to grab the edge of the control panel just to keep himself standing.

As did Ani.

She tapped the control panel awake. "Alright," she coughed, "what do we need to do?"

"Do we have glycerin?"

She tapped the screen. "Yes!"

"Fill as many tanks as you can with as much as we have."

"Filling!" she said.

Angel, he loved watching her work.

All around, pipes rattle and rumble as substances flowed.

"What next?" Ani asked.

Closing his eyes, Jonan focused. He pressed his fingers on his temples and rubbed them in small circles.

Fuck, it hurts so much… he thought.

He stammered. "Uh… uh…" But then, it came to him: "Make a 1:1 mix of sulfuric acid and nitric acid. Put it in a separate vat!"

"Got it!"

There was more rumbling as fluids were pumped through the tubes.

"Now," he said, "set the mix to flood the glycerin tanks."

She did. Jonan watched her fingers' every move, flicking his gaze between them and the data on the display screen.

A schematic representation of the tanks showed the levels of fluid within them, and though they were filling, it wasn't happening as quickly as Jonan had hoped it would.

His blood ran cold.

"Shit!" he yelled. "Wait! Stop! Don't release it!"

"What?"

Moving around to the middle of the control panel, Jonan pushed Ani out of the way and then grabbed the panel's lower corner in one hand and the upper corner on the opposite side with his other hand, blocking Ani from using it.

"What are you doing?".

"The chemicals will explode when we mix them," he said.

"Yeah, that's the point!"

He wept. "We can't! There's not enough glycerin in the tanks yet! Look!"

With his head, he gestured toward the display screen.

"N-no, " Ani stepped back. "Jonan, what are you saying?" Her voice cracked. She started to cry.

Pushing himself off the control panel, Jonan turned to the love of his life, ripped the PPE visor off her face and gave her the worst and yet somehow best kiss of his life.

Her eyes fluttered.

It was too much for her.

"Run, Ani," he said. "I'll follow along. Just give me thirty seconds, give or take."

"But—"

"—I love you forever," he said.

Biting her lip, Ani stared at him for a final moment and then grabbed her visor and ran down the stairs.

A second later, Letty sent the yellow-green wyrm flying, blasting it through the wall. The wyrm crashed into one of the matter printers.

Out in the antechamber, Letty roared.

Jonan tapped the Proceed icon on the control panel once Ani had nearly reached the back doors.

Though Jonan could no longer remember his mother's voice or his siblings' faces, he did remember one particularly embarrassing lesson he'd learned from his biochem lab studies. It was one of those things he didn't think of often, but now, it was everything.

Chemistry was very picky when it came to procedural matters. Add sugar to water? You'd get a tasty drink. But, add water to sugar? You'd get a goopy mess. A similar principle applied to glycerin—also known as glycerol—a clear liquid normally produced as a byproduct of saponification, saponification being the word that people, like Jonan, used when they wanted to make soap-making sound fancy. Though the stuff had many uses—lubricant, sweetener, etc.—it was best known—both to Jonan, and to the layperson—as a key ingredient of the boom-boom juice otherwise known as nitroglycerin. It was the glycerin part of nitroglycerin, the glycerin that provided the fuel-component that made the nitroglycerin molecule dislike stability and existence as much as it did. As Jimmy whats-his-name might have said, when mixing reactive chemicals, a key detail of the procedure was that, unless you really hated yourself, you should never, ever add the reactants to the fuel. No, adding a tiny amount of fuel to the supply of reactive chemicals was always the safer bet, as the former had a stupidly high probability of triggering a runaway chemical reaction of extraordinarily violent proportions.

In case of the tanks filling up all around him, the acids filling them would react with the fatty oils and produce nitroglycerin and heat, which would make the acids and oils produce more nitroglycerin and more heat, quicker and quicker, turning the remaining glycerin supply into the perfect kindling, and making each and every one of the massive strange tanks on the factory floor into a house-sized bomb.

Jonan thought he saw Ani lingering by the doorway as he turned away from the console and ran. But, instead of going down the stairs and crossing the catwalk to make for the door, he slid down the ladder on the side of the tank. He broke several fingers in the process and then fell on his knees as he smacked onto the floor.

His scream ruptured blood vessels in his throat, making him spew up black ooze.

He ran to the doorway leading into the antechamber.

Jonan had always wanted to go out with a bang. And now, he was about to get his wish.

Cupping his hands at his mouth, he yelled. "Come and get me, Letty, you fucking has-been actress cunt!"

Letty turned to him like a viper ready to strike. She slithered close.

Honestly, Jonan was satisfied by this final performance. All in all, there were a lot worse ways to go.

"Fire in the hole," he yelled.

Jonan started to turn around and run into the factory when he saw and heard Ani, running toward him.

"Jonan, no!"

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