Though I did not know it at the time, Dr. Suisei Horosha had, in fact, read the text message I’d sent him. It had surprised him. That made this the second time I’d surprised him, and, considering he’d known me for barely a week, that was unusual. Disturbing, even.

Suisei hated surprises in general, but especially so when they sent him off in a sprint.

Suisei raced down the hallway, chasing after the transformees.

“Nurse Costran!” he yelled. “Dr. Rathpalla!”

Up ahead, there was a crash as one of the hallway’s windows was punched clear through, along with a good portion of the surrounding wall. The nurse and the doctor had combined their powers and their body weight to blast a hole in the hospital wall.

“Wait!” Suisei yelled.

But the two transformees flung themselves out before he could whip up something to stop him.

Suisei pined for the days when he could stop a car with just a wave of his hand.

It was so much easier to deal with people when they couldn’t run away from you.

Well,” Larry said. From where he stood at Suisei’s side, he glanced back at the double doors to the Self Help Group, deep in the hallway behind them. “At least they didn’t make the hole too close to headquarters.”

He turned to face forward once more.

The janitor towered over Suisei, more than twice Dr. Horosha’s height, and nearly all of it was arm. Larry’s remaining human arm had joined its brother in the change, leaving him with two massive wyrm arms sticking out like struts from either side of his mostly human body. Larry’s legs dangled underneath him, as did his short tail, which stuck out from a hole he’d cut in his trousers. The janitor-transformee had taken to using his arms as his legs. He had to bend his head down while he waddled down hallways, to avoid bashing his skull into the ceiling or his face into any dangling light fixtures.

Shadows passed over Suisei’s head as Larry stepped around him, toward the hole. Larry craned his neck down, to look out through the hole.

“Larry…” Suisei said, voicing his concern.

“It’s the fastest way,” Larry replied, with a mighty shrug.

“Please, wait,” Suisei pleaded, but it was too late.

He saw Larry move, and then yelled “Wait!” to stop him, but the janitor didn’t listen. Instead, Larry shouldered through the hole in the wall and leapt down the several-story drop, taking a bit more of the wall with him, knocked free by his passing claws.

Leaning forward, Suisei braced himself by pressing his arms against either side of the hole’s ragged mouth.

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Down on the street below, the three transformees had landed on the tops of cars parked by the curb. The vehicles’ metal roofs had crumpled beneath them like used cushions. Suisei’s anger abated somewhat when he saw Larry crawl off one of the crushed cars and join Yuth and Ibrahim by the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

All three transformees looked up at Dr. Horosha and locked eyes with him before they waddled down the street.

Well, Suisei thought, at least Dr. Howle is getting those reinforcements he asked for.

A sweet wind howled through the hole, buffeting Suisei’s white physician’s coat. Dr. Horosha stood there, deep in thought, and was planning his next step when alarms went off across the hospital.

Apparently, someone had pulled the fire alarm.

Suisei could have thought of worse ways to alert everyone to the riot, zombie horde, and wyrm attack in progress in Garden Court.

Larry wasn’t wrong: leaping the several stories’ jump down to street level was the quickest route to the Garden Court. The courtyard was just around the corner, at the end of the street. Had Suisei been in top form, he would have joined them. Using pataphysics to slow your fall was practically child’s play, and Suisei had done it more times than he could count.

Why waste money skydiving when you could jump off the top of a skyscraper and land comfortably on the ground?

He wrinkled his nose at the scent of spores in the air.

The alarm continued to keen.

Sighing, Suisei stepped away from the hole. If he chose to jump, he’d technically have enough power to cushion his fall. The problem was, he couldn’t do that and maintain his electrostatic barrier at the same time. This was a problem, because the interactions of the pataphysical electrostatics and the spores’ highly electronegative acidic coating were all that was keeping the spores from touching him and infecting him with the Green Death.

Dangerous environmental contaminants were so frustrating to deal with. Biochemical nightmares, radiation spills gone wrong—dealing with situations like that brought headaches and complications in equal proportion. It was like giving yourself a handicap. Ordinarily, Suisei would have just powered through it, but, unfortunately, that was not an option.

Not in this place.

He still wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. The pataphysics were so thin here. He felt like a flower, thrust deep into the desert—shriveled and desiccated.

He didn’t understand the underlying mechanism. He’d pondered so many different possibilities. Was it an absence of available power? Another compatibility error, perhaps? Or, maybe, the power was already here, waiting to be harnessed, but something was sapping it out of him before he could put it to use.

If only these people had had the proper technology to study it.

Then again, he thought, the problem was the reason why they lacked proper technology.

Chicken and the egg, that.

Well… however it worked, there was no doubt in Suisei’s mind that it was the work of the darkness of which the Tachyon had spoken. It was the only sensible conclusion, to the extent that anything in this past year could be called “sensible”.

His life had been so much simpler when his only worries were foreign dignitaries whose minds had been swapped with rabbit men, or the murderous rampages of destabilized bone constructs.

Even if Suisei could make the jump—at the cost of temporarily dispelling the electrostatic barrier—others would see him emerge with the transformees. They’d make the connection, and that would put the self-help group’s transformees in danger.

And Suisei wasn’t going to risk that.

Even if it made him a fool, he still wanted to believe there was a world where he got to see his children again.

With a sigh, Suisei Horosha set off in a run. He was going to have to take the long way—not to mention, get a gun.

But he was used to going off the beaten path.

The more things change, he thought, with bone-dry humor, the more things stay the same.