Cassius glanced at his male colleague. “Dr. Nesbitt: did you upload those files like I fuckin’ asked?”

“Yessir, Dr. Arbond,” he nodded.

Cassius looked up at the hydraulic limbs and spoke a command loud and clear: “ALICE, open file Effed-Up Three.”

Segments of the displays beneath the glass dome and up on the cylindrical wall lit up in a collage. We were presented with all of Merritt’s recent data: X-ray scans, her vitals, her blood composition, and previously taken pictures of her ulcerations—mostly from her shoulders and her face—and several other images. Of the various displays, the blood composition read-out was, by far, the most intriguing. It took the form of a lengthy white, tick-marked ribbon that wound half-way around the circumferences of both the viewing area and the operating theater below. The projections showed smaller strips which, by their color and labels, indicated the various compounds in Merritt’s bloodstream, with the strips’ positions on the display detailing their relative concentrations. The indicator strips’ edges slowly stretched or shrunk, updating the read out in real time as the concentrations changed.

Dr. Nesbitt swept his eyes over the images, and—whatever he was looking for—the frown on his lips suggested he hadn’t found it. “Why aren’t there any resonance imaging scans?”

“Were you not listening back there?” Dr. Arbond quipped, scowling at his colleague, “or was there just too much wax in your ears? It’s like I told you: the patient had an adverse reaction to the MRI. What you see here is the best that we’re gonna get,” he added, pointing at the images on the walls. “It’s gonna be touch-and-go most of the time, so get that so-called surgical judgment of yours out on the field and ready to play.” Cassius turned to his female colleague. “You too, Dr. Mistwalker.”

The surgeon nodded at her superior.

Dr. Arbond looked up at the viewing area.

“Today, we’re going to be performing an exploratory surgery on this Type Two NFP-20 patient. Given her case, our investigation is going to be tripartite. First up on the menu: a partial resection of the ulcerated dermis on the shoulder, between the clavicle and the scapular spine—with therapeutic debridement, if deemed necessary. Second, an endoscopic examination of the throat, trachea, bronchial tree, as well as the esophagus and stomach. Thirdly and finally, we’ll be digging around the thoracic cavity.”

Dr. Mistwalker smirked. “Three in a row. Does this mean she gets her next surgery free?”

Cassius snorted. The sounds came out staticky through the speaker on the exterior of his hazmat suit.

“I’ll give that quip seven out of ten, Francyne,” Cassius said. “Good effort; shabby timing. Learn to read the room.” He turned to Dr. Nesbitt. “I think we’ll start with the endoscopy.”

The other two nodded, and then all three got to work.

Cassius reached up with an open hand. “ALICE: Endoscope.”

“Activating endoscope,” ALICE replied.

With a soft whirr, a long, dark, fiber-optic cable slid out slowly from the mechanical bouquet overhead. The cable was a whipworm sheathed in plastic that leaked a lambent glow through the segmentation rings along its length, though the light came out blazing from the beam beneath the peering camera-eye at the cable’s tip. Cassius grabbed the cable and reeled it toward him with both hands while Dr. Mistwalker took one of the devices beside the operating table and rolled it up to the side of the operating table. The screen on the device woke up and flickered on at the same time as the endoscope, displaying the feed from the endoscope’s camera.

Dr. Nesbitt stepped over to the opposite side of the operating table and held Merritt’s jaw open while Dr. Arbond slowly fed the endoscope down Mrs. Elbock’s throat.

A moment later, Dr. Mistwalker stuck out her hand. “Wh—what is that?”

“Bring the damn screen around so I can see!” Dr. Arbond grouched, straining to look over his shoulder.

She did, and then all three surgeons spent a moment staring at the image, jaws agape.

Cassius shook his head. “Well that’s fuckin’ wrong. I’ve seen a chimeric toe growing in the wall of the throat, and that wasn’t even half as wrong as this looks.” He looked up to the devices clustered at the top of the dome. “ALICE, put the endoscope feed onto the display for the peanut gallery in the viewing area. They’ll want to see this.”

Nodding, she pressed a button. A screen popped into being on the glass cylinder The feed was also visible on the glass cylinder, as well as on the operating theater’s domed ceiling, giving Brand and I a front row seat to the latest discovery.

“Cry the Lassedites!” Brand swore. He reached in my direction, clasping his hands together as if to grab me, only to realize I wasn’t immediately next to him. “Are you seeing this?”

I nodded.

The feed showed dark green tissue lining Merritt’s throat and upper esophagus in helical stretches and rings. It was as alien as it was familiar: it was nearly the same as the aberrant flesh that, even now, was marching across my chest and tail. The difference? Aside from the color—hers dark green, mine dark violet—the growths in Merritt’s throat were studded with branching, fractal ridges. If you ignored the context, the structures were almost beautiful.

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“Is this stuff encrusted on the underlying mucosa?” Dr. Mistwalker asked.

“No,” Cassius replied. “Look at the edges: the mucosa is raised and flayed. It’s sloughing off, and the blurple shit is the one doing the pushing.”

There was a soft scratching noise as Brand crawled across the stair-seats, toward me. “It reminds of the structural features of diatom tests,” he said. “Only, hmmm…” he ran a finger across his PPE visor, “I wonder… what do you suppose all that surface area is needed for?”

I turned to face him, not bothering to remark on his posture.

So much for social distancing.

“Well, what is surface area usually used for?” I asked. “In this context?”

Brand rose up into a squat. “Absorption, and/or emission,” he said. “The chambers of the lungs’ alveoli provide the surface area to facilitate gas exchange—oxygen, carbon dioxide. Forests of villi in the small intestine absorb nutrients from the digestive tract.”

“Right,” I nodded. That was basic knowledge.

Slightly less basic knowledge, however, was the memory of what it felt like to have plastic dissolving in my throat. The sensation came rushing back to me, as did the trickle of food as it melted into my esophageal walls, slurped up by the strange, ticklish tingle that suffused my innards—and all without ever reaching my stomach.

I shuddered at the recollection. “I think it might play a role in how Kurt, Letty, and others eat so much. The food just melts into you, without ever reaching the stomach,” I said, only to hastily add, “at least, that’s how they described it to me. They can even eat plastic.”

Brand stared. “No shit…”

I nodded.

Below, the surgeons were rallying.

“Okay,” Cassius said. “I’m going in deeper.”

Drs. Nesbitt and Mistwalker replied, in unison: “Ready.”

The view from the camera feed inched forward, moving further down into Merritt’s throat. Then, without warning, some grainy static flashed across the screen, but for only a moment.

“What was that?” Dr. Nesbitt asked.

Dr. Arbond stopped feeding the endoscope down Merritt’s throat. The footage shook for an instant as the camera came to rest against the lining of Mrs. Elbock’s throat. Immediately, the static reappeared, stronger and thicker than before. Discolored pixels flared across the screen like a sandstorm against a windshield.

Then, the feed cut out entirely.

“What the hell?” Dr. Arbond reeled the endoscope back out of Merritt’s throat.

It came up looking like a half-eaten plastic churro, stuffed full of slender, glistening straw. The tip was missing, camera and all. Patches of the plastic sheath had been eaten away, as if by acid, exposed metal wiring and naked fiber-optic cable. The damaged end snapped and crumbled as Cassius grabbed it. The plastic sheath flaked off in shards.

He tossed the ruined endoscope on the floor. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.” He squeezed his hands into fists. “Let’s just get to the slicing. Maybe that’ll show us what the fuck is going on here.”

“ALICE, cut the endoscope feed.”

The rectangle of pure static in front of us on the glass vanished.

Dr. Nesbitt craned his head back, perturbed. “We’re cutting into her already?”

“No,” Dr. Arbond replied. He pointed at the ulcerous dark green eruptions encroaching the human skin on Merritt’s neck. “First, we’ll do a resection of the necrotic tissue on the shoulder.” He turned to Dr. Mistwalker. “Man the microscope, Dr. Mistwalker, if you please.”

She reached up to the mechanical bouquet overhead and pulled down a hydraulic arm tipped with something like a cross between a telescope and a rocket-launcher. Without making physical contact, she swiped her right hand over the scanner in the rectangular display screen that crested over the barrel that bore the microscope’s lens. The screen flared to life as it scanned the surgeon’s hand-chip.

“ALICE,” she said, “microscope motion and viewing area display on.”

Slowly, Dr. Mistwalker moved her hand toward Merritt’s shoulder as the feed from the microscope popped into view for Brand and I exactly where the endoscope footage had been a minute ago. The microscope copied her movements exactly, though with arthritic creaks of hydraulics and joints. She moved the microscope into position next to Dr. Arbond, adjusting the camera’s angle and focus with gestures of her fingers.

“Alright.” Cassius rolled his shoulders and clapped. “Let’s do this.”

Picking the scalpel off the surgical tray, Dr. Arbond stepped up to the operating table and made two parallel incisions about an inch apart on Merritt’s right shoulder, right below the clavicle, connecting the two incisions with a third along the still-human tissue, creating a rectangular flap of skin. The third of the strip nearest to the flap’s tip was covered by healthy-looking human skin while the third of the strip on the opposite side—the side still attached to Merritt’s body—bore exposed dark green wyrm flesh which had crept toward her neck like the trail of a slug. The middle of the strip was strangely murky—semi-opaque—with darker tones of changed hide hiding beneath the pallid, almost bleached surface of human skin, waiting to be sloughed off.

Surprisingly little blood oozed up from the incisions.

“Forceps,” Cassius demanded.

Dr. Nesbitt grabbed the forceps and used them to pull back the flap.

“Would you look at that!” Brand said.

The infected tissue didn’t stop at the surface. The mottled, dark green corruption continued beneath the strip, like groundwater beneath topsoil. It was more or less the same as the infected flesh up top, only wetter, slicked by all-too-familiar-looking inky gobs that glistened like the Night beneath the concentrated light coming off the surgical lamp on one of the bouquet’s arms.

Cassius turned to Dr. Mistwalker.

“Francyne, get a close up of that dark tissue.”

Dr. Mistwalker made an O with her thumb and forefinger, causing the microscope’s camera barrel to extend with a barely audible hum.

The microscope feed up on the glass showed an ominous wall of dark, dark green—nearly black—slicked in wet, congealing sludge, covered in the diamond tiling pattern typical of wyrm hide. Minute scales., smooth and uniform, a fossil unearthed from the butchered mess of sliced human flesh. Dr. Mistwalker magnified the image several times over, but finer details only began to emerge as the microscope neared its maximal zoom factor: a weave of impossibly small filaments, themselves composed of units that seemed like anything other than cells.

A chill shot down my back and down into the pants-leg where I’d stuffed my tail.

Brand muttered gravely. “We meet again.”

I locked eyes with him for a moment.

The sight on the microscope was a dead ringer for the sample I’d viewed in Brand’s lab, and for the mutated flesh of Ileene’s misbegotten fetus. The thought of Merritt looking like that made me shudder.

Below, Dr. Nesbit glanced at Cassius. “Did you not cut deep enough?”

“No.” Cassius pointed at the incisions. “I’ve done this a zillion times. We’re looking at the lowest layer of the dermis, no doubt about it.”

“We should expand the area,” Dr. Mistwalker suggested.

Nodding, Dr. Arbond extended the two incisions further into the wyrmifying flesh. Everyone flinched as the scalpel squealed against the wyrm hide. The sound was like metal on metal.

Dr. Arbond bit his lip. “Peel it back, Garm.”