“This is wrong,” said Lilith through Helix’s skin. “There can only be one of us here. You have to be somewhere else to be you.”

“I know,” Helix answered. “But I am here, and we will be either one or none.”

Their struggle became a slow match of strength as Lilith grasped at Helix’s upper wrists and their hands clasped. They grappled with each other, each trying to push the other back through the waters and eventually out of the vat. But they were evenly matched, and each advantage gained by either one only served to bind them tighter together. The cut in Helix’s palm began to ache, and Lilith forced that hand back against the wrist and scissored her lower arms in towards her body, freeing them from Helix’s hold. For a moment it was all shifting limbs and reaching hands, and then Lilith grasped her by the waist, and with a nudge of her knee between Helix’s legs, sent her rotating like a spinner until her face was between Lilith’s legs, her head gripped in her knees.

Arms wrapped around abdomens, heads cradled in legs, their bodies interlocked like magnets in alignment. As Lilith spoke to her in her mother tongue, Helix lowered her face to her soft damp mat of hair, salty like the sea and full of stories.

oOo

Colin slept on a plastic sheet spread on the floor, dreaming of the sun on a warm afternoon, beating down on his hat as he dozed on the porch and waited for the stranger to come. They were all waiting. Waiting with the rhythm of the sun that was a blade of grass waving in the breeze and then the rhythm, the sun and the dream were torn apart by a scream.

Colin sprang from the floor to find himself alone, the door standing open and mist roiling in from outside. Swearing, he slammed the door shut and scrambled into his divesuit. His head was swimming. He felt as if he’d been suddenly yanked from deep water, into the air, and he’d forgotten how to breathe. He shook his head, pulled the face mask on and clamped it tight. Slipping his lips around the mouthpiece he gulped at the clean air for a few panicked moments, wondering how long the door had been open. He hadn’t had much to do in the last day and half except ponder what might be leaching through the ventilation system into the room, and what his chances were of contracting vatsickness from the exposure he had already received. Now he figured he could stop wondering and pretty much plan to die of it; maybe not right away, maybe not for years and years, but sooner or later, and for certain. All the same he double checked the suit’s seals before opening the door and going out onto the balcony. In the vat below the waters were aroil with the bodies of tetras. They were swarming so densely that he couldn’t make out anything more than thrashing arms and legs. Behind him, through the door he’d heedlessly left open, he heard the transceiver ringing.

He dashed back inside to answer it. It was Hector Martin. His hair was in disarray, as if he’d been sleeping and hadn’t had a chance to comb it. “Slatermeyer? Is that you?”

Colin checked the suit’s radio and found that it was still on broadcast. “Yes. Dr. Martin, something’s happening. The tetra’s, they’re -”

“Graham put Helix in the vat room. You have to keep her away from Lilith. They’re both queens. They’ll fight each other until one or both of them is killed.”

“Well, I think it’s too late for that. I was sleeping. When I woke up the tetra guarding me was gone. She left the door open. They’re... swarming in the vat where Lilith sleeps. If Helix got in here, as you say, that would explain it.”

“Slatermeyer, you’re already suited. You have to go in there and break them up.”

“Are you crazy? I can’t even see anything — they’re fighting so closely all I can make out is arms and legs. I don’t stand a chance of getting through the tetras, let alone separating Helix and Lilith. I’ll get killed. They’ll rip my mask off, or pull open my seals.”

Hector shook his head. “You have to try. Lilith and the others attacked Helix when she hatched, and drove her out of the vat. They’ll kill her now. Or she’ll kill Lilith. You have to try to stop it. Please. If I could get there, I’d do it, but Graham’s lackey, Benny, welded the door shut. There’s no one else. You have to do something.”

Colin shook his head reluctantly. He’d already suffered who knew how much exposure to the growth medium. If he threw himself into that mob of fighting tetras, he’d surely get more.

“Please.” Hector stared at him, his eyes wide and desperate.

Colin sighed. “I’ll try. But I’m not going to risk whatever’s left of my life in a futile effort to separate them. You know how strong they are. But I’ll get in, and I’ll try to talk to the other tetras, try at least to get them to back off. I’m sorry, Doctor, but they’re your brainchildren, not mine.”

Hector slammed his fist down on the coffee table in front of him. The impact must have jarred the transceiver recording his image. His face blurred, and then came back into focus, but sideways. “Go,” he said. “Do what you can.”

oOo

Hector walked into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Straightening, he stared at his image in the mirror. How, he asked himself, how had things gotten this bad? At what point had he crossed over from the sane and illustrious life of a corporate researcher to this — this mad nightmare where he asked his assistant to risk his life for the good of a project that would never meet its stated goals? He thought back over the decisions he had made, and realized that it was in the very beginning, when he’d had the dream and decided to follow it. He had stopped being an employee of GeneSys right then, had stopped caring, really, if this project was in their best interests, or his. Though he hadn’t known it at the time, he had offered himself up in service to Lilith and her kind, and since he’d taken that step, there was never any time afterwards when he could have changed anything. As he gazed in the mirror, the ventilation grating on the wall behind him popped off, and a woman crawled out. Hector turned to face her. She dusted off her jeans and straightened up, looking around her.

“Oh, sorry. I had no idea what room I’d end up in. In fact, I was afraid I had the wrong apartment. You’re Hector Martin, aren’t you?”

Mutely, he nodded.

She smiled and offered her hand. “Chango Chichelski. Boy am I glad you’re home. I was supposed to bring you my sister’s air tanks. Vonda tested them and there’d been blast inside. But Benny caught me, and he got them. He-” she paused, struggling with the possibilities. “He was coming upstairs. He had a blowtorch.”

“They welded her inside,” said Hector.

“What? Where?”

“In the vat room. Down in the sub-basement. There’s an old biopoly lab with test vats. It was in disuse for years until I took it over for the project.” Hector glanced at the hole in the wall above Chango’s head.

“We have to get in there.”

Chango followed his gaze. “I got into a maintenance stairway. Lots of places to go from there. Big conduit housings, access crawl ways for plumbing. I took the ventilation system.”

“And you found your way here.”

“I had to pop out and check the circuit boxes. They label them by apartment. I couldn’t really be sure I had it right, but I do have a pretty good sense of direction.”

Hector bit his lip. “Do you think you could make it down there?”

Chango puffed out her cheeks. “Geez, that’s a long haul. It’d take awhile. I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should just go down there and unweld that door. I’m afraid they may be killing each other right now.”

“They?”

“Helix and Lilith — her mother.”

“Oh, her mother...”

The transceiver at Hector’s wrist bleeped and he answered it. It was Slatermeyer. “What happened?”

“Well, they’re not fighting anymore. They’re just sort of... wrapped around each other.”