It took some juggling–at one point, literally–but Ruvle managed to cram the snake into the ducts, rather far down there past an intersection, in fact, and was now re-seating the ductwork face to the enclosure. Her ankle was burning from the inside out.

  Focus on the task, not the venom, not the pain. From this angle, pulling the duct face back in place, her eyeline pointed so close to parallel with the ceiling that she could see through that narrow gap at the top of the dark glass face. Bright and colorful, in the distance, a scientist fiddled with their lanyard, in front of a door with a big red light the size of her head centered above it. He presented it to the door, which scanned the lanyard with a green swooping beam, and the red light turned green with an affirmative beep. The scientist walked in–and walked upwards.

  The third floor. Ruvle closed and screwed back in the duct face from the inside, a matter of grabbing the exposed sharp screw ends and turning them, trivial with needlework.

  Moments later, Ruvle poised in a vent just across the hall from the keycard door, quietly grimacing. Mount Radius snakes had venom, but not a lethal dose…she just had to ride out the pain, the pins and needles, the growing unresponsiveness of her leg. It’d be fine. She was fine. Ruvle pointed her pen down the duct, so as not to shine light through the vent.

  ‘Mielo ~ I found the way up,’ she wrote.

  ‘Chain Hydrapress ~ Knew you could do it. I talked Yoris into letting me onto the second floor, if you need help.’

  She heard nothing of Chain or that guide scientist, presumably Yoris, amid all the bubbling tubes, humming hydraulics, and beeping terminals. Her leg seized in slow-motion, but the toxin made it no further than her thigh. Stay calm. She was fine. It hurt, but she was fine.

  Opportunity finally arrived–a middle-aged woman in a well-fitted coat, with red frizzy hair and stark black gloves clasped behind her back. She found the door and silently flashed her lanyard at it. An important lanyard, too, judging by the black-and-red borders around the identification. The door opened as its light turned green, and the woman proceeded inside–

  –to be immediately apprehended. Ruvle was there in a flash, the door closing behind her, her arms under the woman’s shoulders and one hand against her mouth. As the woman’s muffled grunts failed to draw any attention, Ruvle walked her up, hobbling, smiling to herself–and swiping the lanyard.

  Of course, she’d have to dispose of the witness. The third floor had a far more pristine air of sterility, white walls and linoleum flooring, akin to a clinic more than a lab–hallways that made sense, glass doors, signs to clearly-labeled ‘SURGERY ROOM A’ or ‘STERILIZATION ROOM’ or ‘VENDING MACHINES’. Many options. But Ruvle had a more interesting idea for how to make the witness not be able to communicate for a while. Signs suggested the surgery rooms to be far across the floor, and Ruvle needed to get rid of this squirming scientist as soon as possible; the lanyard cord tied far-too-tightly around her neck might not hold for much longer. There happened to be a nice, clean garbage chute built into the wall nearby, a plastic lid labeled for Biohazards and Medical Waste, big enough for a full garbage bag–or a person–to fit down it.

  Chain wouldn’t let her throw a person two stories down into a pitch-black pit of used needles and twenty kinds of toxic waste. But Chain wasn’t here to stop her this time, now, was he? Ruvle shoved the woman in feetfirst. At least losing her grip on the lanyard cord would loosen it, so she wouldn’t choke down there. Ruvle told herself that this counted as a mercy.

  She shouldn’t care whether or not it counted, but she did.

  “And who’s this guy?” Chain asked, standing next to a computer terminal among the blue liquids that floated animal parts all around, beholding the entity coiled up in a steel bucket. Another scientist busily carried that bucket on a cart, pushing it towards a gap between the blue liquid tubes lining the walls.

  “The gegha, or our new hire carrying him?” Yoris asked.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Not the new guy. I mean, him too, but the…genetic experiment…I forget what that stands for.”

  “It’s quite alright, ‘gegha’ is accepted parlance for Genetic Experiments Gone Horribly Awry,” Yoris said, waving a hand in entertained dismissal.

  The snake was gigantic, the size that belonged more on the distant jungle serpents that ensnared and swallowed tigers than anything near Mount Radius. Its coils weighed so heavily on the bucket that its edges bent outwards and the rim bit into the snake’s thin-looking scales–at least the parts of it that remained biological. An entire contiguous fourth of its body had been replaced with brass-and-steel telescoping machinery, which moved with the same ease as its biology. A glowing red light replaced one of its eyes, a patch of cyborg replacement parts that extended to its jaw. The snake opened its mouth as it raised its head from the bucket, revealing one normal fang on the biological side of its face and six brass ones on the other, all seven dripping with venom. A drop of it fell onto the rusty expanded iron of the floor below, which sizzled loudly, scouring the rust completely clean.

  “That’s Dusaw,” Yoris said. “Sometimes our snakes get loose, and we’ve bred them for so much more neurotoxin in a smaller space that it’s not safe to corral them ourselves! Dusaw here brings them back to the pen for us.”

  The giant snake slithered up into the ducts. Chain watched it go until its tail disappeared in, frowning to himself.

  “Are you really asking me to believe that you don’t grab snakes yourself?” Chain asked.

  “Oh, no, I do so the moment the safety officer looks away.”

  With a quick hobble to the next air duct and a climb inside, Ruvle got acquainted with the ‘positive pressure’ concept. All ducts blew air, but in a leisurely amateur way; positive pressure ducts made a production out of it. The wind rippled the rubber mask over her face as she pulled herself through, distant thrums of air pumps and fans serving as sonic constellations to navigate by.

  Some of the floor turned out much the same–another lecture auditorium, this time filled with anatomical charts of every creature in the world besides humanity. More connective halls. The break room contained a caged rat with a sign instructing anyone entering that they must pet it at least once, for safety reasons. The numerous rooms filled with veterinary equipment seemed closer to what Ruvle wanted, tall machines of exposed steel and electrodes whose painted labels promised to be a ‘virtual grid scanner’ or ‘scale stitch-o-matic’ or ‘bone extractor 3002’. The latter’s paint faced away from any of the vents; Ruvle only learned its name from loud commiseration between a surgeon and his anesthesiologist about how the bone extractor 3001 had been so much easier to use. The operating rooms didn’t interest her at all, but the ceiling vent for room B1 was loose, so she dangled down and swiped a scalpel from the surgical tray.

  And so she bided her time, exploring with care and silence.

  She could no longer feel anything but pain from the affected hip down, and below the knee, nothing at all.

  Finally, she found it. Another keycard-protected door, trivially bypassed through the ducts, held her prizes. Ruvle dropped into the storeroom inside, shelves lined with cardstock boxes, sealed glass ampoules and vials of precision machine oil. Valves, artificial claws, loose patches of biocompatible polymers, ball-headed pins labeled ‘immunodelineator’ for whatever that meant–too many devices of loose quantity to count. And then she found it–a box of hearts of varying sizes, and she picked the one the size of her fist. The knot of brassy tubes and white polymer lay lifeless, smooth, in her hands, an instrument designed with care for all of mammalia–something that would, someday soon, become a part of her. A transcendence of biological limits, not a direct improvement in its own right–not like Dye–but a key to open the door to her higher self, something that Dye could never do. Fine, now, was inevitable.

  ‘~ Found the heart,’ Ruvle wrote to Chain.

  ‘~ Good, now let’s get out of here.’

  ‘~ Not before I break everything. I have this nice sharp scalpel and all this sensitive equipment.’ Ruvle smiled to herself.

  ‘~ Hey, so, do you think that’s necessary now?’ Chain asked. ‘We could just leave with the heart.’

  ‘~ Fygra has to burn.’

  She felt her pen click with some sort of response from Chain as she put it back in her suit, unseen. She didn’t care. This was the fun part.

  Vending machine glass shattered. Wires of medical machines sliced open, spilling crackling electricity between them. The bone extractor 3002 cracked and tipped as Ruvle pushed it, and it slammed the floor before it with a thundering crack, shattering a pile of glassware she placed there. Two junior scientists ran in, through the hall whose drywall she’d peeled and torn to shreds, stopping to see only a blur of black–the shadow of Ruvle climbing effortlessly back into the ceiling vent. She imagined they only may have seen her unresponsive leg in the moment between entry and closing the duct face.