The spilled nerve agent induced acute apotemnophilia in ninety-four percent of those exposed. It was nonlethal. It wasn’t supposed to exist.

In Grosse Pointe, a woman helped her daughter remove six fingers with a knife and pliers. A Bloomfield grandfather sawed off his leg. Few died, surprisingly–the agent accelerated the clotting process. The only populations spared were prisoners and mental patients, without access to sharp enough objects.

Loren’s unsurprised when the bill comes across his desk. They’re only twenty percent, in Detroit, but each could yield four healthy transplants.

He leans on his remaining hand, hates himself, and considers it.

“Look!” says Senji. “Pegasi!” He points eagerly to where the creatures are swooping and soaring around one end of a rainbow.

Hawthorne snorts. “Crude creatures,” he says. “Ungainly air-wallowers! Nothing like my helicorns!”

“But those, ah,” says Senji, “didn’t those tend to–”

“So they decapitated a few test riders,” snaps Hawthorne. “So what? Grist for the fodder! There are risks to any great invention, and now I know them. My new hanging-basket contrivance solves all that–just you wait and see!”

Senji is watching, later, as Hawthorne–in that very basket–learns the hard way that helicorns don’t come house-trained.

“If you lay it flat,” says Bertrand, “you’ll put holes in the floor.”

“Possibly,” concedes Jacques.

“Furthermore, this will go faster if we both drill.”

“Perhaps,” says Jacques, “we should hold it and drill from opposite sides.”

Bertrand considers that, frowning, but he can’t find anything wrong with the idea.

“All right,” Jacques calls over the sheet of wood a moment later, “remember! We are bracing on the left and drilling on the right!”

“Yes,” says Bertrand, still frowning. “I think… yes.”

A few seconds later, screaming, they jerk back their bleeding hands. Unsupported, the wood falls over onto Bertrand’s head.

Charles lets the officers spot the little silver flask, so when he volunteers to take the dogs out during lunch, they think they understand, and say yes.

Together they do two circuits, during which Charles cries: big helpless sobs he tries to keep quiet, and tears he doesn’t bother to blot. He cries for what they are doing. He cries because he must. They must.

He composes himself, and empties the flask into the sand.

Then he takes the dogs on their long poles back through the gate: into the rooms, where the detainees huddle under sandbags, whispering Allah. O Allah.

The door into the crawlspace leads under the porch, right onto the old house’s granite foundation. Pleasance decides to grow a tree there. She’d like having a tree inside the house.

She puts pieces of pinecone in one of the cracks she finds, and some mulberries in another. As an experiment, she puts a wedge-shapen wooden toy block in a third.

Pleasance is a conscientious six-year-old, and usually remembers to water them. The pinecone and the mulberries fail to thrive, but one day, the part of the foundation where the soaked and swollen toy is wedged groans. Then shudders.

And splits.