The stump bled first like anything cut in two would have. A bright arterial cough made damper by the tourniquet above.

But the gush dwindled to a trickle that was strangled to a seep.

The raw face of bone glazed over with something that wasn’t bone and wasn’t not; the vessels snipped back into themselves like frightened worms; the cut muscles shivered and pressed in as if a palm was smoothing them.

The assistant’s voice went thin. "That shouldn’t be possible without—"

"Time," Davis snapped, as if the concept belonged to him. "We’ll see if it keeps."

He set his clipboard aside.

Now he did look at Sera, properly, as a man might stare across a gulf he’d always known he would have to cross. "Do you understand what you are?" he asked.

"A disappointment," she said. "But you don’t have to keep pretending you’re surprised."

"Subject 972 was viable," Dr. Davis said, ignoring the knife of the word daddy embedded in the way she watched him. "Her phenotype expressed fully human morphology with stable markers. That makes you an outlier. Useful, if predictable."

"And if I’m not?"

"Then you’ll be cataloged," he said. "And disposed."

"Trash day," she nodded. "Put me by the curb. Hungry things come around. I wonder if you guys have the pleasure of meeting the zombie this far up north."

The assistant had placed the severed hand in a stainless tray like he was setting a place at dinner.

He couldn’t stop glancing at it, as if he expected it to move. It didn’t. It was just a hand. The wrist end shone wet and wrong in the light.

"Cold bath," Davis said, without taking his eyes off Sera. "Saline. Plain."

"For— for reattachment?"

"For later," he said. "We’re not giving the tissue any assistance."

The assistant set the tray aside with clumsy reverence.

When he came back, his forearms were speckled with white dust and dots of blood. He wiped them with a towel he didn’t bother to throw away.

"Remove the tourniquet," Davis said.

"Now?" the assistant asked.

"Now."

The rubber loosened and snapped off. Blood surged, angry with gravity. It should have jetted. It didn’t.

It bloomed, spatters on the sheet and the metal and the assistant’s hands, and then... diminished.

The stump’s surface changed as they watched—darkening at the center, paling at the margins, a whorl of color like bruise and birth all at once. Sera exhaled through her nose once. The EKG agreed.

The first bud appeared like an insult.

Not a grand eruption, and much slower than when she lost it in the battle against the dire wolf.

Just a slick nub swelling from the bone’s glossy cap, pushing wetly into the space where a hand should be.

The assistant made a small sound that had no place in a lab. Sera turned her head to look because curiosity cost her nothing now.

"Disgusted?" she asked him. "You’re supposed to be excited. You get to write your name on it."

He looked away. "I didn’t sign up for—"

"You signed the NDA," Dr. Davis snapped, a crack tearing through his practiced calm. It sealed again almost immediately. "You also signed the oath. Continue the record."

The assistant’s voice shaking into professionalism sounded like a man building a coffin around his own fear. "Time since amputation: seventy-three seconds. Initial granulation complete. Vessel retraction intact. Apparent osteogenic activity—" He glanced at Davis. "Is that... bone growth?"

Dr. Davis stepped closer. He didn’t touch. "It appears to be."

The nub lengthened. More buds formed—five islets along an arc where knuckles should be, then a larger swelling where a palm might anchor them.

The skin crawling over it wasn’t exactly skin; it gleamed, too thin, too new, a membrane extruding before it had decided what to become.

It was a pale lavender color, but neither one of the scientists remarked on it.

Maybe they thought it was all the blood vessels under the newly formed skin?

Sera wasn’t going to convince them otherwise.

She let her head fall back. "Can we skip to the part where I disappoint you faster? I’ve got a class at nine."

"You won’t be going back to class," sneered Dr. Davis. "The world’s come to an end, or haven’t you noticed?"

"I have noticed that. City H was a bit cold when I left. Have you told mom that I am here? Have you told her that her precious house that she was so proud of is under 20 stories of ocean water and ice?" she asked. "Apparently, you are much better at lying and hiding the truth. Were you planning on just not saying anything and see how long you could go before she noticed I was gone?"

Dr Davis looked at Sera for a moment. "I hate to give you any more bad news, but I already told her that you died a few months back. She isn’t looking for you, she isn’t expecting you. She is happily living with our daughter and grandson. For all intents and purposes, you are simply a smudge to wipe out when I am done with you. No one will miss you. No one ever has."

The assistant’s eyes snapped up.

For a second, he saw it—the thing in the space between scientist and father that no clipboard could flatten: the betrayal dressed in scrubs.

It made his stomach roll, and he looked back at the nub to stop himself from thinking about that level of betrayal.

"Pain report?" he asked, as if talking to a person would anchor him. "On a scale of—"

"She processes things differently," Davis reminded him with yet another disappointed sigh.

"She can speak for herself," Sera snapped, and for the first time, the voice was not dry but sharp.

The assistant flinched as if slapped had physically landed on him. Sera’s face smoothed again almost instantly.

"Try ice," she said. "I don’t like cold. Or cat dander. See what happens when I am exposed to either one."