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grabbed a mic stand. She hefted it across her shoulders. "She's mine."
      Charlotte's mother laughed low in her throat. "She can be replaced."
      Charlotte spun, swinging the stand foot-side out. It landed inside her mother's ribs. The other woman looked at it a moment before snapping it off and gripping the rest of the stand.
      "You knew this was coming." More laughter hiccuped out of her torn body. "You can never outrun me, I'm your mother."
      Charlotte screamed high and desperate. She charged. Her mother grabbed her by the collar and drove her head into the opposite wall. In his arms, Amy had gone perfectly still.
      "Dad, Mom needs help."
      He bent her head to his chest, kissed her scalp and stroked her hair. He was at the door now. He could feel its push-bar in the small of his back, already giving way as he prepared to make the final step. Shame shrank his voice into a rasping thing. "I can't, baby. I'm not strong enough."
      "Oh." Amy hugged his neck. "That's OK." Then she slipped down his body and ran away.
      "Amy, no!"
      But Amy, whose body was ten times as strong as that of its organic inspiration, was already at the stage. Her little feet danced up the steps. Her voice came out bigger than her little body would have suggested possible: "Granny!"
      Charlotte wailed. Amy evaded her frantic grasp and dashed toward the wretched, broken thing before her. She scrambled up it like a monkey on a tree. Charlotte's mother grinned triumphantly, clasping her arms around Amy's tiny body, pinning her flailing arms. And as though their reunion were a happy one, Amy darted down for a kiss.
      For a moment, it was almost beautiful. Jack thought of his wife and daughter's kisses, thought of Charlotte's lips, warm and tingling with digestive fluid. You developed a taste for it, after a while. That sweet, distinctive burn remained in the mouth and on the skin for hours. He went to sleep with it every night and rolled over every morning just to get it back. But as Mrs Lindsay had pointed out, that very pleasure came from the acid bubbling behind their smiles, the kind that only came up if they were obsessive about their diets, if they were trying not to iterate or trying not to grow.
      Muffled behind her melting lips came the sound of Portia screaming.
      Jack had never enjoyed depriving his daughter of food. He firmly believed that for Amy to grow up right she had to grow up slow, and that meant growing up starved. She felt no pain. Her belly didn't distend. Her nails didn't weaken or her locks begin to fray. But watching her break the fast of her hungry years he sensed how long they must have felt for her. Her mouth opened wide, wider, until it unhinged like a snake's and sucked down the remnants of her grandmother's neck. She snapped a clavicle in her teeth. Black bone dust poured down her throat. Aerogel wreathed her face in a darkly glittering halo. It adhered to her skin in sparkling black streaks. She licked it off the heels of her hands and spat plastic like a hunter freeing buckshot from fresh-cooked game.
      Amy's grandmother sank to her knees. Amy dug her fingers into the older woman's skin and pulled. Flesh flensed away from the ribs; aerogel piped out in a smokestack. It coated Amy's hair and hands and face. The ribcage shuddered and trembled in her grip before finally giving way with a groan. It was not hunger Jack witnessed, now. It was vengeance.
      He tried to step forward, to intervene, to be the dad, but there was a tide of frightened people streaming around him and he was, after all, only flesh. He watched as Amy's body lengthened – her limbs stretching and popping, her shoulders expanding, her waist narrowing, as her grandmother's body dwindled, faded, became a pile of glittering silicon or lithium or whatever was left. Amy stood, her pretty white graduation dress mere shreds over a woman's body, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
      "All gone,