She'd managed to generate five dupes before the gunfire started. 
Now she was down to three. When she'd started learning the Flash 
Mob, she thought that controlling half a dozen versions of her body 
at the same time would have been difficult. It only took a few 
minutes to get used to it, though, and now it was almost natural to 
her. 


Almost. 


"You alright, MacMallan?" Stuarts asked. Him and Deacci continued 
the Barrier Waltz, generating a faint shimmering bubble around them 
that kept them safe. She'd gotten over how ridiculous they looked 
doing it a while ago. Osuigwe was on the other side; he'd generated 
four dupes before the shield went up, but as far as she knew all of 
his were still alive. 


"Yep, just lost one. I'm fine." 


The bubble flashed in time with a dull thudding sound. A bullet 
bounced off and fell harmlessly to the ground. The Serpent's Hand 
had attacked Foundation sites before, but this was brazen even for 
them. What hell were they doing here? 


He'd heard the whispers. The Foundation had developed something 
new. Some weapon or kind of soldier. It was unlike them, to use one 
of their shiny new toys instead of locking it in a box and pretending it 


didn't exist, and that had made certain people curious. 


They were secretive, certainly, but they weren't so hard to find if you 
knew what you were looking for. A couple of months of digging and 
he had managed to track down the facility this new group of theirs 
was operating from, and then it was just a matter of waiting. And he 
was nothing if not patient, a trait which had been regularly rewarded 
in his line of work. He'd gather enough info to sell sooner or later. 


Two four-by-fours rolled out of the facility that had, quite poorly he 
thought, been disguised as a run-down old chemical factory. He 
followed at a distance as they headed north. He wasn't too worried 
about being seen, but being reckless didn't pay the bills. It got 
harder as they left the city and headed out into the open desert, but 
he had ways of keeping hidden. Soon enough the vehicles stopped. 
Eight Foundation agents emerged. 


Four of them started dancing. He started recording. 


"Where the hell is Michaels? And where the fuck is our backup!" 
Deacci roared. 


Three of the Serpent's Hand soldiers - were they soldiers? She had 
no idea how they were structured as an organisation, she realised - 
had reached the bubble and were alternating between hammering 
on it with metal batons and trying to blow it up. They'd never get in 
of course, not as long as Deacci and Stuarts kept dancing, but it 
sure was distracting. Osuigwe's dupes held the entrance to the site 
while hers laid down suppressing fire, trying to hold the road. The 
backup Deacci was yelling about would need a clear path in. 


It wasn't a heavily equipped site. They didn't actually contain 
anything here so security was pretty light - just Sigma-2, who were 
currently deployed there, and a basic security detail who were 
keeping things locked down inside. Why the Serpent's Hand would 
even be attacking this site in the first place was a mystery, and from 
what she knew this kind of full-scale assault wasn't normally how 
they operated. 


Osuigwe pointed at one of the soldiers outside the bubble, who held 


a metal rod with some kind of silver fork on the end. "What the hell is 
that?" 

Looked kind of like a tuning fork, MacMallan thought to herself just 
before they approached and tapped it against the shimmering 
sphere. 


The noise was sudden and agonising. 


She and Osuigwe clapped their hands against their ears, but Deacci 
and Stuarts didn't even have that small respite; they just kept 
dancing, and it was only a few seconds before she saw a small 
trickle of blood coming from Stuarts' ear. Sound shouldn't have been 
able to penetrate the shield any more than their explosives had. She 
was about to tell them to stop dancing when the sound cut out. 


She looked back around just in time to see Michaels snap the neck 
of the last of the three in one of their giant hands, colossal chest 
heaving with exertion. 


"For the last time, Jackie, please stop calling it the Fusion Dance. 
I'm sure the process reminds you of all your cartoons but | can't 
stress enough how serious this is." 


"| know, Doc, | know." 


"Are you sure? You and Anders will literally be merging into a single 
body. It's a miracle we even got approval to try this and | don't want 
you blowing it by treating it as a game.” 


"Come on, Valdez, lighten up a little. We know the drill," she clapped 
the doctor on the shoulder. "We've practised. We're ready." 


Doctor Valdez, Head of Development for Project Margod, nodded. 
He ushered Agent Molera into the testing area; Anders was already 
there waiting. 


The movements required for the kinetoglyph they had designated 
PMK-06 were fast and intricate, but surprisingly short. It was over 
almost before he had even realised it had started; a flurry of twists 
and leg positions and ending with the right forearms touching. There 


was a flash of light, but no sound, and then Anders and Molera were 
both gone. 


Standing in the centre of the test area was one of the most 
physically perfect human specimens Valdez had ever seen. 
Standing well over two meters tall and built with muscle, wearing the 
same bodysuit both Anders and Molera had been wearing, the giant 
flexed its arm. Biceps rippled under golden skin. 


Valdez stood there, staring and stunned. It had worked. They had 
fused into a single, perfect, androgynous person. One that, it 
appeared, was content to stand there admiring its own body. 


"How- how do you feel?" Valdez finally managed to ask, 
breathlessly. Everyone else in the room was silent. 


"l- we- hm. We are..." the giant cocked their head to the side, as if 
considering. "Michaels. We are Michaels." And then the most perfect 
smile spread across their face. They laughed. "And we are great!" 
Their voice was like music. 


Michaels started running and jumping and somersaulting around the 
room, whooping with delight and moving with a level of agility and 
speed that until about five seconds ago would have seemed 
impossible considering their size. This continued for a few minutes, 
before Michaels ran over to Valdez and effortlessly lifted him off the 
ground in an embrace. 


"This is incredible, Doc!" 
"And you're both okay? You're both... there?" 


"We're both here, yeah. But I'm- I'm me. Does that make sense? | 
don't know how to explain it. When we think, it's with both of their 
voices. But we think the same thing at the same time." 


A frown spread across their face as they dropped Valdez back to the 
ground. 


"So er, Doc? How do we separate?" 


Michaels made a series of hand gestures- Are you okay? -it was the 
only way to communicate through the bubble. Light passed through 
for some reason, but everything else was blocked. 


She gestured back- We're fine. Stuarts' ear had already stopped 
bleeding. Michaels nodded, then turned and sprinted towards the 
front gate at an inhuman pace. They were something else. The 
higher-ups had prohibited using the Fusion Dance again; two for one 
wasn't a good deal in their eyes, especially when they still hadn't 
found a way to separate them. But at this point MacMallan wasn't 
sure Michaels would want to be separated. And they certainly pulled 
their weight, so she was happy that Michaels was around. It was a 
shame the Flash Mob didn't work for them. 


She shook her head and focused. She'd managed to hold the road 
with her duplicates, but something seemed off. The Serpent's Hand 
had stopped pushing forwards. 


"Osuigwe, what's your status?" 


"There's no one here. At the main entrance, | mean. They pulled 
back about a minute ago. | think we've driven them off." 


MacMallan frowned. That was a big display for them to just give up 
like that. She grabbed a walkie from one of her belts. 


"All stations, check in." 


A series of voices reported back, confirming that the attackers had 
all pulled away. She waited. Everyone had checked in. Everyone 
except Radek. 


They had found his body stuffed in a utility closet. He'd been 
stabbed in the back. The only casualty of Sigma-2 and he hadn't 
even been on the front line. They'd found two security personnel and 
a researcher dead, too. The entire damn thing had been a diversion. 
They already had someone inside and needed a way for them to get 
out. 


It had been over an hour; her duplicates had blinked out of existence 


a while ago. Being reduced back down to a single set of senses was 
always a little jarring after the rush of having multiple bodies all 
feeding in sights and sounds and sensations, but she was glad for 
the relative numbness right now. They'd been played. She slammed 
her first down onto the table wordlessly. Sanderson, the head of site, 
scowled briefly before turning her gaze back towards some research 
technician she didn't recognise. 


"What did they get?" 


"Files on three-six-eight-eight, Project Marqod development logs, 
video files of practice sessi-" 


"What did they get, lan?" 
He paused before responding. 


"Everything, ma'am. They got everything." 


Max reviewed the footage of their raid on the Foundation site. A 
glorious, golden-skinned giant tore through five people as if they 
weren't there, dodging bullets as it went. No way that thing was 
natural. They'd lost more people than he would have liked, but they 
got what they wanted. 


More footage; squads of identical people, glowing force-fields, 
someone who could move faster than any human should. And that 
giant. He'd heard of Foundation teams using anomalous things on 
missions before, and even heard rumours of a team of reality 
benders they used on rare occasions, but for them to regularly make 
use of a group that had this kind of power... that was an escalation. 


He wouldn't let his small part of the Serpent's Hand be left behind. 


He skimmed through the documents they'd recovered to get an idea 
of what they dealing with. All of this, created from a single base 
dance. No information on where that came from, unfortunately, but 
there was probably something in the Library. 


Something caught his eye, a dance that had been forbidden by the 
Foundation's leaders. 


high desert near , Peru. 


SCP-1001’s trunk and taproot are hollow, opening to a rounded 
aperture at its apex, and filled with a highly caustic solution of 
hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes comparable to those found 
in the pitchers of Nepenthes sp. This solution is capable of reducing 
50 kg of soft animal tissue to a thin slurry within 20 minutes of 
submersion. 


While it is capable of photosynthesis, SCP-1001’s leaves are 
singularly inefficient, producing only approximately 50% of the 
plant’s caloric requirements. Likewise, its roots are unusually 
ineffective at uptake of organic and mineral nutrients. To mitigate 
this deficiency, SCP-1001 is an obligate carnivore: it uses its 
prehensile leaves to capture passing prey and pull it into the central 
cavity, where it is digested. 


SCP-1001’s intelligence is highly debatable. Its basic hunting tactics 
resemble those of Paralichthys spp. (flounders): it buries its longest 
leaves in the sand and waits for a sufficiently large animal (at least 
40 kg) to pass by, whereupon it emerges suddenly and captures the 
passing prey. When this tactic does not produce results sufficiently 
quickly, however, SCP-1001 resorts to sophisticated audio mimicry. 
It is capable of reproducing literally any sound it has ever been 
exposed to, as well as recombining “known” sounds into novel 
phrases. It has been observed using the latter capacity to lure 
human prey, speaking in the voices of other humans known to the 
prey subject. Its means of sound production are unknown. 


Also interesting are SCP-1001’s prey preferences: it prefers to 
consume intelligent animals, especially those capable of tool use or 
of building artificial structures. Humans are always its preferred prey, 
but in their absence it has accepted primates, dogs, parrots, pigs, 
beavers, ants, and nest-building birds. Note that many of these 
species fall well below its usual size threshold, some to such a 
degree that capturing and digesting them produces a net energy 
loss. Its method of detecting intelligence is unknown but apparently 
not based on experience, since it has attacked squid and small 
dolphins with eagerness comparable to its attacks on humans and 
Andean monkeys. 


He flicked through the video files they'd retrieved until he found what 
he was looking for. Some people talking, then two of them start to 
dance. A flash of light, and in their place, that giant. That was it. 
What had she called it? He replayed the video. 


The Fusion Dance. 


Corrido of the Man with Eyes in the Back of His Head 


The afternoon sun shone relentlessly on a remote corner of the 
Arizona desert, a flat plain dotted with little more than scrub, rolling 
hills on the horizon. No cloud served to mitigate the heat and light 
everywhere. It was the sort of place you could see for miles and 
miles. You could see because there was nothing to see. A little 
shack right here, a dusty rental car nearby. Nothing. 


El Conserje had walked here, having hopped off a pickup traversing 
a lonely stretch of highway a couple miles away. He came prepared 
for the trek across the scorching landscape: plenty of water, space 
blanket for the night, protein bars for focus, and a bandolier of 
magazines for his pistols. He tensed, fully expecting his quarry to 
see him approach from miles away. He came, knowing death would 
meet him on this path. He gave thanks to Jesus and Mary as he 
pistol-whipped the first person he saw at the shack entrance, 
unaccountably blind to his approach. 


Then he asked them for deliverance upon viewing the carnage 
within. The shack and its occupants had already been vandalized. 
Beakers, glass tubes, flasks had been shoved wherever they would 
fit (for loose definitions of “fit”) and shattered. One man looked like 
he had burned from the inside out. He realized he only once before 
seen a pipe made from a human skull, but at least that one had 
been long dead beforehand. 


Needing answers, he handcuffed his captive and cracked open 
some smelling salts. The other man gagged and returned to 
consciousness with a start and a pounding headache. 


“Hey, muchacho, did you do this?” he demanded. 


The man rolled his head uneasily around and slowly registered the 
scene through a bloodshot haze. He blearily answered, “Uh... No. 
Did you?” 


The hitman cursed and pulled out a water bottle, opening it and 
letting his captive take a sip. Indicating the scene with his pistol, he 
explained the situation. “No. Yeah, I’m here to hit them. But | ain’t no 
sick fuck.” 


He grabbed his target by the chin, looked over his dark stubble, his 
stained button-down shirt. He looked over the pistol and radio he 
had carried, the small case emblazoned with some weird three- 
arrow symbol he’d never seen before. “Nah,” he continued, pushing 
his face away. “You didn’t kill them. But you gotta help me. | ain't 
here to kill you, but | gotta know who you are, before | change my 
mind.” 


Cognizance reentered his hostage with the sip of water and he 
made a quick assessment. Captor clearly intelligent, keeping 
control. Good. Equipment on the table, behind his captor. Good. The 
meth lab’s inhabitants, still dead. Good. Body sore, hands cuffed, 
head pounding, but still intact. Good. The sun peeking through the 
slats in the shack wall, low in the sky. 


Shit. “Quick, what time is it?” 
Hector backhanded him. “Nuh uh. Name first. Who are you with?” 


"Agent Rashaun Washington. DOD. You're on federal land, and | 
have to evacuate everyone before a nuclear test tonight.”