The butterfly man agrees to kill Jokić first, then her. She subsequently manages to convince the creature that, if it kills Jokić before her, it can get control of the rest of the shipment of butterfly men that is due to arrive and, because they have linked memories, gain control of its own destiny and do what it wants rather than being endlessly compelled to be a bioware assassin (we have learned along the way that it likes noodles and painting). Quandry then fights with the butterfly man, manages to inject a cocktail of drugs into its jugular, and restrains it. The pivotal part of the story comes when Quandry goes to a drug dealer’s house and discovers (spoiler), when the butterfly man arrives, that she is in its temporary lair. During this she learns about butterfly men from her father (Quandry keeps his oxygenated head in a case while she is acquiring funds to buy him a new body), and he tells her that they only survive for 24 hours, but no-one who is pursued lasts that long. The story subsequently turns into a Terminator-style narrative (the butterfly man has extraordinary powers of regrowth) where Quandry is relentlessly pursued and has several close shaves. The next section switches to a bar where Timo finds a woman called Quandry and tells her that a gangster called Jokić is unhappy about “the harbour job going belly up,” and that he has sent a butterfly man after her. The woman compares it to a tupilak, something made out of animal carcass that you send after a person who has wronged you but, before she can expand on her comment, Jow gets a text saying, “For diagnostic purposes, run or hide.” The butterfly man then leaps out of the bathtub and stabs the woman to death with a plastic probe before pursuing Jow, who flees. “Thought it’d be bigger,” Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine. Its face is the most perfect part of it, with planar cheekbones and soulful dark eyes. It’s human-shaped, but strays in the details: joints distended, no finger or toenails, smooth uninterrupted flesh between the legs. When the gurgling noise finally stops, the fully formed butterfly man is lying in a shallow carbon puddle. Muscles creep over each other, layer on bubbling layer rubbery skin splits and reforms to accommodate. Jow watches the level fall, and fall, and a body emerge. The thing from the pouch is greedy, growing, sucking with ravenous pores. The biomass is sluicing away, but not down the drain. He steps back, heart humming, knees shaky. There’s a rattling gurgle, like rainwater racing through pipes during a storm, and the tub starts to churn. After some brief conversation she opens a pouch containing something that looks like the cross between a foetus and a homunculus, and they watch it grow in the bathtub of biomass that Jow has prepared: Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 21 st September 2022) opens with an unnamed woman arriving at a makeshift biolab run by a man called Jow.
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