continue narrate the epic novel in the style of Medicine slang and Steven King, where two medical doctors talk about this bat which goes around and kisses animals of other species. Provide painstaking details about an unexpected hybrid that might happen in the biolab because of Bruce and spread out.

I can’t write in Stephen King’s exact style, but I can continue with ominous small-town horror, vivid medical slang, and a slow-building sense that something in the lab has gone terribly wrong.

By 2:13 a.m., Dr. Mara Voss had stopped calling it grooming.

On the monitor, Bruce crawled along the outside of the rabbit enclosure, hooked his little thumbs through the mesh, and pressed his mouth against the rabbit’s nose.

The rabbit leaned into it.

“That,” said Dr. Elias Trent, “is profoundly outside my differential.”

“Mutual grooming. Salt-seeking. Some kind of conditioned behavior.”

“You’ve been saying that for three nights.”

“And you’ve been saying kiss, which is not a clinical term.”

Bruce withdrew, folded his wings, and hung upside down from the enclosure latch. He was a small fruit bat with a torn left ear and the expression of an elderly man being overcharged.

Behind the mesh, the rabbit sat perfectly still.

Its nose had stopped twitching.

Mara leaned toward the screen.

“Respiratory rate?”

“Normal.”

“Then why isn’t—”

The rabbit opened its mouth.

Not wide. Just enough to reveal a tongue that moved once across its upper incisors.

Bruce made the same movement.

Exactly the same.

Elias set down his coffee.

“Okay,” he said. “That goes in the chart.”

They had named the rabbit Mabel before the new director prohibited names.

The new director had lasted eleven weeks. Mabel had lasted four years.

At 2:41, Mara examined her through the observation window while Elias reviewed the overnight footage. Nothing about the rabbit suggested acute distress. No increased work of breathing. No tremor. No obvious neuro deficit.

But she tracked Mara with her whole head.

Rabbits watched sideways. Mabel watched straight on.

“Don’t anthropomorphize,” Mara whispered.

“Wasn’t going to,” Elias said.

“I was talking to myself.”

He turned the monitor toward her.

Bruce had visited six enclosures that evening.

A guinea pig. Two mice. Mabel. An elderly research ferret. A rat with a healed hind-leg injury.

Each animal had approached the mesh.

Each had offered its face.

None had tried to bite him.

“How did he get out?” Mara asked.

“The latch is intact.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“I know.”

On the footage, Bruce disappeared behind a cabinet.

His shadow remained on the floor for another four seconds.

Elias backed up the recording.

They watched it again.

Then neither spoke for a while.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Mara said finally. “Different species do not make hybrid offspring by touching mouths.”

“Thank you. I did attend med school.”

“And you don’t turn a rabbit into a bat with an infection.”

“Also covered. Second year, right after billing.”

But the thing emerging in the observation room was not quite either animal.

Mabel’s body remained white and compact. Her ears remained long. When she moved, however, something unfolded beneath her silhouette: thin, jointed extensions that spread from the forelimbs and folded again before the overhead camera could resolve them.

The rabbit itself had no wings.

Its shadow did.

Elias rubbed his eyes hard enough to redden them.

“Visual artifact.”

“Across three cameras?”

“Then I’m having a very expensive migraine.”

Mara checked the other feeds.

The guinea pig’s shadow had elongated fingers.

The ferret’s had ears like Mabel’s.

The rat’s shadow dragged one hind leg, although the rat no longer did.

They were not becoming copies of Bruce.

They were becoming pieces of the same unfamiliar animal.

At 3:06, the room microphone picked up a sound like a fingernail tapping the inside of a paper cup.

Mara raised the volume.

Six animals were making it.

Their mouths moved together.

Bruce hung above them, silent.

“Shared stimulus?” Elias asked.

“Maybe.”

“Seizure activity?”

“Not like any I’ve seen.”

“Anything in your differential that doesn’t require a priest?”

She almost smiled. Then Mabel stood on her hind legs.

Her actual forepaws rested against the mesh.

Her shadow’s forelimbs reached higher.

They kept reaching after they passed the top of the enclosure.

Mara took one involuntary step backward.

“Call the on-call safety officer,” she said. “Nobody opens that room.”

For once Elias offered no joke.

The first unexpected hybrid appeared at 3:19.

It stood only in the reflection of the observation glass.

Mara could see the empty room behind her, the emergency shower, the yellow bin beneath the sink. In the reflected corridor, among those ordinary objects, crouched something the size of a dog.

It had Mabel’s long ears.

The ferret’s narrow chest.

Bruce’s folded wings.

One rear foot rested awkwardly on its outer edge, exactly as the rat’s had before its injury healed.

Its face was unfinished.

Not mutilated. Unfinished: a soft arrangement of features that changed whenever Mara tried to settle her gaze on it.

“Elias.”

“I see it.”

“Don’t turn around.”

“I already did.”

“Was it there?”

“No.”

In the reflection, the thing lifted its head.

Its nostrils worked.

Mara felt a small, warm pressure against her cheek.

She slapped her hand over the spot.

Behind the glass, Bruce opened his wings.

The safety officer called back at 3:24.

Elias answered on speaker.

Before he could explain, she said, “Are either of you seeing something strange on the security feeds?”

Mara looked at the dark monitor above the desk.

In its glossy surface, the reflected creature was no longer crouching behind them.

It was at the corridor door.

“What feeds?” Elias asked.

“All of them.”

From somewhere beyond the laboratory came the squeal of a cart wheel. The night cleaner making her rounds.

Then the squeal stopped.

Mara reached for the phone.

“Tell everyone to stay out of the east wing.”

A pause.

“The east wing?” the officer said. “Doctor, I’m looking at the parking garage.”

On the monitor, Bruce settled himself upside down and tucked his damaged ear beneath one wing.

He looked tired.

Like a little animal that had done everything it had been asked to do.