“Just like the reports from PA, it’s a lot stiffer, bent around more like a wad of wire than the way DNA’s double helix can be compacted into chromatids. Wow. This is going to be a whole new world of polymerases, histones, helicases, and binding proteins. Let me get some more images.”

Michaela waited while Vik changed the angle and clicked, all the while building a three-dimensional model on the screen. When she was finished, she cycled the slide and slipped in one that she had precipitated from Toni’s blood sample.

Vik wiggled her fingers, as if tuning them like a maestro at the keyboard. “All right, if Dr. Turnienko suspects TriNA, our first task is to see if it’s what we call cell-free. That means it would be circulating in Toni’s bloodstream. Or, at least, that’s what we’re going to test for to start with. Recovering cfDNA is a relatively easy procedure using centrifugation. I’ve processed Toni’s blood, and it should be ready.”

She slipped from the chair, stepped to the centrifuge, and recovered a tube. Placing it in one of her machines, she monitored a screen as the supernatant was removed. Then the sample was automatically transferred to the slide, stained, and presented behind a transparent door.

Vik carefully removed the slide, carried it over, and placed it in her scope.

“Truth time,” she murmured. “Let’s see if anything is running around in Toni’s blood.”

Michaela watched the microscope adjust magnification, its programming searching the slide for anything that might have resembled the TriNA molecule they’d recorded in the prokaryote cell.

The haze on the screen refined, the image firming up.

Michaela, of course, recognized the intertwined spaghetti of DNA, which was what the centrifugation protocol and methodology was designed to recover. And there, right in the middle of the tangle of DNA, like a bent-up and coiled wire, was the now-familiar form.

“What the hell?” Michaela wondered. “TriNA. But, where did he get it?”

“And more to the point,” Vik noted as she began to scan the slide, picking up the twisted-wire form again and again, “Where did Toni get so much of it?”

“Go back a couple of steps,” Michaela suggested. “Do you still have the pellet you recovered from Toni’s blood after centrifugation?”

“Of course.”

“Check it. See if you can recover anything larger. Maybe a cell.”

“Got it.”

Vik stepped over to her centrifuge, gave it a command for a sample reference. Again, the drawer popped open, a slide prepared. This she brought back to the microscope and inserted.

The scope searched the slide, changing magnifications, and the first thing that popped was the familiar image of red blood cells, the occasional, much larger white blood cells, and there, in the plasma, something that appeared as a blanket-like honeycomb of cells.

“What’s that?” Michaela pointed.