Anna sat back, frowning. It had taken human medicine thousands of years to learn how to manipulate immunogenetics and the use of quantum cubit computers to do it. And now they were expected to believe that a bunch of solitary Donovanian prokaryotes had infected and completely reengineered little Toni’s immune system within a week?

Apparently it had. She needed only to turn from the scope, look with her own eyes, and see the boy. Fact: He had turned green because photosynthesizing algae cells now made up about forty percent of his integument. And it did so without inciting any kind of host response. Nor was it a random hodgepodge of infection, but well-orchestrated, as if by plan. And all of it smacked of the impossible.

So what was Toni? A hybrid? A chimera? A monster? Or just a little boy with an infection that had left him a vegetable?

Anna rubbed her temple and looked around her clinic with dull eyes. If she was seeing this in the boy’s skin, what was happening inside? To his internal organs, his brain? If forty percent of the boy’s integument was algae, then his brain might be just as compromised. And if it was? Skin was a pretty straightforward tissue. But the intricacy of the human brain? Compromised by all that infection?

She experienced a moment of sympathy for the kid. “Hell, Toni, your brain might be a total write-off. The miracle is that you still have autonomous functioning.”

But if Toni was this compromised? What about the other kids?

And it hit her.

So much made sense now. The arms and legs “learning.” Even Felix’s inexplicable implication in Bill Martin’s murder. It wasn’t just immune systems that the algae was playing with. The stuff was trying to figure out the children’s brains. All of which changed the entire equation when it came to Felix and his claims that he “wasn’t there” when Bill was murdered. If the algae could rewrite a body’s immune system to recognize its cells as friendly instead of foreign, what was to stop it from doing the same with the brain?

Whatever it was attempting, it must have gone wrong in Toni’s brain to leave him comatose.

She stood, walked over, and stared down at Toni in his isolation tent. “What the hell are you? Why are you doing this?”

This was miles beyond quetzal TriNA floating around in humans. This was the planned and well-orchestrated remodeling of an entire organism. Take the edema at the side of the boy’s throat. She could recognize the swellings now for what they were: gills. The perfect adaptation to an aquatic environment.

Anna shivered in spite of herself. Wondered for a moment if it wouldn’t be to everyone’s best interest if she were to slip a plastic bag over the little boy’s head and simply let him die.

“Anna?”

She whirled. Almost jumped out of her skin.