Vik slammed a fist into the table. “Damn it, don’t you see? Our own semantics may have killed us. Algae? This life-form that we’re calling slime is an intelligent organism like nothing we’ve ever conceptualized. It shares information through transferRNA, proteins, and entire strands of recombinant TriNA. It’s made up of single prokaryotic cells that can assemble themselves at will into an organism that thinks, moves, plans, and inhabits our bodies. It’s infected us. The mode of transmission is by physical contact. Through the skin. As long as it has light, it can survive.”

“Can we kill it?” Yosh wondered.

Michaela felt like she was falling, like nothing was left. “What’s to keep it from just disintegrating into single cells and floating away again? No, I suspect we’d have to kill every single cell, and do it all at once.”

“Good luck!” Vik closed her eyes, paused to catch her breath, and said, “Do you begin to get it? This organism is everywhere, and we don’t know what it wants. Let alone why it’s doing what it’s doing.”

“Like with the kids,” Mikoru barely whispered. “This stuff has taken my little boy from me. Maybe it’s taken Felix and is about to do the same with Sheena.”

“To do what?” Yosh demanded. “What does it want with Toni? Why infect him?”

“Or any of the children?” Michaela answered. And then it hit her. Like a big chunk of the puzzle falling into place. “Oh, dear God!”

“What?” Kel demanded.

“Felix!” Michaela cried. “What he calls the Voice. When he said that he wasn’t there when Bill was killed.”

“I don’t understand.” Kevina leaned forward, expression tight. “We found traces of Bill’s blood on Felix’s clothes, on his hands.”

Yosh broke in. “You’re saying the organism did this? Took over Felix’s brain and murdered Bill? Turned the boy into an assassin? Why Bill, for God’s sake?”

“Test run,” Casey said bitterly. “See if the kid could really be turned into a weapon.”

“Why a kid?” Casey asked. “Why not one of us?”

“Maybe adults aren’t plastic enough? Or we’re too hardwired?” Vik wondered.

Michaela felt a headache beginning to spin up from behind her right eye. Shit, she hadn’t had a migraine since her university days. Or could it be the slime building some tumor in her brain? Was that it? Now that the creature was found out, it was going to kill her? Turn her into some sort of vegetable? Digest her body from the inside out in contrast to the way it had engulfed Tobi and Bryan?

Dear God, can it do that? Accrete and slowly digest me?