Dek lifted his hands, imploring. “But I still don’t get it. Felix tried to kill us. He split Kevina’s head with an ax. His mother, for God’s sake. I knew that boy. Watched him grow up. Him, Sheena, Felicity, and the rest. How the hell could something turn those precious children into murderers?”

Raya shot him a sidelong look. “You’re the one with quetzals in his head, and you’re asking that question? How close did you come to losing yourself?”

Dek heard the chittering of quetzal laughter.

“We’ll get a better idea when we get to the brain,” Vik told him. “Listen, Dek, we’re just at the start of this. We’ve got years of research on Felix’s body. Let alone understanding what kind of life the slime is. Slime? Even the name’s wrong. Disparate cells that can assemble themselves into an organism at will? That collect, transmit, and analyze data? That can, in a matter of days, adapt an entire immune system and alien organic chemistry to its needs? From single cells, it took over and destroyed the Pod, turned the children into its agents, and used them against us. Are you getting an idea of the sophistication? The intelligence it takes to do something like this?”

Shanteel gestured with a scalpel. “And some of the children are still missing out there.”

Vik’s shoulders worked, as if she was fighting off a shiver. “The little ones, they were remodeling at an advanced rate. God knows what the slime is turning them into. You ask me? The slime was willing to sacrifice the older children. Maybe, like the adults, they couldn’t be modified as successfully as the younger children and infants. The changes in Toni, Vetch, Kayle, and the rest? Well . . . call it chilling.”

“And Tomaya?”

“Still out there, Dek.” Vik stared at him through her transparent mask. “This is a guess, but my take is that after the organism first infected Felix and the rest of the children, it saw an opportunity. For the first time in its evolution, the introduction of the Pod into its environment provided protection from predation by cones, seaskimmers, and who knows what else. Better yet, it realized what an opportunity human physiology offered. We are remarkable animals, capable of manipulating and modifying the physical world in a way the organism can’t. All it had to do was take the Pod and adapt the human body to function in the organism’s aquatic environment. Our arrival gave it the opportunity to completely change its existence. We gave it the ability to modify its environment.”