“I know I sound like a broken record, but that’s impossible!” Nadia couldn’t believe Dr. Luc Monnet was feeding her this nonsense. Had he snapped?

He smiled but with no trace of humor. “I kept repeating that word too, like a mantra. I must have said it thousands of times since I began working with Loki, but after months I have come to accept the fantastic as fact. What choice do I have? Its properties are predictable and replicable. And I have sat here and watched my photos and models and drawings change before my eyes, felt all memory of the structure I had been looking at only seconds before vanish like smoke.”

“But that’s—” No. She would not say the word again.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, and this time she found a trace of humor in the twist of his lips. “Good. I’d worry about you if you did. Were positions reversed, I’d say that you were in dire need of intense therapy and large doses of Thorazine. This is why I waited until today to introduce you to Loki. Today is this sample’s twenty-ninth day. When you come in tomorrow morning you will find it all changed, and you will not remember what the original looked like.”

Yes, I will, Nadia promised silently. Oh, yes, I will.

“And then your work will begin. I’ll give you a fresh sample—perhaps the last fresh sample we will be able to secure—and then you will have twenty-nine days to stabilize it. I’m hoping you will not leave us flat like your predecessor.”

“I’m not a quitter.”

“I know you aren’t. That is why I have high hopes for you.”

Not a quitter, no, but she had zero tolerance for looniness. Too much pseudoscience and bad science around as it was, and she would not add to it. A molecule that degraded to a different form was no big deal—but changing all records of its former structure as well? Absurd. Dr. Monnet said this phenomenon is predictable and replicable? She’d see about that. Nadia was going to make copies of the Loki molecule’s structure, including a printout to take home with her. Tomorrow morning she’d prove how wrong he was.

“You say it’s going to change overnight. Do you know when?”

“I know the exact minute.”

“Really? What’s the trigger?”

A heartbeat’s worth of hesitation. “A celestial event.”

Oh, please! “Which one?”

“Can I hold that in reserve as well?” he said, sounding apologetic. “I’m not trying to be coy or overly mysterious, but I feel you will be more accepting of all this tomorrow when you’ve seen—experienced for yourself—the changes I’ve described.”

It was the way he said it that unsettled her—not with the note of someone anticipating vindication, but with the air of a rational man who had been forced to accept the unacceptable.

“This whole thing doesn’t make sense. It borders on… supernatural.”

“I know,” he sighed. “That is another reason I christened it Loki. Loki was a god, a supernatural being.”