Most of those words I didn’t know, aside from the red flags of cancerous and abnormal — but human children was all I needed to feel like throwing up. I almost didn’t want to go further. But I drew a breath and forced myself to start reading the first document.

Fang and I stared at the screen.

“Is it just me or does this feel like it’s written in Latin?” Fang said five minutes later. We were both so freaked by the scientific mumbo jumbo that we hadn’t even clicked to the next page view.

“Latin would be easier to understand than this,” I grumbled. “But hold on — see those references in parentheses to ‘figure one’ and ‘figure two’ and ‘figure three’? It means there are pictures somewhere associated with this paper.”

“Well, you know what they say … ,” Fang began.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” I finished. “Let me just skim through the rest of this stuff real quick and see if anything catches my eye.”

I have to give myself credit for that one. Most grownups wouldn’t have even bothered to try to wade through that crap, but I managed to pick up on two key points.

First: Autoantibodies set your immune system against you and attack the body’s own organs like they’re the bad guys. Second: Abnormal cell growth, too much cell growth, badly “programmed” cell growth = party invitation to cancer. Great.

I started clicking through the pages of the PDF faster now, to get to the pictures. And then, when I did, I wondered why I’d been so eager to see them.

Our grisly tour of Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen’s Gallery of Mistakes took at least two hours.

We saw people with purple eyelids and grotesquely bulging eyes the size of baseballs, people with glands in their necks so swollen it looked as if there were an alien creature growing inside them. Others had muscles so inflamed their bodies ballooned and twisted into shapes I didn’t think possible. The skin disorders were maybe the worst for me to look at. Rashing and cracking and bleeding and virtual disintegration so wildly extreme that I had to stand up and walk away from the computer at one point.

This was only what was happening on the surface of these victims. I’d read enough to understand the bottom line: toxic disaster. Chronic pain, even agony, not to mention the psychological effects of dealing with it.

“There’s more. The regeneration stuff,” Fang said, and I nodded. It was a horror show, but I had to go deeper, and deeper still. Page after page, image after image, document after document.

I can’t even write down the details of what I saw on the screen that day. It would bring back too many nightmarish visions of festering wounds, partial and deformed limbs, and horrific tumors of all shapes and sizes.