“But what if it helps us become even better?” Angel said, ever the creepy optimist. Her normally beautiful face looked like a personal-size pizza with eyes. “We could be like superheroes!”

“Yeah, so far that’s working out well for you,” I said, gesturing to everyone’s ruined skin. “Do you have any idea who would —” I stopped as the obvious answer came to me. “Dr. Seersucker.”

Angel sat up. “Dr. Gunther-Hagen is really brilliant, Max.”

“You want to be accelerated? Fine. But you have no idea what’s going to happen to you next. We already know that your good doctor’s self-healing genetics can have some pretty scary side effects.”

Angel frowned, and Dylan looked concerned. I’d forgotten he had been gifted with Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s magic spit.

My mom turned to Jeb, who was leaning against a wall, looking gray. “Is there any way to know what will happen to them? How toxic is it? Is it deadly? Is there any way to get it out of their systems?”

“Um, not really, I’m not sure, I don’t think so, and I doubt it,” said Jeb, trying to answer all her questions. “My guess is that this initial bad reaction might be the shock of having it introduced to their systems. I’m hoping that once it’s absorbed, these side effects will go away.”

“This was someone conducting an experiment,” Fang said slowly. Frowning, he turned to Jeb. “Someone who’d want to be there to see the results.”

Jeb held up a hand. “Don’t even go there, Fang. The accelerant would have had to be in a shared source — say, in the air or water at the house. I would have been affected too.”

“But it wouldn’t affect you because you’re normal,” Fang objected. “You said so yourself.”

“That’s just a theory,” Jeb said. “This was not my doing.” My mom interjected. “Let’s focus on the important thing here. Is there a way to undo this?”

Jeb shook his head. “If I’m right, it would have been designed to start binding to their DNA immediately, inserting its enzymes and amino acids directly into their chromosomes.”

I sank down onto a hard plastic chair. “Oh, my God.”

“This could give us cancer!” Nudge said, blinking back tears.

“Or turn us into, like, pterodactyls or something,” said Gazzy. “It wouldn’t take much.” He looked stoic.

Jeb sighed. “We should contact Gunther-Hagen to see if he admits to any of this — or even if he won’t admit it, maybe he’ll give us clues as to what it is.”

The idea of contacting the doc for help was totally crazy to me. Excuse me, but hadn’t Jeb just been shot by one of the man’s employees?

“I would vote to get out of here, get to a safe house, and see what happens over the next twenty-four hours,” I suggested.