Nate made a rolling motion with his hand. “Just get to the good stuff.”

“Okay. There was one item that came back with utterly bizarre results. That fluffy bit of red feather you found. From its morphology, I managed to narrow it down to a few species, and when I did a DNA analysis, that’s when things went south. I’m not one hundred percent sure what kind of bird it was, but it looks a lot like a Gouldian finch—same basic feather structure, coloring, and size—but if so, there’s something way wrong with the DNA results. It reminds me of that case you brought me three years ago. Remember the one with the dog hair?”

Nate remembered. That case remained unsolved to this day. “You’re saying you couldn’t get a DNA match to the feather?”

Hendrickson shook his head. “Nope. And the pisser is, the DNA would suggest this creature is closer to a crocodile than to anything having wings and feathers. Granted, we’re only talking a six percent difference in the genetic makeup between a croc and your common bird. They’re not that unrelated. So all I can tell you is that the bit of fluff came from something feathery, but otherwise off-the-scale unidentified.”

Nate frowned. “So you’re telling me it’s not just some unidentified species of bird.”

“No.” The analyst turned to Nate with a grim expression. “It’s feathery, but it’s no bird. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s not another fucking bird out there with anything close to that genome. Which means… I don’t think it’s natural. No amount of mutations could cause such a massive genetic drift.”

“So… what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, I think someone’s been playing God.”

Chapter Eight

Juan studied Winslow’s facial expressions as the head of AgriMed’s R&D division skimmed the thick clinical report, which documented the progress he’d made with his current experiments on the rats.

The room felt warm and Juan breathed deeply of the earthy scent of the leather chair he sat on.

If all went well, he would get permission to move on to human trials. Except that Juan had been at this stage a dozen times before. Every time he thought he’d crossed every ‘t’ and dotted every ‘i’, Winslow raised questions that he didn’t yet have answers to. The director was a stickler for protocol when it came to human trials.

It had been a grueling few years, but Juan knew he was on the brink of something huge.

Without looking up from the papers, Winslow said in a gravelly tone, “So, specimen 153 has continued to exhibit tumor resistance, but this metabolic panel shows an elevated core temperature. Have you figured out the cause?”