“The hell is it?” he asked. He looked as if his daughter had scribbled red lines through the whites of his eyes.

“A quill,” Doc said. “Strangest hickey you’ve ever had, I bet. And what did you say touched you?”

Aziz scrubbed at his neck. “Don’t know. Vaginal tentacles?”

Yaya hadn’t shown those in bed on Friday night. New samples of a unique specimen, that was how ABP would tabulate her, same as with Doc’s work in Kentucky. She hadn’t seen anything like that in nine years, unless she counted her nightmares.

She had stepped toward that high school with best intentions. She could not say the same for Yaya’s apartment. Both warm and cold approaches seemed prone to failure.

Not that anyone else regretted the Kentucky Incident. ABP had their samples. That was all they would ever care about.

Greenwich crowded into the bathroom. “Phone call, Doc,” he said. “It’s the Board.” He didn’t need to specify which member. Three suits formed the ABP

Board, but they only ever seemed to be one person, a triple-headed golden dragon ripped from old Godzilla movies.

“Agent Hall, speaking,” Doc said, taking the phone.

“Private property management concerns,” a monotone voice said. “Team member disarray. Reduced synergy. Development threat equals profit threat.

Asset loss needs asset recovery.”

A tornado of hammers pounded inside Doc’s skull. She didn’t want to think about team members, morale, or profits right now, and she shouldn’t have had to when Human Resources and Accounts were separate departments.

“Are you done reading the automated report?” she asked. She watched Aziz stand uncomfortably and shamble out of the bathroom. “We only lost the one.”

“Asset loss needs asset recovery,” the Board said again.

She’d known their priorities before Greenwich handed her the phone, and the Board knew she knew. The call was solely to keep on her ass about it.

Questions like How? and Why? never mattered.

“We’re pursuing all solutions,” Doc said. “Thank you, members of the Board.”

The line crackled. “All science needs a control group, Agent Docia Hall.

Keep them under control.”

Control groups had nothing to do with keeping control. There would have needed to be a variable group and strict parameters, not an accidental poisoning of genetic material across the United States. The call ended without Doc having to explain this to the Board. They wouldn’t have cared anyway. They applied a stick to everyone below them as if ABP agents were piñatas full of good news.

She looked over her recent messages. Her team had spent the day asking questions and checking boxes, and not until after noon had they been alerted to target locations. Yaya wasn’t the only chimera to play hooky from her mandatory checkup today, just the last and most difficult. Had Doc been paying attention to names instead of serial numbers, she might have known in advance.

When the hammers in her head quit spinning, she tugged off her yellow hazard suit. The day was over, and she didn’t feel like wearing this banana peel one more minute. She tossed the black gloves into her bag.