Her words dropped a shuddering chill through Doc. Detaining chimeras was sometimes necessary, but putting them through a full-on dangerous experiment was another level.

Or had it always been the same? Standing to one side of the testing lab, Yaya and Magenta floating dead or undead behind plastic, Doc remembered that this was the fate Yaya had feared from the start. She’d thought that if detained, ABP

Frankensteins would cut her on a slab. Perhaps all chimeras feared dying this way more than Sibs.

“Get samples,” Doc said. “Not people.”

“Severed tissue isn’t working,” Farrow said. “Might be something in the central nervous system. We’ll see soon enough.” She turned to Doc. “The Board’s breathing down our necks, and you know how it is. They say, we do.”

Doc knew. She shuddered again. “Where?”

Farrow told her.

23

Over ninety people had been found with teeth in their vaginas, the first of Yolanda Betancourt’s symptoms. For all anyone knew, they had over ninety similar unique specimens on their hands, albeit transforming at slower rates, if at all. Only cutting and prodding would tell, chimeras’ wounds spilling a cornucopia of data. Legally, ABP had no right to hold any human being indefinitely, but they could argue Magenta as precedent that these were not human beings.

Never mind that while the October 12 injection was the common denominator for genital teeth, only Yaya’s body had turned out anything like Magenta. She was the unique factor.

That hadn’t stopped ABP from sedating and detaining these ninety-plus people. Another wide room stretched before Doc, two floors down from the testing lab. Steel beds filled the floor in rows, and people filled the beds. Tubes ran from their arms and blankets draped their bodies. Their eyes were closed.

If challenged, ABP would argue their case and purchase these people from the U.S. government through bribes, blackmail, and so on. Even if they were wrong, they could freeze any lawsuit in court for years while they slurped up the data. Nothing was solid in their eyes. ABP would always change the rules to suit them.

Though unmoving, each face reminded Doc that she was useless. She’d botched her chance to make a difference nine years ago in Kentucky, and then for Yaya, and now this.

Two yellow-suited agents followed Doc in and began adjusting one of the steel beds into rolling mode, the testing lab being its chimera’s destiny. Doc approached the bed and lifted a chart. A driver’s license scan read Name: Sabin Delacroix, Sex: X, and a birthdate of twenty-six years back. The pages beneath offered scant details of past medical history and prior ABP experiments.

When had Sabin last woken up? A scar tore across their middle, ragged at the edges. Was that a sample the lab had taken from Sabin’s skin and applied to Yaya? Skin wasn’t enough, of course. ABP was going to take Sabin’s whole body.

“Leave them here,” Doc said before she could think through her words.