“It’s doable without Lorenzo’s formulas,” he said in the darkness of his study. “If they have the right type of chemists on the Gold team.” He looked over the notes, this time using my method—top page to bottom—instead of turning the pages over and laying them to the side as he finished. Of course he didn’t want to see the poem again. Getting slapped in the face once was enough. “Definitely doable, but slower. See, they need to break down the product and—”

Everything else Patrick said was a blur. I’m no chemist.

“Lorenzo,” I say, taking the single vial of serum from the fridge and two packets of sterile syringes from the cabinet next to it. I pretend to study them, and lower my voice to the barest of whispers. “The notes I have are the only copies, right?”

He slaps the counter with the palm of his hand and sprints toward the rodent and rabbit room. I hear the main door of the lab hiss open and closed.

Chapter Sixty-one

SIXTY-ONE

Lin, even absent, guides me through the setup. Her notes are pristine, as detailed as a set of blueprints. If she were here, I wouldn’t be handling the injection, and that injection wouldn’t deliver a concoction of proteins and stem cells into Mrs. Ray’s bloodstream. Lin would take care of that, through a strategically placed borehole in our subject’s skull—not an operation I was keen on trying myself.

As if she anticipated her own sudden disappearance, Lin assembled two separate procedures. I put the instructions for direct-to-brain delivery aside, wincing at the photographs of skulls and immobilizing frames and boring instruments, wondering what sort of nutcase one had to be to try this on himself. Or herself, I think, remembering the woman who took an electric drill to her own head sometime in the 1970s. She said it opened up her mind.

Right.

What I’m about to do is easier, since Mrs. Ray will have already been prepped with a catheter before leaving the nursing home where she now spends her days. I suppose she’ll be returning there once the trial is over; she has no home to go to with Del out of the picture. Some favor I’m doing her, I think, and wonder if the old woman who planted my gardens might be better off in her current state. At least she won’t understand what’s going on when some bureaucrat in a suit informs her what’s happened to her son and daughter-in-law.

And her grandchildren.

Lorenzo’s offer is still on the table, but how can I even debate it with myself? What brand of monster would hop on a flight with a forged passport and leave four children behind? Then again, how fucked-up would I have to be to stay, knowing exactly what will become of this next baby?

Super fucked-up, I decide. Either way, I lose.