“Stay close to the cages on your way through the chimp room,” I call after him. The thought of Morgan having his face shredded by a few angry lab animals brings a satisfying tingle. I turn to Lorenzo.

“Petroski’s the key,” I say. “How’s the work coming?”

He leans against the back of his lab stool, smiling broadly. “It’s done.”

“What?”

Lorenzo runs me through the chemistry. “I need your eyes on this, Gianna.” He points to a set of correlations between the old neuroprotein we tested on Mrs. Ray and semantic fluency, then moves a finger down the page to the notes he’s been working on this afternoon. “Look good?”

It looks terrific. It also looks as if we’ve unleashed the very devil. “With this quantity, Enzo, we’re taking about total contamination, flat-out disruption of”—I check the numbers against my data a second time—“of more than three-quarters of the superior temporal gyrus. Forget Mrs. Ray’s disfluency; this thing would turn Henry Kissinger into a mute. In about five seconds.”

The grin hasn’t left his face. “Yeah. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Depending on what your idea of beauty is, I think. And I have a delicious idea that must be all over my face, because Lorenzo raises an eyebrow. “I can cook this up in a few hours, I think. Got a first subject in mind?”

“What do you think?” I say, scanning the lab. No one seems to be listening to us. What little chatter there is focuses on Reverend Carl and “that poor kid—I wonder what he’s done.”

“I think,” Lorenzo says, twitching one eyebrow and then the other, “great minds think alike.”

“And sometimes we do, too,” I finish. “Anyway, better Morgan than one of the women in there,” I say, and point my chin to the locked doors on the opposite end of the lab. “You saw how many chimps are left. When they run out, Morgan’s going to want to climb up the great ape food chain.”

Lorenzo stops chewing on the end of his pen and taps it lightly against his teeth. It’s an old habit, one I haven’t seen him do in more than a year. “There’s one hitch,” he says.

“What? It turns people blue?”

I watch the humor leave his face.

“No, not blue.”

“Oh Christ. Lethal?” I say.

“Could be.” He points to a series of formulas on the notepad between us.

“They don’t look anything like your old ones.” As I read further, Lorenzo’s work becomes clear. “This isn’t water soluble. Or injectable into the bloodstream.”