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He shakes me as easily as a child with a doll. “Do your job, Doctor. No more games or foolish experiments. You’re wasting our time.” He pulls me closer to him, his eyes boring into me. “If you fail us, I’ll see to it that your head is on a pike beside your sister during the next presidential address.” He shoves me back, and I plop onto the couch as he storms from my apartment.

Silence returns, and I’m alone, my entire body shaking as I fight back the terror that threatens to consume me. When the adrenaline finally fades, I’m left to wonder which one is the act—Valen’s care or his violence.

20

“When live plague virus is exposed to the sample blood, it doesn’t respond.” Gretchen flips through a legal pad of scribbles. “There’s no replication. It doesn’t even try to invade. None of the proteins interact.”

“How’s that possible?” Wyatt swipes his hair from his eyes as we go through the same facts over and over again, looking for the missing piece of the equation.

“Simple. The blood isn’t human.” I spin in my desk chair. “The virus won’t replicate in non-human cells. There’s no host receptor available in any other species.” My statement that Valen and his kind aren’t human isn’t even debatable anymore. This room full of skeptical scientists knows it’s the truth, no matter how far beyond our understanding it is.

“Except for the bonobo. It has the receptors, too. Maybe Juno’s Miracle has been a bonobo all along,” Aang chimes in. “And what the hell happened to your arm?”

“Just an accident.” I pull the sleeve of my sweater down to cover it.

He gives me an eyebrow raise. “Uh huh.”

“It’s a no on the bonobo angle. Now let’s go back to the samples themselves. How are they different from each other?” We have to find the strands of the three bloodlines. With no DNA to go on, there has to be some other method of deconstructing them. Something not contained in all the blood science humans have been conducting for centuries. Something new.

“They aren’t, save for the one with the antibodies.” Gretchen scrolls through mounds of data with a few clicks.

“Why?”

“Why what? Why antibodies?” Aang asks.

“Right.” I point at him.

He looks at me like I’m a complete idiot. “Well, generally speaking,Doctor, antibodies exist as an immune response to disease vectors.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“That this new species can get sick?” Gretchen sounds less than sure of her answer.

“Precisely.” I drum my fingers on my desk. “If they can get sick—”We can kill them. “—there has to be some other mechanism in their blood that allows it to heal humans. Some factor we’re missing.”

“There’s nothing else in the blood we’ve been given.” Evie ropes her blonde hair up into a ponytail. “The cells look the same, react the same to everything we’ve thrown at them. There’s nothing there.”

“Nothing we can see under the microscope,” I correct her. “But thereissomething. We have to go outside conventional methods.”

“We could …” Wyatt shrugs. “Mix them?”

“Yes!” I nod. “See what that does.”

“Maybe pull some other viruses from the national stores and see if they interact with the cells?” Aang turns and starts typing immediately. “I’ll have to talk to Director Hamberg, get authorization.” He groans.

“If he says no, tell me. I’ll fix it.” At least, I think I can go around him somehow. I suppose I’ll deal with that problem if it arises.

“I can get the good stuff. Covid, flu strains, whatever common cold strains they have on file, RSV. Maybe some HPV for fun? Chicken pox, definitely.” He goes on, mumbling a litany of viruses under his breath.

“Anything else outside of the box?” I ask.

Gretchen raises her hand.

“You don’t have to raise—” I give up and point at her like we’re in class. “Yes, go.”

“Human trials.”

“Um, recordscratch.” Aang stops typing and gawks at her.