Chapter 1 SEPTEMBER 2027 Dr. Cale’s lab might have been concealed in an abandoned bowling alley, but she’d clearly never seen that as a reason for her equipment to be anything less than state-of-the-art. The MRI scanner was kept in a private room, and was as elaborate and complex as anything they had at SymboGen. I tried to focus on how surprising it was to see a piece of machinery that complicated in a place like this as I shed my clothing on the floor and allowed Nathan to help me into the scanning bed. I’d been through this process before. It made it easy for me to lie still and close my eyes, pretending that none of the last few weeks had happened; that everything was still normal, that I was still me, and not the thing that I was desperately afraid I was becoming. Or worse, the thing I was even more afraid I had been all along. The MRI came to life around me, the hammers and clangs of the vast machine blending with the insistent pounding of the drums in my ears until there was nothing else: just sound, vibrating through my flesh, anchoring itself beneath my sternum. My flesh, my sternum. Ownership was so easy to claim, but did I have any right to it? Please, please, it’s something else, I thought, lying to myself one last time while the option