This was going to cost the human dearly, however.

Yet another in his long list of regrets.

After Sarah’s decade or so of medical science education and training, she was very well acquainted with the way the human body functioned, how the mechanisms of sight and hearing worked, how the channels of information gathering and processing ran along neuropathways, how the brain managed the flows of sense and thought.

All of that academic crap went out the window as she stared across the hospital room and watched a boy open his mouth and latch on … to a woman’s wrist.

He was drinking.

Blood.

She could see his throat working as he swallowed again and again.

Simple logic told her she needed to stop what was happening. There was never a reason for a human to give their blood orally to another person. This was both dangerous, given all of the blood-borne pathogens that could be carried, and unnecessary.

But she returned again and again to those scans.

“What are you,” she repeated without taking her eyes off the bed.

She was dimly aware that she was gripping the commando’s arm—and there was no letting go of it. In some strange way, she was convinced the connection was the only thing keeping her on the earth.

And then things began to happen to the boy.

Things that … could not possibly be explained.

The first sign of what was to come was a popping sound, like that of a finger joint being cracked. Then there was another. Louder this time. Like a vertebra during a stretch after someone had not moved for a while.

After which began the transformation: Under the sheets, down where Nate’s feet were, something was moving—and not as in back and forth. As in growing longer.

Sarah’s eyes got even wider as beneath the thin blankets, his toes began to extend down the bed. At first, she told herself it was just because the pain he was in had made him point his foot. But that could explain only so much.

More pops. Even louder now.

And his feet moved still further … as if his legs were growing.

Sarah looked up to where he was gripping the arm of the woman and holding the source of the blood to his mouth. Before her very eyes, she saw his elbow distort under his skin, the bony protrusion seeming to curl into a fist and twist before—snap! It was in a different position.

The same thing happened to his jaw. Initially, she assumed the disfiguration of his face occurred because his mouth was wide open due to being latched onto that wrist—but soon she realized that whatever was happening to his legs and his arms was affecting his entire body. He was growing.

Not by millimeters. By leaps and bounds—

Abruptly, his forehead seemed to bubble forward, his brow ridge undulating under his skin, his ears moving outward.

More popping.

Sarah felt something wet on her hand and looked over at where she had gripped the commando’s bare arm. Her fingernails had sunk so deeply into his skin, his blood welled in crescents.

When she looked at him in alarm, his eyes were remote. As if what was going on across the room was no mystery at all—but her reaction was what concerned him.

Sarah snapped her hand back and wiped it on her pants.

She had spent all her professional life on the lookout for revelations about the mysteries of the human body, her days and nights devoted to the pursuit of breakthroughs in knowledge and lightning strikes of hyper-deductive reasoning that ultimately relieved suffering and cured disease.

She had never, ever expected that the biggest discovery of her career would not be about humans at all.

Sarah had no idea how long it took. Hours could have passed. Days. Who knew.

But she sat through the entire … whatever it was … not feeling the chair under her, not caring that she had to go to the bathroom, not aware of anything other than the boy’s maturation process.

That was the only framework into which she could fit what she witnessed.

Nate had started out looking like a nine or ten year old boy. Then some kind of craving had come over him, and that woman had arrived. She had bit herself in the wrist, put the open wound to his mouth … and somehow as he drank from her, his arms and legs grew by inches upon inches, and that wasn’t the only change in him. His face became that of a man’s, growing a jawline and brows. His hands elongated, his shoulders widened, his throat thickened. His chest doubled, then tripled in size, until it split the small hospital johnny down the middle.

There was incredible pain. Horrible pain. Then again, it was clear that the process wasn’t coordinated, some bones and muscles growing before the joints did, others lagging behind. It was impossible for her to tell what was going on internally, but his organs—his heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver and kidneys—had to be doing the same.

Sometime in the midst of things, the woman took her wrist from Nate and seemed to seal the raw wounds with her own mouth. Then she bowed deeply to the commando and removed herself from the room. She appeared exhausted, her skin pale to the point of snow, her gait a shuffle rather than a walk. As she stumbled out the door, there were people waiting in the hall to catch her, and soon thereafter, the medical staff came in and checked on Nate. They listened to his heart, took his blood pressure, ran an IV—for fluids? Sarah wondered.

No one said anything. Everybody was tense.

Instinct told her it was a dangerous time, given how nervous the doctors were. And then hello, there was all the obvious stress on his body.

After the woman left, Nate continued to change on the bed, his legs sawing as they kept growing, his torso twisting and flopping back, curling in and releasing.

At one point, he gasped and threw his head to the side—and this time, as she caught sight of his eyes, he had pupils again now. Pupils that stared out of a man’s face.

And they locked on her.

“Help …” he said in a rasping voice that was a full octave lower than it had been at the lab. At the farmhouse. In the van on the way here. “It hurts …”

A tear escaped, rolling out and trailing down the cheek that was no longer that of a child.

The boy was still in there, though. And he was begging for her to go to him, even though there was nothing she could do for him.

As he implored her for help, time slowed down—and in the swirl of her own confusion and panic, a thought crystalized with the clarity of church bells ringing through a foggy night: If she went to him, if she sat with him, if she tried to ease his suffering, she was going to lose a part of herself forever.

Because she did not belong in this world. In his world.

She was not supposed to be here. She was not supposed to know any of this. And somehow, she wasn’t sure exactly how, they were going to make sure she went back to where she belonged with all her previous ignorance front and center.

There was no way she was going to be allowed to keep this information, this experience. All she had to do was remember their escape from the lab and the way the commando had seemed to put that guard in a trance, and control Kraiten, and make things happen with people’s minds.

He was going to end up doing the same to her.

Except … she was willing to bet emotional ties were not going to be as easy to get rid of. And there was nothing more powerful for the heart than the mother/child bond—which was the way Nate implored her now.

He was a child. He was in pain. And he needed somebody to nurture him.