The profiler could feel his ulna pressing toward his radius—and the concussive power of that terrible heartbeat. But it wasn’t the beat of the boy’s heart at all, was it? It was something else. It was more like a blast of radiation, luminescence from some unknown reach of the electromagnetic spectrum. It resonated through the profiler’s body now, and he could feel the change within his bones and joints. Something inside him was coming to order! He could actually feel genetic order returning to his mutated marrow!

Then the boy let go. And scratched his nose.

“There. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

A bruising crunch of guards exploded into the room, grabbing Dillon, forcing him back down into the chair, Dillon offered no resistance, but the guards still struggled as if he had. The profiler backed away. He had thought his training and experience had prepared him for any madness he’d come in contact with. But what if the boy’s touch coincided with a complete and total remission of his disease? Would that be madness? Would he still call that coincidence?

“You’re going to need more than handcuffs,” he told the guards, and he ran out, hurrying home where he could cry in the arms of his wife.

1. Tessic

The nuclear reactor never went on line.

The entire plant was beset by such incredible bad luck and untimely mishaps, it precipitated a storm of rolling heads from Michigan Power and Light, leaving a trail of blood all the way up to the Nuclear Reg­ulatory Commission. Inferior bolts from questionable vendors, leaks in the coolant system, pipes that seemed to do nothing but terminate in solid concrete. No one with an ounce of sense was bringing uranium within a mile of the place.

For years the stillborn power plant stood dormant and cold in the rural community of Hesperia.