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The light flashed red.

“It works,” Margaret said. “Clarence, the test works.”

“Fantastic,” he said. “I’ll let Murray know immediately. He can rush the testers into production. Great job, Margaret. That finally gives us what we need.”

“Thank you,” Margaret said. She had grown rather fond of Clarence’s voice in her ear as she worked. He stayed in the computer control room, managing any requests she had, listening in to her and Amos theorizing as they cut up infected bodies.

Gitsh tapped her on the shoulder. “The sample’s up on the screen, Margo.”

She turned to look at the large flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall. She hadn’t designed the trailer, but the monitor was her idea. Looking into microscopes was kind of annoying—routing them to a big plasma screen let everyone see what was going on.

The screen showed what she expected—the red, pink and white of highly magnified flesh and blood vessels, along with the gray of decomposing matter and the black of cells that were already long since destroyed by the apoptosis chain reaction. Only about 25 percent decomposed: the best sample she’d had yet. Even so, she didn’t have long.

“Okay, boys,” Margaret said, turning back to the table. “We need to work quickly.”

Anthony used scissors to cut away the boy’s yellow pajama bottoms and the T-s.h.i.+rt, leaving his bent body naked on the table.

“Caucasian male, approximately six years old,” Margaret said. “Severed spinal column, ma.s.sive blunt-force trauma.”

Even before cutting into him, she could see that the boy’s internal organs were smashed to h.e.l.l.

“One triangle on the stomach,” Margaret said. “Heavily damaged, lowest priority. One on the front upper-right thigh. Intact. Highest priority. Turn him over, please.”

The a.s.sistants flipped the little corpse. Now his broken body angled to Margaret’s left instead of to her right.

“One on the lower back, just above the eighth thoracic. Completely destroyed. Lowest priority. No other triangles visible on the body. Flip him back and let’s give him the injection series. Maximum dosage. I’ll take the right thigh.”

They gently put the corpse on its broken back again. Marcus laid out six large syringes, each with a long needle sheathed in hard plastic. Margaret carefully unsheathed the first syringe and went to work in the area around the triangle.

As soon as the triangles died, they caused a chain reaction of apoptosis. Apoptosis is a normal part of human health: sometimes cells outlive their usefulness and become a drag on the body, so they self-destruct. The triangles did something to that chemical code, however, turned it into a cascading event that dissolved all the tissue of an adult male in less than two days.

Margaret had tackled that problem in working to save Perry’s life. She’d performed immediate surgery on him to remove any trace of the dead triangles rotting inside his body. That hadn’t stopped the apoptosis, but it slowed it, giving her enough time to find a solution.