Page 235 of Caged

“There’s no evidence of modification?” I ask.

“None. Normally, with splicing, you can see the seams—places where the genome was tampered with. You can tell what was added mainly because it’s unnatural. Like trying to graft fur onto scales. It’ll look like it was forced in, because, well, it was.” She exhales, full of tension. “But this was all woven together perfectly. No one fucked with this DNA. Whoever’s blood this belongs to, they were born this way.”

“So it doesn’t belong to Frankenstein’s monster,” Vae hums, fingers tapping on the wood of the tabletop. “But it could belong to a fucking unicorn.”

“There’s more. Whoever’s DNA it is, it’s not just holding information. It’s doing things it shouldn’t be doing. It’s regenerating on a cellular level. You already knew it was resisting decay, but… Dax.” Her voice sharpens with excitement, and her words start spilling out faster. “It’s adapting to external stimuli.”

“Explain.” I snap.

“I tried to light it on fire,” she says, like that’s a normal part of lab protocol. This fucking female.

“Go on,” I grit out, trying to sound encouraging when what I want to do is bang my head on this table. Repeatedly.

“Blood doesn’t burn like paper. It’s not flammable, per se. It coagulates, then dries up. This blood lit up like—Fates… it was glowing. Then it pulsed, spread out, and reformed.” She’s damn near squealing. She went from pissed off to kid-on-Christmas-morning in like two minutes flat.

“What the fuck?” Silas whispers, and for once, I can’t disagree.

“So I thought, alright, I’ll hit it with another element.”

“Sure,” I mutter, because at this point, I’m just along for the ride.

“It didn’t dilute in water. It started to, but then it clumped back together. Air didn’t dry it out—it made it glow again and release a smell like petrichor. But Earth… Dax,” she hesitates, sounding both excited and a little bit scared. “This part fucked me up.”

I swallow, my throat dry. ”It should have been absorbed.”

“Yes. I left it in a small mound of soil, stepped out to take a call, and by the time I got back,” she takes a large breath, “the soil was growing roots.”

My stomach flips. It isn’t a pleasant sensation. “How long were you gone?”

“Maybe four minutes.”

“Even I know that’s not normal.” Vae mumbles. Then louder, he asks, “What did the roots grow into?”

“They’re still growing. It’s only been like an hour. But they look like they’re developing into some kind of flora. The stalks are the darkest green I’ve ever seen.”

Blood that doesn’t react the way it should to outside elemental stimuli, doesn’t decay, and has no genetic markers related to any known species on the planet. Riven is right. We aren’t dealing with science anymore.

At least, not completely.

Which means the real question is: How the hell did Varenthrall get his hands on that blood? And more importantly—Why is he injecting it into Omegas?

I clear my throat. “Well, as fun as this conversation has been…”

“I’m not done.” Whitetail snaps.

Of course, she isn’t. I lean back in my chair, scrubbing my hands through my hair. This call has gone so far off the rails that it isn’t even on the same continent anymore. Every single experiment she ran defies natural law so thoroughly, it’s like science itself is personally flipping me the middle finger.

“I’m obsessive about my database queries,” she continues. I can hear her pacing in her lab, faint thuds from her footfalls echoing through the speakers. “I have part of my specialized programming constantly searching for any matches when I’m running my own. I didn’t expect a hit from the blood you sent. If you’d asked me two days ago, I’d have sworn no one’s ever sequenced this DNA before.”

“You found a match?” I ask, straightening up in shock.

“Seven years ago, a geneticist out of Boston ran the exact same DNA and uploaded his findings to a private server. It was encrypted to hell and back. I worked for almost two days to get access to it, and I still couldn’t fully crack it. But I did manage to backtrack some of the login metadata. Found a license for a lab that doesn’t exist, and the name of the guy who ran it.”

“Who?”

“Cecil Albertson. Fifty-seven years old, single, no kids, lives alone in Peabody in a house with no mortgage. Doesn’t owe money on his car, and his bills are paid through an offshore account that I haven’t been able to trace yet. I’ll send you the file.”

Grunting, I flip open one of my laptops and nudge Silas out of my way. He huffs indignantly before swinging himself up and over the table and plopping into the seat next to Vae.