“Well, this isn’t good,” Wade said as he watched the mutation.

The writhing man collapsed, riling up the other Carriers. Carrier #1 (The beautiful 30-year-old woman) retreated to a corner and balled up while screaming.

Carrier #4 (The caroler) took Carrier #3 (The tween girl) into her arms as they bawled. Carrier #4 (The elderly security guard) and Carrier #7 (The sick little girl) remained in their beds staring in horror. Carrier #6 (The burly hockey player) and Carrier #8 (The suited businessman) stomped up to the Healers wearing hostile faces. They were yelling in German.

Ashlin was the first of the Healers to act by removing her hat and flipping onto the floor. With the cyan blue inside of the hat facing up, a red, scaly humanoid with a dragon head popped out and blasted a beam of bright blue flames.

The hostile carriers jumped back as a wall of blue flames kept them from reaching the Healers.

Akachi backtracked to the door and opened it. “Come on, we’re out of here,” he said.

“Wait!” Wade shouted and ran towards the wall of fire as he tossed his pen to Ugo. “Hold my pen!”

Ugo tragically caught the pen by its saliva-soaked cap.

In what might’ve been a sudden, but not surprising episode of madness, Wade dove through the fire and returned with the same diving maneuver. He was seared and had a large syringe in his hand. The others watched him pull himself up as he chuckled and patted away the small torches all over his lab coat. “Okay, we can go.”

Ashlin pushed her creation back into the hat and equipped it before hauling ass alongside Akachi and Ugo.

Wade halted as he noticed Zeke being idle. “Hey, what’re you doing?” he yelled.

Zeke was unable to move, squinting through the cyan flames, watching the confused carriers scream and cry, plummeting into the most bottomless pits of despair. “This is wrong,” he said, taking a closer step toward the flames. “We have to—”

Wade gripped Zeke’s shoulder and dragged him out of the room.

With a forceful push, Zeke staggered onto the staircase and got up to find Wade closing the basement door, followed by Ashlin putting a spell on the handle. It glowed a cyan blue.

“What did you do?” Zeke asked angrily.

“If they try to touch the handle they’ll receive a shock that’ll make them not want to try again,” Ashlin said coldly. “That’s if they’re not stupid.”

“We can’t just leave them like that!”

“And what do you suppose we do, man?” Wade asked and held his hand out. Ugo returned his pen to him. He started gesturing with it as he elaborated, “We explain to them what’s going on? That’ll only waste time and cause confusion, bruh. Like trying to convince a dude having a really bad trip that the government isn’t tracking him and trying to recruit him for a space program to fight aliens on Mars against his will.”

“Speaking from experience?” Ugo asked.

“Don’t mix Hippogriff feathers with Imp powder, dude…” he said and put the pen in his mouth.

The Healers waited for Wade to continue, but he just stared off into nothingness, chuckling to himself. Ashlin approached Zeke, taking up from where Wade left off.

“The best course of action right now is to come up with a cure as fast as possible,” she said.

“You know,” Zeke started, making the meanest frown he could muster, “being a doctor isn’t just about finding the cure. Interpersonal connection is important, too! Those people are scared! We need to think about their mental state!”

“Fine, we’ll hook them up with therapy after we’re done, happy?” Akachi said and walked up the steps. “Let’s get started.”

Zeke stared at the ground and shook his head as the others went up the steps. He was the last to follow.

The group went to the top floor with all the mystical machinery. Everybody except for Wade called off their Healer’s Garbs. Taking everybody by surprise, Wade took charge, revealing he extracted some of the mutated carrier’s DNA into the syringe he conjured.

They stood around the room like med students observing a demonstration as Wade pulled up his wrinkled face mask. Zeke still had a hard time believing that those regular-looking items in poor condition were magical.

The incubator was where Wade went next and prepared the microscope slide. He carefully pushed the extraction from the syringe and onto the slide, substituting the previous slide in the incubator box with it (the old slide was put in a different compartment inside the glass box).

He examined the specimen and let out a whistle of astonishment. Subsequently, Wade stepped away from the incubator box, pulled his mask down, and ambled to the left side of the room, opening a door that nobody knew existed. The Anesthesiologist disappeared into the room and came out pushing a revolving whiteboard (because, of course, Yaalon had one of those).

Wade stopped in front of the Healers and grabbed the black marker from the bottom of the board. First, on the left side of the board, he drew Kian’s specimen—just a normal-looking shapeless microbe sprinkled with black dots. Under it, he wrote down all the facts and features about the supernatural protozoa, and overhead, he wrote: BEFORE EVOLUTION.

Lastly, on the right side of the board is where things got interesting. As if he were a painter about to show off, Wade looked at the board, let out a heavy sigh, and drew a Möbius strip. He marked it with black dots and then added short lines across the edges of the complicated shape—all together they looked like tiny hairs.

Wade stepped back to observe the drawing as he took a bottle of pills from his Garb’s pocket and dry swallowed a couple.

Ugo sat on a box-shaped piece of machinery with gears all over it. “How the hell did you draw a Möbius strip so perfectly?” he shouted, asking the important questions.

“I think there are more pressing matters here…” Zeke said, giving him a look.

Over the shape, Wade added the caption: AFTER EVOLUTION. “This is how the specimen looks now,” he said. “I took the sample from just the carrier’s face and there were a bunch of them. So it is now capable of asexual reproduction. All the duplicated cells seem identical. Hopefully, it’s mitosis—”

“Why hope for that?” Akachi asked, leaning onto a machine that resembled a giant laser ray from old-school spy movies.

Zeke volunteered himself to explain. “Think of mitosis just like cell cloning. From the parent cell comes two diploid daughter cells, all with identical genetic properties. I think what Wade is hoping for is that the specimen is capable of only doing that instead of meiosis. Which is a process that results in four diploid daughter cells with only half of the chromosome number or, in other words, a higher genetic variation.”

“Correctamundo,” Wade said and chewed on his pen as he looked back at the board. “Dealing with a higher genetic variation would be a major pain in the ass.”

“Okay, microscopic zoology isn’t really my thang,” Akachi admitted, “so just say what we need to do and we’ll get it done.”

“Well, it’s an amalgamation of our Healer Garbs’ cells,” Wade said. “It can counter any magic we throw at it and is immune to pretty much every medicine I can think of: Kelpie water, liquified unicorn horn, Caladrius essence. I tried everything that wasn’t on Yaalon’s notes and I got nothing. Ideas, people?”

“Hold up,” Ugo said, raising his hand for a moment. “Aida is the Geneticist. Can’t her magic fix this mess?”

“It wouldn’t work,” Ashlin said, making her debut in the brainstorming session. “The dog can change genetics, but if what’s causing the mutation is a microbe that can counter her magic, the results will be disastrous: a continuous mutation.” She averted her eyes over to the magical machinery.

“An exorcism is out of question because it’s not demonic….” Akachi said.

“We can’t kill it with hellish methods either because it isn’t angelic in nature either…” Wade added and heaved a sigh.

A joyous smile curved up on Zeke’s face as he realized he was in a room of exceptionally bright minds and being treated as one of them. Not only was he learning, but he was participating, too!

Zeke would’ve been honored to be one of the Tainted Generation. If it wasn’t for being marked as a cosmic criminal by the angels or being forced to play the universe’s worst game of Russian roulette where aside from dying, you can go straight to Hell. Yet, even rationalizing this, he couldn’t get rid of the pride or the smile on his face.

“Let’s try to make a vaccine,” Ashlin suggested right in time to reel Zeke back to reality. “Maybe we can’t save those who are already infected, but we could prepare the immune system for others.”

Zeke curled his lip to the side. He wasn’t a big fan of the play but knew that arguing further wouldn’t get them anywhere. “So, what magical vaccine-making methods are there?”

Wade replied, “Live attenuated vaccines—”

“Which are made from the pathogen itself, right? Much tamer and weaker,” Zeke said with a smile on his face growing wider as if he was holding back a laugh. “And there are inactive, subunit, DNA, and RNA vaccines.”

“Oh, so you do know.”

“Those are the ones that exist in the normal world. Huh, nice to see that they are the same.”

“A DNA vaccine would be the most effective,” Ashlin said and perched on the edge of a desk, “We use plasmids to isolate the protein necessary to trigger an immune response from the specimen and inject it into the patients.”

“That’s great, except these are regular people we are talking about, and this is a very Mana-charged pathogen,” Wade said. “If we were talking about elves or dwarves with good Mana affinity, this would be a different story. To make it work… we will have to fill these plasmids with lots of Mana.”

“Allegedly, the only people infected are downstairs, right?” Ugo said. “Number 2’s protozoa has already mutated; who’s to say that the others haven’t already mutated? Creating a vaccine only to prepare the immune systems of those unaffected could be useless. We need to fix those people downstairs, like, right now.”

Zeke nodded with his ever-growing smile that lasted until he caught a disapproving look from Ashlin.

It was like a mnemonic, flooding his brain with information about why they were in this situation in the first place. Zeke felt like an addict coming down from the best high he ever had.

A few of the others argued with Ugo, but Zeke ignored it. As he focused on the incubator box, he thought back to the night of the murder. He was lusting over Violet, making out with her while someone in a nearby room had their life taken away.

Zeke slapped the side of his head and tried to focus on reality. He looked at Ugo as he was saying something.

“Attacking the cell from the outside is the problem, right?” Ugo asked.

“It’s got Yaalon’s annoying defensive magic,” Akachi rasped. “It’s impenetrable.”

Ugo giggled. Zeke rolled his eyes, knowing which part of the sentence made him titter.

“It’s like a turtle,” Ugo started. “Look, there’s this game called First Fantasy, and one of the best boss fights is against this giant turtle. It attacks with spinning moves, all without coming out of its shell. There are no visible openings, so it’s impossible to land any damage, but the secret is to use this phasing lance. The turtle is hard on the outside but soft on the inside like everybody else.”

For a tense, quiet moment Akachi, Ashlin, and Wade exchanged looks.

“I was once messing around with one of Poseidon’s horses, trying to make an antidote for a poisoned manticore. I learned why the horses never got sick,” Akachi said as he rubbed his chin. “I don’t understand that stuff all that well, but their cells used Mana bombs to destroy any pathogenic cells that got near it. Maybe we can do the same for the carriers.”

“That’ll work,” Ashlin agreed. “Mana bombs are just concentrated energy. They aren’t exclusive to any of our Garb’s magic. If we can get it inside the cell, there isn’t any spell it can use to counter it.”

“How would we get the bombs inside the cells, though?” Akachi asked.

Silence took over as the Healers mentally strained themselves for a solution. Some walked around, others played a bit with the smaller machines, while Zeke stood in front of the board doing what he did best—getting lost in his head.

Like when he was holding hands with Violet. It slowed down their carrier gathering for sure. Maybe they could’ve reached the final carrier before Kian showed up, and the mess at the airport could’ve been avoided.

Sure there was the silver lining that Kian was captured, but Zeke’s mind would never let himself be content with that.

While staring at Wade’s impressive Möbius strip drawing, Zeke thought back to the fight at the airport. When he used his veins to latch onto Kian after being stabbed was a life-saving maneuver. He pictured Kian struggling to break free in his head and then looked closer at the Möbius strip.

The epiphany battered into his head like a power drill.

Zeke snapped his fingers. “Wade!” He turned to him and pointed back at the board. “These hair-like things you drew around the specimen. They’re cilia, right?”

“Yeah? Why—oh my God, you are a genius,” Wade responded.

The others regrouped.

“What is it?” Akachi asked.

“If it’s a ciliated protozoan, then that means it can do sexual reproduction,” Zeke explained to the others. “‘Cilia,’ which are these hair-like organelles, are by the organism to move and connect to other cells. To perform a conjugation process. It is an exchange of genetic material between two individual cells. If we can make the plasmid have the right mating strains and chemical signals to join with the malignant protozoan….”

“With the gamones, we can have our plasmid transfer the Mana bomb into the protozoa during the conjugation,” Wade finished for him.

Zeke pointed back at Wade. “Ka-blamo.”

“Ka-blamo!”

“We’re going to pull off a Trojan Horse,” Akachi said excitedly. “Nice!”

Wade started pacing around the room. “But to develop such a plasmid—our Trojan Horse, we need it to mature. I analyzed the specimen Yaalon extracted, which is still in its initial phase while in the incubator box.”

“It needs to be a Container with a real soul, I think,” Wade added and stopped pacing, “and that’s not all. Making a Mana bomb is feasible; in fact, I’ve made a couple myself for… recreational purposes….” The others stared blankly at Wade as he stopped to chuckle. Astonishingly, he noticed and shook his head, pulling himself back to the real world. “Shrinking the Mana bomb to the size of something that can fit inside a protozoan is tricky.”

“You can’t just make a microscopic Mana bomb from scratch?” Zeke asked.

Ashlin flipped her dark red hair to the side. “It wouldn’t be as potent,” she said, “and before you ask… no, we can’t perform a spell that shrinks something to that size.”

Zeke squinted at her trying to make sense of what she said, and ended up thinking how much her back must ache daily.

Wade swallowed some more pills and drawled, “There is one way.”

“Don’t say it….” Akachi pleaded.

“Fairies.”

“Shit.”

Ashlin cursed in Russian as she crossed her arms.

“They’re the only ones that have that kind of magic…” Wade lamented, removed his earflap cap, and brushed back his disheveled red hair.

“What’s wrong with fairies?” Ugo asked.

“Well, Ugo…” Akachi started explaining while flexing his arms and staring at them. “The past Tainted Generation screwed them over so bad they haven’t left their Realm in centuries and don’t allow any other creature inside. It’s become a closed Realm. Especially for humans. Just us stepping foot there could cause an all-out war.”

Zeke scratched his head. “Maybe, if we explain the situation to them—”

“They were enslaved by the Tainted Generation. Used for experiments,” Ashlin said. “They won’t listen.”

“Here’s the plan,” Wade said, putting his cap back on. “Somebody needs to go to the Fairyrealm, sneak into the Queen’s lab. and steal some extract of the Fairy shrinking factor. While someone needs to volunteer to be the test subject for our Trojan Horse.”

Ugo raised his hand. “I’ll do it.”

“Mora!”

“No more debating!” He said and got up. “We have no time.”

“Yes,” Ashlin said. “I’ll stay behind with Wade to watch over you…”

“Okay!”

“... and the dog,” Ashlin said, giving Ugo a disgusted look. “To speed up the process, I will put a temporary aging spell on your Container for the specimen to reach its full potential.”

“Sí, señorita.”

“Oh, Dios mío,” Zeke said under his breath. He hoped that Ugo wasn’t putting his life in danger just to impress Ashlin. Then he made a hiss, realizing his brother had no idea Ashlin was already in love with someone else.

Akachi clapped Zeke on the shoulder. “Shortstack, you’re with me. We’re going to the Fairyrealm!”

Zeke looked back at Akachi, smiling nervously, and then looked at Wade. “Hey, there’s something else we need to talk about concerning our Trojan Horse.”

“I’m all ears,” Wade said.

And then Zeke explained it to him.