"That's a very good question," she says. "Mother thinks I'll be fine, but she can't actually be certain. I'm a combination of two failed experiments, and she thinks that combining them will somehow cancel out the flaws and make it work."

There's a first time for everything, right?

"The other girls my age have gone feral, as the slugs don't produce as much of the drug as they used to. And Dr. Alexander was injected with so much of it that he mutated horribly, and he lives in a tank now. She thinks that injecting me with high doses will keep me from going feral like the other girls, and that the slug will keep me from mutating like poor Dr. Alexander, but there's no way to know. Either way, at home I get daily injections, and here I haven't."