EB ALWAYS SAID HE’D TAKE a bullet for us. Now that he had, it significantly changed my sense of superiority over him. If he died, I would have some major soul-searching to do. Advice: Don’t wait until someone you have issues with — especially someone you’re related to — gets shot before you work it out.

Fortunately, the bullet seemed to have missed the important parts, but he’d lost a lot of blood, so there was no way we could avoid the dreaded hospital. I’d rather be in a zoo. Instead I was in a waiting room, taking out my frustrations on a vending machine that wasn’t working. I really needed some chocolate.

“Max!” I heard someone call. I felt my stomach unknot slightly.

“Mom!” I hurried to her, and we hugged. I’m not a huggy person, but her hugs were pretty much the best hugs on earth.

“Jeb’s out of surgery,” she said. “It looks like he’ll be fine.”

Fang and I led my mom to a room where the rest of the flock was under observation. The “agents” that Angel had hired had set up their private security guys outside the door — they didn’t want word of this leaking out. These kids were no longer marketable.

“Dr. Martinez!” Nudge said, managing a weak smile. Mom was good about not grimacing. Nudge’s skin looked like chocolate pudding bubbling in a pot on the stove. The rest looked like they had been dipped in a cauldron of lye. Doctors had swabbed the flock’s sores, taken blood, taken their temperatures — but hadn’t found squat.

“Oh, my gosh, Nudge,” my mom said gently. She smoothed some of Nudge’s corkscrew curls off her forehead, then went around and said hi to everyone else.

“I’m Dylan,” Dylan said when she paused by his bed, looking confused.

“He’s the latest, um, acquisition,” I explained weakly. Even with his messed-up skin, he still looked like he’d been designed by Gods R us. Except right now it was Trolls R us. But, like, a troll who would totally be a pinup in all the troll teen magazines.

“Hi, Dylan,” my mom said. “I’m Valencia Martinez, Max’s mom.”

Dylan’s puffy eyes widened. “You have a mother?” he asked me. “Wow. I had no idea. Do you have a father too, then?”

Bad, bad question. My mom quickly changed the subject. “You know, I read about a case where someone poisoned a spy with a radioactive element,” she said. “The pictures I saw kind of looked like this.”

“Oh, holy crap,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth.

“It’s not radiation poisoning,” said a voice.

“Jeb!” My mom went over and closed the door behind him.

“How do you know?” I demanded of Jeb. “Did you have something to do with this?”

“No,” said Jeb. He was wearing a hospital gown, open in the back, and I hoped he was enjoying the breeze. An IV dripped into his arm, and he had wheeled its little stand in with him. He looked pale and weak — after all, he had taken a bullet for us. Maybe I should be a tad less accusatory.

“No,” he repeated. “And I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s an … accelerator of some kind. A genetic accelerator.”

“What the heck is that?” Gazzy asked.

Jeb paused. “Well … it’s something that would react with your genes. Basically introducing new mutations and speeding up mutations you already have. I think all of us got dosed, except maybe Max and Fang, because they were gone. But it’s having an effect only on you, whose DNA has already been modified.”

There was an appalled silence. I’d been gone for, like, two days, and in that time, everything had completely careened out of control.

“But what if it helps us become even better?” Angel said, ever the creepy optimist. Her normally beautiful face looked like a personal-size pizza with eyes. “We could be like superheroes!”

“Yeah, so far that’s working out well for you,” I said, gesturing to everyone’s ruined skin. “Do you have any idea who would —” I stopped as the obvious answer came to me. “Dr. Seersucker.”

Angel sat up. “Dr. Gunther-Hagen is really brilliant, Max.”

“You want to be accelerated? Fine. But you have no idea what’s going to happen to you next. We already know that your good doctor’s self-healing genetics can have some pretty scary side effects.”

Angel frowned, and Dylan looked concerned. I’d forgotten he had been gifted with Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s magic spit.

My mom turned to Jeb, who was leaning against a wall, looking gray. “Is there any way to know what will happen to them? How toxic is it? Is it deadly? Is there any way to get it out of their systems?”

“Um, not really, I’m not sure, I don’t think so, and I doubt it,” said Jeb, trying to answer all her questions. “My guess is that this initial bad reaction might be the shock of having it introduced to their systems. I’m hoping that once it’s absorbed, these side effects will go away.”

“This was someone conducting an experiment,” Fang said slowly. Frowning, he turned to Jeb. “Someone who’d want to be there to see the results.”

Jeb held up a hand. “Don’t even go there, Fang. The accelerant would have had to be in a shared source — say, in the air or water at the house. I would have been affected too.”

“But it wouldn’t affect you because you’re normal,” Fang objected. “You said so yourself.”

“That’s just a theory,” Jeb said. “This was not my doing.” My mom interjected. “Let’s focus on the important thing here. Is there a way to undo this?”

Jeb shook his head. “If I’m right, it would have been designed to start binding to their DNA immediately, inserting its enzymes and amino acids directly into their chromosomes.”

I sank down onto a hard plastic chair. “Oh, my God.”

“This could give us cancer!” Nudge said, blinking back tears.

“Or turn us into, like, pterodactyls or something,” said Gazzy. “It wouldn’t take much.” He looked stoic.

Jeb sighed. “We should contact Gunther-Hagen to see if he admits to any of this — or even if he won’t admit it, maybe he’ll give us clues as to what it is.”

The idea of contacting the doc for help was totally crazy to me. Excuse me, but hadn’t Jeb just been shot by one of the man’s employees?

“I would vote to get out of here, get to a safe house, and see what happens over the next twenty-four hours,” I suggested.

“I’ll call a contact at the CSM,” said my mom, reaching for her phone. “He’ll be able to help us find a place.”

But I had only one real desire right then: to go back to Colorado and drink the water. If my flock was going through this, I needed to go through it too.