DAVID STOOD UNDER the cold spray of his shower. The hot water ran out a while ago. He barely felt it.
He was trying. God knew, he was trying his best. And he was failing. There was no answer in the cells of any of the test subjects. Whatever miracle whipped through them and cleaned them up and rebuilt them, as if they were fresh off an assembly line, did not leave a trace.
At least, not one he could see. He’d tried everything. Computer modeling. Genetic sequencing. Tests for foreign matter. Nuclear resonance imaging.
None of it worked. He found nothing.
Failure.
On his last visit to the hospital, he found Elizabeth had checked in again. He’d had a stupid, desperate hope that he would crack the code of the miracle cure in time to get her into clinical trials. But he hadn’t been fast enough. She was not going to make it. It was a matter of weeks, if not days.
Failure.
Things were even bad between him and Shy. True, he was still seeing her almost every night. In his paranoid moments, he suspected that she was keeping him exhausted to keep him from focusing completely on his work. It was an insane theory, but it would explain the distance that had grown between them since they’d fought.
He looked down into the drain of the shower. He was having a hard time finding the energy to get out, dry off, and head to the lab to fail again.
He noticed something. Hair. More than usual at the drain.
Terrific. On top of everything else, male-pattern baldness. It almost made him laugh. Here he was, trying to cure old age and disease, and he’d have to get a prescription for Propecia himself.
He got out of the shower, toweled off, and began to shave. A scrape and a sting on his chin told him that he’d pushed one too many days out of the razor blade. Either that or his skin was getting thinner, too.
Everything falls apart. Everything ages. Everything dies. Failure.
Of all people, he should have known this was inevitable. Somewhere in his cells, a tipping point had been reached, and the downward slide had begun. Free radicals ricocheting around his body, breaking things up like a drunk in a bar. Mutation erupting in his genes as ultraviolet light and transcription errors piled on top of one another. And the never-ending strain of breathing, eating, and bleeding, every day. We are not built for long-term success, David remembered. Aging was constant and unstoppable, the continual erosion of the body against time. Over time, we are all dead.
Failure.
Wait. Over time.
Intuition pulled something together at the back of his mind. It had been there almost since day one. He’d truly witnessed the process of the cure in action only once, when Simon showed him Mueller. But he hadn’t seen it at the cellular level.
Since then, he’d spent all his time on tissue samples, cell slices, and DNA markers.
But his tests had all been static—examinations of one moment or a single result. He’d never watched the process in action. He’d never seen how it behaved in the human body, over time.
It couldn’t be that simple, could it?
Only one way to find out. But he had to have an actual sample of the original cure. Otherwise it was useless. He had to convince Simon any way he could.
He wiped the shaving cream from his face, got dressed in record time, then ran two red lights on his way to Conquest.
There might be a solution lurking behind all this failure after all.