The buzzer cut in over the Zen music, shattering the carefully crafted zone of tranquility. 

The clock on the computer's menu bar read: "10:24."  R.J. had been steadily working for over six hours.  Unable to sleep, he had come in during the middle of the night.  His take-out cup of coffee stood cold and forgotten on the desk.

A spike of anger had replaced the need for caffeine.  When he first arrived, he'd taken a quick look in the OC, only to find both the girl and Tray fast asleep.  Fury sizzled through his bloodstream at the thought of the young man's careless attitude.  He had no respect for the job they were doing – no understanding of the Subject's value.  And the lazy bastard had only made it worse by sputtering out one excuse after another while begging him not to mention it to Wiley.

"You asked for this shift.  If I catch you slacking again, I'll make sure you're joined at the hip with Dr. Gracie for an entire week."  R.J. wasn't used to raising his voice, but in that instant, he was consumed by all the frustration and impotent rage that had been nibbling around his edges for days. 

He wasn't just upset with Tray Cullen.  Part of the hostility was directed at WiIey.  Maxwell had been AWOL for three days.  Three days of snafus, minor emergencies, and one major discovery.  The whole time Maxwell hadn't returned a single message.

So instead of downing the coffee to shake off the fatigue, R.J. worked to calm himself as he settled into his office.  He put on meditation music and spent an hour watching the video of LARS.  The first few, electric moments of the transformation and the frantic exploration of the enclosure erupted across all three of the monitors, which sat on his desk like a shield against life's barrage of misfortunes.

After a while, two of the monitors got replaced with work, but the surveillance footage continued to play on the third.  And the hours lapsed with no discernible passage of time.  Until the door buzzer shook him out of his deep concentration.

R.J. toggled from a spreadsheet to the camera in the hall.

A face stared into the lens looking impatient.

Wiley.  About time he showed up.

Simultaneously, R.J. hit the lock release button on the desk and minimized the LARS video.

Maxwell pushed through the door.  The words on his lips were almost a growl.  "What the hell is so important?" 

R.J.'s burgeoning mood turned into a stone and fell, dropping until it sunk back beneath the surface of a deep well.  "So you do still work here," he said matching Wiley's tone.

"Don't you start."  Maxwell stiffly walked to a chair and threw himself into it, barely concealing a wince.

"Are you hurt?"  R.J didn't want to feel sympathy for him.  He even wondered if the agent wasn't putting on an act to throw him off balance.  But he had never seen Wiley look less put together.  His skin had the unhealthy tone of cigarette ash.

"Just a sore back."

It wasn't just a sore back.  Just another lie from the man.  "Is that why you decided to abandoned us?"

"You would do well to remember that I don't report to you."  Rarely was Maxwell Wiley so direct.  R.J. began to wonder if there was something seriously wrong.  "Just tell me what the hell Haddad's report means."

So he had taken a look at the report after all.  It was mostly page upon page of graphs and data dumps – charts outlining the partially mapped DNA of the Subject in both her states, with comparisons from several control subjects.  All of it led to one Earth-shattering conclusion.

"Jamie estimates her genome has a deviation of at least twenty-eight million bp's."

Maxwell's eyes looked blank – a void – neither reflecting understanding or even focus.  But he nodded appreciatively, as though R.J.'s statement made perfect sense.  Except it didn't.  It was total insanity.  If the Agent understood even a part of it, he would have gaped, leaped from his chair, done something.

R.J tried to explain it keeping in mind Wiley was no scientist.  "Look, the human genome is made up of a total of about three billion base pairs or bp.  That little girl has a deviation of roughly one percent."

Maxwell opened his mouth to speak, but R.J. didn't let him.  He was too excited to stop or even slow down, even though his mind was struggling to put it all into layman terms.  "That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is ten times the normal deviation between human beings.  It's almost the difference between humans and Neanderthals.  Or to put it another way, it's about two-thirds of the difference between us and chimpanzees."

The last comparison was an often-quoted fact based on faulty science, which only looked at base pairs.  The actual genetic difference was much higher.  But Maxwell wouldn't know about that.

"So what's the point?  Are you saying that it has monkey DNA?"

R.J. rubbed his temples.  The statement didn't only display gross ignorance on multiple levels, but he couldn't believe that after all, they'd seen Maxwell was still referring to LARS as an it.

"No.  Chimpanzees are primates, not monkeys.  And no, in answer to your next question, she doesn't have primate DNA.  At least no more than any of us do."  He took a deep breath.  "What I'm saying is that LARS – both when she is a little girl, and when she is a lycanthrope – is not technically human."

"That's your big revelation.  I think I could have told you that right after she turned into a goddamn wolf."

"True."  Okay, definitely not a scientist.  More like a child even, R.J. thought, fighting against the urge to be snippy. 

"But this is scientific proof.  She isn't some magical creature.  She isn't infected with a disease.  She is a separate species.  She represents a completely different evolutionary branch."

Saying the words out loud felt almost like a magical intonation.  Scientific proof.  Beautiful irrefutable evidence.  It had been the Holy Grail he'd been searching for all his life. 

The last time he believed that he had held it, he had found only fire in his grasp.  A flame that consumed him.  It ate away his career and his self-image.  It devoured his marriage.  It didn't simply destroy it.  It stripped from him the very feelings that had held it together.

"I'm sorry," Mila screamed.  There was no repentance to it.  It was a cry of frustration and defiance.

They had been fighting again.  It was some Wednesday night in a heartless October.  The atmosphere in the house had that permanent air of dusk that had settled in months ago – a dim murkiness, with an underlying quiet that was both somber and sober.

"I'm sorry too."  It was grimly said, expressing regret not remorse, and it left Mila no doubt that the stack of his regrets lay entirely on her shoulders.

She pushed past him, as though moving to the living room would leave the recriminations behind in the kitchen.    

"I can't take this anymore."  Her words were directed at the window and the street, like an actress on stage addressing the audience instead of her fellow actor.  Her black hair hung down over her crisp, white blouse and shook as she spoke.  "You sit around here all day moping.  I come home... I come home and..."  She struggled to find words to express the torment she was living through.  "It's like you don't even love me anymore.  You're so different, changed.  You're cruel.  You've become a... a...."

"A what?  A monster?  You know that monsters don't exist."  The words were delivered softly almost with tenderness, but they had the effect of a slap.

"I don't know what to do.  What do you want of me?"

"I think you should move out.  Leave."

After that, there was nothing left of the man known as R.J. Blass.  Some farcical creature inhabited the lonely home, until it grew tired of even being that.  So it moved away to Alaska and became an ethereal being— a suit and tie that drifted back and forth from the office every day.

But here, in a chain-termination chart, all the G, A, T, and C's spelled out vindication like letters etched in stone by the hand of God.  He had a species that science could barely begin to imagine.  He actually had it- had her.

It was hard to tell if Maxwell was bored or woozy.  His eyelids sagged and his body wavered in the chair.  "Okay.  So we have something to report.  But I can't see the brass getting too excited about it."

"But don't you see, if she is a different species, she didn't just spring up spontaneously.  Her family must also be lycanthropes.  We need to get any living member in here.  We also need to examine the bodies of her deceased relatives.  Hell, we should be exhuming the graves of everyone related to her, right back to her great-great-grandparents."

Maxwell stood.  Whatever effort it took, he concealed with the sudden motion.  He was quick to turn his back to R.J. as he walked over to the sidewall, with his hands clasped behind his back.  He looked as though he was gazing out a window, but there was only beige painted metal in front of him.

"Couldn't she have just sprung up?  A genetic mutation?  That's how evolution works – by mutations, right?"

"Yes, but slowly over thousands of generations.  It's not like in X-Men.  A new, fully formed species just doesn't pop up out of the blue."

"So there's more out there.  How many?"  The timbre of his words echoed the calculations going on in his head.  He wasn't concerned with how many of these unique wonderful creatures there were; he was making a threat assessment.

"It's impossible to say for sure."  R.J. felt a slight fear at the possible consequences of the answer.  He contemplated stalling or lying.  But it would come out eventually.  And he had already done the math and was anxious to share it with someone. 

He had once estimated the Oregon Sasquatch population at between fifty to a hundred.  But that was a contained population, and the figures were based on spore samples and sightings.  Although later, he had to revise that number to something much closer to zero.

This time, it was broad speculation.  There was only one known subject, but the implications suggested that it could be a species with a global reach.

"There would need to be a certain amount out there to keep the species viable," R.J. began.  "But at the same time, if they were too populous this wouldn't be a new discovery – we would have encountered them before and often.  Since they appear human, it is entirely possible that they are spread across the globe to an equal extent as any particular ethnicity."

"A number.  I asked for a number."

"If I had to hazard a guess, I would say at a minimum there are five thousand.  At most, fifty.  All depending on the degree to which the population has spread."

Maxwell continued to stand there.  A statue.  What did he see in that bare wall?

"So you'll start bringing in her relatives?" R.J. prodded.

"No, I won't."  Without any rush, he made for the door.  "She was adopted. We don't know who her relatives really are.  But I'll start looking into it.  Good work."

Alone in his office, R.J. felt suspicion covering him like a second skin.