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***

Maria eyed the Doctor mistrustfully. She'd never seen equipment like this before, and it was making a real mess of this room. The Doctor had scooped up the blood samples she'd taken for him and put them into a big metal thing that spun the phials around. Now they were stuck in a weird-looking metal box, and the Doctor seemed very serious. Pretending he knew what he was doing, she imagined.

'How long are you going to let him run rings round us?' hissed Maria to Roley.

'Please, Maria, not now.'

She ignored him. 'Things only blew up round here when be came along.'

'Aren't you forgetting Oscar Austen?' said Roley, sighing.

'Aren't you forgetting you're writing a book? A bestseller?' He said nothing, and she tentatively put an arm round him, praying he wouldn't shrug her off. 'Well?'

'A man is dead.'

Maria frowned. 'Well... yes, but...'

Abruptly, the Doctor lifted his head from a tiny microscope, his hair flying around him with the violence of the movement. 'Fascinating! Each of them the same.'

Roley moved away from Maria, leaving her talking to thin air. 'What've you found, Doctor?'

'Austen, Lucy, all of them. They have some kind of adjunct to their DNA.'

'Their what?' Maria barged over to join them.

Roley turned to her. 'You know, it was in all the papers.'

We don't read the same papers, Maria reflected, sadly, as Roley continued.

'The building blocks of life, they call it. All the proteins and chemicals that make us what we are.' He gestured up and down Maria's body and she almost blushed. 'Crick and Watson won the Nobel for their research into it last year.'

'And Wilkins, of course,' the Doctor pointed out. 'What a way with crystallography that man had...' He shook his head. 'Anyway, it's as if some extraneous, unknown protein's been introduced to the chromosomes. It's causing all sorts of bonding anomalies.'

Roley concentrated. 'Adenine bases link to thymine, and guanine bases to cytosine, correct?'

'Correct; said the Doctor. 'In Nurse Bulwell's and your own DNA, certainly, and that checks out fine. But in the others, the guanine and cytosine are both bonding with a different base that doesn't even appear to be nitrogenous.'

'Impossible,' stated Roley.

The Doctor gave him a wry smile. 'Dangerous word to use, that.'

'That would break all the rules of stereochemistry,' Roley protested.

'I know,' said the Doctor. 'Frustrating, isn't it? Seems our friend the leech is something of an iconoclast.'

'You said it was just a transmitter.'

'Mmm... I imagine it's transmitting some kind of retro virus that's attacking the host RNA and replicating itself... That's why new leeches could be grown after the originals were taken out.'

'Retrovirus? RN- ?'

The Doctor cut Maria off. 'Whoops. You never heard me mention them.'

'So through whatever means,' said Roley, 'it's the leech that's generating the powers we’ve witnessed in Watson and the others.'

'I think it more likely they're just a side effect.'

Roley was becoming agitated. 'But if, as you say, the leech was manufactured, who could have done such a thing?'

The Doctor said nothing, so Maria ventured a question of her own.

'And why?'

***

Sam wondered how long she'd been lying in the grass, hoping to calm down, breathing deeply and trying to remember some old Shortlist lyrics, rubbish though they were.

Halfway through reciting yet another shoe-gazing epic about unrequited love and suicide, she sat up and looked around again. In the distance she could see a familiar gangly figure in a grey raincoat heading for the main entrance.

'Hey, Fitz!' she called. He must be visiting his mum. Christ, she'd better tell him what had happened.

He heard the shout, and turned to see who was calling.

'Come on, then!' she added. What would she tell him? Watch out for your mum, Fitz, she tried to throttle me a few hours ago when she thought she was the devil.

He looked worried,