When the final whistle of the day sounded, Bruce headed outside and was excited to see the supply driver waiting for him. He was one of the guys who moonlighted doing unofficial delivery runs between the jungle and the city. A week or so before, Bruce had asked him to find a specific flower. Now it had arrived! Bruce ran over and paid him. Then he hurried home with the rare orchids, feeling a surge of optimism to balance out the stressful day.

When Bruce got home, he showed the pack to Cachorro. "See that?" he said excitedly. "That's our ticket out of here."

Cachorro barked, picking up on Bruce's excitement. Bruce put the flowers down and set up his laptop and portable satellite uplink. He kept them hidden in the apartment, together with a newspaper clipping.

On the paper was a grainy printed-out photograph of a gorgeous woman with refined features and long dark hair. The caption read Dr. Elizabeth Ross . Bruce sighed. Betty Ross had been his girlfriend as well as his lab partner in the experiment that had gone so wrong. He missed her desperately, but he would never let himself be in a position to hurt her again. She didn't know where he was now, and he was going to stay hidden until he solved his problem. Seeing the botany book gave Bruce a twinge of hope.

It had been a long time since he'd seen Betty. She might not love him anymore after what had happened in the lab at Culver, but the thought of her was the only thing that kept Bruce going sometimes. He fired up the satellite feed and used an encrypted chat program to contact a person he knew only as Mr. Blue. Bruce didn't know who Mr. Blue was, but he'd spent the past months trying to reach out to people who knew something about gamma radiation. Mr. Blue clearly did, and Bruce relied on his scientific advice. He was a skilled research scientist himself, but he had no lab and no way to keep up on the latest findings in his area—at least not if he wanted to stay hidden and stay safe.

G: Blue, are you there?

B: Mr. Green? Good hearing from you, my mysterious friend.

G: I've found it.

B: At long last! It's a lovely little flower, isn't it?

Bruce looked at the flower. It was pretty, but that's not why he cared about it. He returned to the monitor and his encrypted conversation. Mr. Blue had already logged off after leaving a final note:

B: Be sure to try a high dose. Good luck! :)

Bruce signed off and got to work. First he clipped the orchid's petals into small pieces. He gathered them in a small bowl and poured a bit of rubbing alcohol in before crushing the petals into a paste. He added more fluid and put the mixture into a makeshift centrifuge he'd built using parts from a bicycle. It spun most of the fluid out into a small vial, where Bruce examined it. It was still too cloudy, meaning there were still too many bits of the crushed petals. He needed a better filter. He lit his stove and slowly heated the mixture in a distilling setup, watching the purer fluid fall drop by drop into a new vial. Now it was clear. Now he could use it.

After pricking his finger, Bruce squeezed a drop of his blood onto a glass slide. He peered down at the slide through a microscope and adjusted the focus until he could see individual little disk-shaped red blood cells. Only his weren't smooth and red; they were lumpy and a mixture of red and green, like they had been since his accident back at Culver University five years ago. This was the effect of the gamma radiation he'd been exposed to during the experiment. It was also what caused his transformation into ... that thing.

Bruce took out the slide. He filled an eyedropper with the clear fluid he'd distilled from the crushed orchid petals. Then he squeezed out three drops onto his blood on the slide and stuck the slide back under the microscope.

Peering into the eyepiece, Bruce saw the formula seeping into his blood from the edges. The green lumps disappeared, and what were left were ordinary cells. Bruce's heart jumped. Could he have found a cure? Could he finally come out of hiding and go home?

Could he see Betty again?

But as he kept watching, scribbling in a lab notebook to record the experiment ... his cells deformed again, with the warty green bumps coming back and spreading to how they had been before.

The experiment was a failure, and Bruce felt sick with the loss of hope. Eventually, Bruce got up from the lab table and went to his laptop to tell Mr. Blue the disappointing results.

G: Another failure.

B: How much did you use?

G: All of it.

B: Then it's time to meet.

G: Not safe.

B: Living with gamma poisoning is not safe. Stop messing with flowers. Send me a sample.

B: Can't help if you won't let me.

Bruce looked at the picture of Betty and at the litter of flower stems on his table. Mr. Blue was right. He'd done everything he could do without actually giving someone else a look at a sample of his blood.

When you only had one option, there was no point wasting time. Bruce drew a few milliliters of his blood with a syringe, capped the tube, and wrapped it carefully for shipping. He labeled it Mr. Green . The next day he mailed a package to Mr. Blue's post office box in New York City. 9JhoQQ9BUjzdB3FMvaa3BY5kDIDayel0QhPjSWltBnVo+kGkHid/ad63AvRONxyn