“Just like the good old days,” Drake said.

  “Actually, much worse. You see, the rock is like an opportunistic virus. It affects, it interacts with, its entire environment, using whatever it finds at hand, to shape the change.”

  “The change?”

  “The only two people to escape the PBA with powers intact were the two people who were physically changed. Morphed. Taylor, and you, Drake.”

  Drake was perfectly still, listening, waiting, like a cobra watching a mouse. The end of his whip twitched.

  “The rock, very much like a clever virus, has found a way to survive without the dome. It altered the physiognomy—sorry, the body—creating a sort of hybrid creature made out of the person’s DNA, any other DNA that happened to be nearby, and in some cases seemed affected by need, by desire, as if it was reading synapses inside the brain, feeding on memory, on passion.” Peaks shook his head ruefully, admiringly. “Oh, it is a very, very clever piece of work, this rock. Millennia ahead of human science.”

  He snapped out of a reverie and looked into Drake’s soulless eyes.

  “It . . . they . . . will win. The rock will have its way, you see. That’s clear to me now. I don’t know why, I don’t know what it plans, but it is not a mere virus. No. It is being watched. Perhaps it is a sort of lens that allows connections through a bent and folded space-time, I don’t know, but I know that some consciousness . . . is watching.”

Monster, Chapter 20