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mumbled as she looked at the genetic sequencing.
    “Problem, Boss?”
    “The protein sequences are all messed up.” Assa was there in a moment looking over her shoulder. The small girl pushed her mop of red hair back over one shoulder as she read the data and nodded. “Polluted, is all I can think.”
    “Look at this,” Assa said and pointed over Lisha's shoulder, “and there.”
    “I know, it's very unusual.” She sighed and leaned back, scratching her chin unconsciously. It would take days to order another sample be prepared and run. And budget constraints were already bad enough on The Project. After that expose last month, a lot of their Euro funding had dried up. A new super race, indeed. Idiots. She was about to order it to be run again when her phone rang. Assa went back to her work and Lisha picked up the receiver. As her luck, or lack of it would be, it was one of the directors calling from San Diego.
    An hour later she hung up, her ear sore from all the time holding the handset and listening to him complain about her leaving the site for a week and how far behind schedule they were.
    “There is no such thing as a schedule for what we are doing,” she tried to remind the annoyed idealist, who proceeded to soldier on with his complaints regardless of what she said. So in the end Lisha sat and endured the verbal assault, assuring the director that they would continue to make progress as quickly as possible. She also tossed in how the trip to New Mexico would garner some positive press from the university department she'd visited. She didn't think he was convinced, but he was eventually placated, and she was allowed to get back to work.
    It was two hours past dinner when a lab technician came in and asked her what she wanted to do with the fox samples. “Do you have the ones I just saw the results on? Sorry, I forget your name?”
    “Grant Porter,” he said with a shrug. “Here are the results. I was going to toss them in the burner before cutting out for the day.”
    “Can I see them?” She followed him back to the prep area of the lab and he removed three glass slides from a container marked with red tape and the writing 'contaminated'. She put on a pair of nitrite gloves and examined them. The microscopically thin slice of animal flesh was visible, dyed a shade of green. “You using a new dye?”
    Grant glanced at the supply shelf then shook his head. “Nope, same stuff for years.”
    “Then why is the sample green?”
    The man opened his mouth to comment, and then shut it and cocked his head. “You know, I really don't know!” He picked up one of the other two samples, also both a nearly bright shade of green. “All I can guess is there was some sort of a reaction to the reagents.”
    “But why not those samples?” Lisha asked and gestured to another rack of slides on a nearby counter. They were all the normal color tint to them.
    “I’ll run some tests and see what I can figure out.” Lisha nodded and returned to her work. Grant picked up a green tinted sample slide and eyed it suspiciously. He reached for another sample without looking and suddenly jerked back his hand with a hiss. He’d caught the corner of the slide, and of course wasn’t wearing his nitrite gloves outside of the lab. “Damn it,” he said and squeezed a drop of blood from the nick. He grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer off the shelf and spread a liberal amount of it on the wound, ignoring the flash of burning pain from the alcohol based goo. Wiping it clean on a paper towel, he tossed it in the flash burner and headed back to his lab, the incident forgotten.
     
    * * *
     
    Lisha didn’t know why she got up in the middle of the night. She’d worked fourteen hours in the lab crunched genome numbers and running simulations, the last thing she needed was to be up at three A.M. staring at her dimly lit compartment roof and wondering why she was awake at all.
    “Might as well go to the bathroom,” she mumbled to the