For the past three months, they’d been so intent on the minute details of the transplant—monitoring the fever charts and blood counts, watching for signs of infection—that they hadn’t considered the person who made it all possible. They hadn’t, but Luca had. “He’s inside me now, Nina. I can feel it.” “You can?” Again, Nina was struck by the boy’s words. Yet the more she thought about it, the more they didn’t seem so far-fetched. Luca was no longer only Luca. He was—what did Tosti call it?—a chimera, a mixture or hybrid, like the creatures in Greek myths. There was, in a sense, another person
...more
