An underground gene-hacker trading in barely legal psychoactive viruses, Alex Sharkey never played with "dolls"- blue-skinned, gengineered lifeforms designed for work, amu manical little girl needs his unique expertise, in order to make the earth over by providing the soulless genetic constructs with a future, free thought, and the power to reproduce. In an instant, Alex Sharkey is less, and more, than he wasand left with a void in his life and memory that he must refill. For he has helped to unleash a plague of madness on the world. It is his destiny to pursue the new sentient species he has helped sire, from the ruins of a Magic Kingdom outside Paris across wartime Europe to the myth-haunt-ed hills of Albania and the mysterious Library of Dreams and a threat to Man more deadly than Man himself.