The Spliced Series

Sixteen-year-old Jimi knows people change, but nothing could prepare her for what's about to happen to her best friend, Del. Del is obsessed with becoming a chimera: a person who pays back-alley geneticists, known as "genies", to illegally splice animal genes into their own. The resulting physical changes have scared lawmakers into drafting legislation declaring chimeras officially nonpersons, so when Del goes missing, Jimi is desperate to find him before he alters himself forever.

After Del’s death, Jimi wants to pick up the pieces of her life and move on. But she’s become a public figure in her defense of chimeras, and she can’t quite shake the spotlight—or her suspicion that she’s being followed. When her friend Dr. Guzman, a chimera sympathizer, is arrested for the murder of a chimera wearing a strange medical bracelet, Jimi does some digging—and eventually discovers that Howard Wells, the venal businessman and proponent of the Genetic Heritage Act, is supporting a hospital that ostensibly provides healthcare for chimeras.

Committed to both peace and human rights for chimeras—people who alter themselves with animal DNA—seventeen-year-old Jimi Corcoran is torn when she’s invited to a gathering of moderate pro- and anti-chimera rights activists seeking to find common ground. But when a militant chimera rights group prevents her from attending—and saves her from being killed by the bomb they’ve planted—Jimi herself falls under suspicion for the blast.