In the spy world, this means that you can spot the one person in the crowd who is waiting for you to walk up and say, “The eagle has landed.” In the human body, those messengers are hormones. Just like spies, they are dispersed into the community—in this case, the bloodstream—to be funneled toward the appropriate targets in order to provide necessary information. The first hormone ever identified was adrenaline. This happened in 1901. By 1904, adrenaline was being synthesized in the laboratory for medical use, as in counteracting anaphylactic shock. When it occurs naturally in the body, adrenaline dilates blood vessels and air passages, which increases muscle performance and mental acuity for short periods of time. As in, for instance, the brief period of time it took Fiona to beat the living crap out of Clete. When you don’t use your adrenaline in an appropriate amount of time—as in what was happening to the two Ghouls pinned to the wall inside the Grossman home—you might find yourself feeling nauseous, shaky and disoriented.
