Deadly Memory (Living Memory Book 2), page 18
Prey snarled in frustration, not understanding again. Did she get what he was saying or not?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I understand, or I think I do. You were just trying to convince us. But you do it too well. You don’t leave us a choice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Samira could barely feel her legs anymore, and every muscle in her back ached. Anger boiled in her gut without relief. Anger at Charlie, anger at Bowman and his eagerness to pull the trigger, anger at Paula for being dead, anger at herself for leaving Paula behind. Halfway through the trip, she started banging her fists on the metal flooring just to feel the pain.
At that moment, she almost wanted God to exist so she could rage at him for making such a messed up world, where whole species could die at the gravitational whim of an orbiting pile of rock or a scrap of protein with a talent for replicating itself. She needed there to be a reason. If God had killed Paula, it would have been part of some grand, unfolding plan, and she could have hated him for that. But without God, there was just no reason at all. She needed to know why, but there was no why. The question itself had no meaning.
Samira wished she could have planned this rescue better. With no time to prepare, she hadn’t thought much further than getting him out of the facility. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t expected to get this far. They had succeeded in getting him out. Now what?
It was one thing to spring a dinosaur from a secure government lab; it was quite another to keep him secret with the government on their trail. Where could they possibly hide him? It’s not like she could take him to her apartment. Ideally, she would have found some empty field or woods to hide in with a lot of land and no visitors, but she didn’t have anything like that. She had to go with what she knew, and what Samira knew was the University of Colorado Ornithology Center.
The truck stopped moving and the engine died. They had arrived.
The door rolled open and Dad and Alex helped her climb down. It was still night, but the streetlights and the light from the nearby stadium meant it wasn’t very dark. This was the riskiest part, with the most danger of being seen. The streets of college towns were rarely empty, even in the middle of the night, but at the moment the threat of the Julian virus was keeping more people inside.
They crept toward the building, a ridiculously conspicuous sight: three people leading a living dinosaur through a college campus. There were cameras, but she wasn’t too worried about those. No one would look at the recordings unless there was a break-in or some other reported crime, and if someone knew enough to report a crime, it would already be too late.
They saw no one. So far, so good.
Samira used Paula’s ID card to open the door. They were headed for the development lab, where Lewis the Dodo had been hatched and hand-raised. The lab was off-limits to all but a very few: those who had good reason to be there and knew enough not to risk damage to fragile biological specimens. Lewis had enjoyed a habitat inside the lab before being moved to his current home, with both indoor and outdoor accommodations. As far as Samira knew, his old habitat was currently empty, and what was better, inaccessible to most people. It was the only place she knew where Charlie might, just possibly, stay safe and secret, at least for a day or two, until they could figure out a better option.
They crept through empty and dark hallways, Charlie’s claws clicking on the hard flooring. She wondered what sorts of floors Charlie’s people had used, if they had constructed floors at all. Soft, mossy coverings, perhaps, that claws could grip without destroying? Or horizontal ladders, with no floors at all? They passed the avian center, where Marcy the raven and Mikey the cockatoo were probably sleeping.
At the lab, Samira pressed Paula’s card against the reader. The light turned green, and a whirring sound in the doorframe accompanied the release of electromagnetic locks. She turned the handle, and the door swung open.
The lab was split into two areas, much like the underground lab that had housed Charlie. Half of the space was behind glass—the habitat where Lewis had been raised—and the other half was designed for the human scientists. As soon as she saw it, Samira began to doubt the wisdom of this plan.
If Paula had been with them, this could have worked. Paula knew how to update the system to control who had access to the room, and the authority to pull it off. She would have been able to bring in supplies without suspicion, at least for a time. How could they do it without her? Samira didn’t even know who could get in here, or when they might suddenly appear.
She didn’t even want to keep Charlie a secret, not really. She wanted to show him to the world. But how could she do that now? As soon as the CIA knew where they were, they would swoop in and clean up the mess. Even if they could stay hidden somehow, they might not control the narrative. Everson could publish pictures of the soldiers Charlie had killed and spin up public fears of rampaging dinosaurs. If he blamed her and Paula as reckless scientists and painted it as a Jurassic Park scenario, they could kill Charlie—or even just pretend to kill him—and the public probably wouldn’t even object.
Samira closed the door behind them. They would be safe here for the night, at least. They could get a little sleep and figure out what to do in the morning.
A sudden clatter and a loud curse from the opposite end of the room drove her heart into her throat. She looked in that direction, but all she saw was a counter with several microscopes on top of it. Then something moved underneath. A young man rolled off of a cot hidden in the shadows and clambered to his feet. He was tall and terribly thin, and he swept unruly hair out of his eyes to stare at Charlie. “Whoa,” he said. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Samira hunted in her memory for a name and came up with it. “Trevor,” she said. He was the graduate student who’d been working in the avian lab when Samira had picked up Wallace after returning from Thailand. She cursed herself. It should have occurred to her that someone might be here even this late at night. She’d slept over at the lab more than once herself as a student working long hours.
“That’s a dinosaur,” Trevor said with certainty and awe. “A maniraptor, am I right?” He finally tore his eyes away and looked at Samira. “Was this Paula’s big secret project? That she’s been disappearing off to so much?”
Samira sighed. “Yeah.”
“Wow. This is incredible. How did you get the DNA? What surrogate did you use, an ostrich? What method did you use to introduce the genome into the germ cells? Where’s Paula?”
Samira felt a lump forming in her throat and pushed past it to speak. She remembered how much she’d loved Paula as a graduate student, and doubted Trevor felt any different. “I’ve got bad news,” she said.
She told him, and he cried. She didn’t know this kid at all, but she felt a surge of affection for him as he tried to hide the tears that ran unbidden down his face. She sat with him, a hand on his shoulder, while Alex took stock of the room, opening all the drawers and cabinets and examining the equipment.
“We’re going to need some food for Charlie pretty soon,” Alex said. “Did you have a plan for that?”
Samira looked up. “Me? This is Paula’s place. She might have had a plan, but not me.”
“He needs live prey, not just meat. Where are we going to get that?”
“I don’t know! We’ll figure it out.”
Alex’s eyes were wide. “Figure it out? We’re not going to last here. How long do you think we can keep this a secret? As soon as it gets out that Paula is dead, people will be coming through here to check on her projects. Someone else will take over her job. And how do you propose we bring live animals in here without anyone noticing?”
“We’re not going to figure it out by panicking,” Samira said. “We’re all in shock and grieving for Paula. We need to get what rest we can and—”
She stopped when her father lurched forward, holding both hands over his mouth.
“Dad? Are you all right?’
He lurched again, and this time his hands came away and he couldn’t hold it back. He vomited bright red blood on the floor.
Samira felt weak, like her legs might suddenly give way. She tried to think of reasons why her father might be vomiting blood. Maybe he had a stomach ulcer. Or a tear in his stomach lining. But she knew it wasn’t any of those things. He was infected with the Julian virus.
She rushed forward to help him, but Alex grabbed her around the waist and held her back.
“Stay away,” her dad said, his voice a painful croak. “You know what this is. You can’t help me by catching it yourselves.”
Trevor, looking terrified, leaned carefully forward and passed him a roll of paper towels.
“You should all stay here,” Dad said, wiping his face. “I’ll make my way to a hospital.”
“Wait,” Samira said. “What about Mom? Is she sick? Is that why she didn’t come with you?”
“No,” he said miserably. “I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t know I was sick. She was really tired, which is unusual for her.”
Samira thumbed the icon on her phone to place a call to Mom, but it rang with no answer. She tried Beth next, who answered right away. “Samira? Where are you? Where have you been?”
“Look, there’s a lot to explain, but the most important part is, Mom may be sick. She’s at home, but she won’t answer her phone.”
“Sick...as in…”
“Yeah.”
“Did you try Dad’s phone?”
“Dad’s here with me. At the university.” Samira didn’t want to tell her, but that wasn’t fair to her. “Beth, he just threw up blood.”
“Oh no!”
“I’m afraid Mom may be sick, too, but no one is with her. You’re closer, and I know there’s a quarantine, but—”
“There’s no more quarantine. I’m on my way.”
“What?”
“They lifted the quarantine. This thing is just everywhere now, and Denver’s not even the worst. They need the Army more in other places, and the line in the sand they drew here is meaningless. They announced it a few hours ago.”
“So you’re going to go check on Mom, then?”
She heard a car door slam. “Already on my way.”
“I’ll take you to the hospital,” Samira said.
Her dad shook his head. “That’s stupid. You’ll only get infected yourself. I can still drive.” He lurched to his feet, a little unsteady, but walking fine. He took a few steps toward the door. It all seemed so logical: you get sick, you go to the hospital. As if he had any hope of coming back again.
“Wait!” Samira cried. Her eyes stung and her chest hurt. “Don’t go. They’re overrun at the hospital; there won’t be any free beds. And if this really is Julian, they won’t be able to help you.”
“If I stay here, I’ll just get all of you sick,” he said. “If I haven’t already.”
“Then stay in there.” Samira pointed to the glass enclosure where Lewis had spent the beginning of his life. It was just an empty space now, but it would keep him separated. “And if it isn’t Julian, then you’ll get better.”
Dad’s flat smile told her what he thought of that possibility, but he nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. He didn’t want to walk away and never see her again either.
“Take the chair with you,” she said. “And here—take Trevor’s cot.”
“Wait, what?” Trevor said.
“Come on, he’s sick. He’ll need to lie down.”
Grudgingly, Trevor pulled the cot out from under the counter and handed it over. Dad took it and the chair and dragged them through the glass door into the enclosure. He shut the door behind him. It clicked with a sound like the end of the world.
They stood there, staring at each other in horror, nobody knowing what to say, until Charlie moved, scraping one claw against the floor. Samira jumped and realized that for the first time, she had actually forgotten there was a dinosaur in the room.
“What is happening?” Charlie asked in his harsh voice.
Samira suddenly felt bone tired. “The sickness I told you about,” she said. “Many humans are dying.” She pointed into the enclosure. “Now my father is sick.”
“I help,” Charlie said.
“Help? How?”
“Change. Not sick.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Change.” She could see he was frustrated, not having the words to express what he was trying to say.
A pungent smell filled the room. No, Samira thought. We don’t have time for memories. Too late, she felt herself sliding into another time and place.
Prey stood at the edge of a modification pit, fifteen days before impact. He could see his reflection in the dark liquid, rippling gently in the granite ravine below. Could this actually work? Could they actually survive here?
Distant Rain joined him at the edge. Through all their work together, she’d been teaching him more than he’d ever understood about how this technology had developed. He knew the liquid had been invented to store scent communication, so that the stories of his people could be remembered and passed down, but he hadn’t known much more than that.
She’d taught him how the power their bodies naturally had to synthesize scent had given them dominance over their prey and formed the basis for their social hierarchy. Obvious, perhaps, but it had never occurred to him to connect their way their bodies worked to how their society was structured. Scent, she taught him, was also chemistry. Chemicals that could strip organic material down to its basic instructions, that could sample it, alter it, and coax it to replicate in new patterns. They’d learned to build complex chemicals that operated like machines. Once that was possible, those machines could be combined into larger and even more complex chemicals, and those larger machines into chemicals that represented whole systems of interaction and change.
Eventually, they learned to tailor plants and animals—and males—to best fit the jobs they were needed for. No one person could remember how to make chemicals of such great complexity, though, so that knowledge was stored in the pits, where those trained in their use could inhale them, read them, and apply them to the task at hand.
“It’s going to be hard for some of the females to accept,” Prey said. “The idea that they might have to be modified too.”
Rain bobbed in agreement. “They think they’re what’s keeping our species pure. That if we modify everyone, we won’t be people anymore. We’ll start a genetic slide that causes us to lose our true nature.”
“But isn’t that true?” Prey asked.
Rain snorted. “Not hardly. Or I should say, it is true, but it’s not new. Our species has been sliding for thousands of years.”
“Male modifications are enough to have a noticeable effect?”
“Sure, eventually. But it hasn’t always been just males, either, despite what our current leaders would have you believe. Females have been modified, too. In fact, our whole species has been modified en masse, and more than once.”
They walked around the edge of the pit, watching as cranes raised a wooden platform dripping with liquid.
“A hundred years ago, there was a skin disease that ravaged the coastal roosts and spread westward. It was both disfiguring and dangerous, leaving sufferers susceptible to infection and killing many. The modification engineers found a way to alter us to resist it. I suspect there have been more, too, forgotten over time, or intentionally buried. The greater size and strength of the females—was that given them by evolution? Or was it modified intentionally to give them power? Maybe a thousand years ago, it was males who dominated society.”
That didn’t sound likely to Prey—in nature, the whole purpose of life was reproduction, and it was females who did the reproducing. They could choose which males to accept, and thus whose genes would be passed on to the next generation. It only stood to reason that they would have the most power.
Distant Rain brought him inside, where a rush of conflicting smells made him cough. “It takes some getting used to,” she said.
Rows of organic blanks stood to the side, waiting to be programmed into walking load carriers, memory storage devices, bioluminescent light fixtures, music players, egg creches, nest cleaners, and a wide array of living entertainments and toys. But none of those things were being created now. Instead, the blanks were being used to test the modification fluid. Dozens of them had been shaped into eerie facsimiles of Rain herself, in different stages of transformation.
Prey shuddered as she showed them off with evident pride. “They look just like you. How can you stand to look at them?”
“They’re not really alive,” she said. “Well, technically alive, but not thinking or feeling. And the modifications are working well. Which is good, because we don’t have much time left to redesign.”
Prey walked down the row of subjects, trying to imagine those changes happening to him. If all went well, he would be finding out what it was like quite soon. It didn’t seem real.
“The whole world is going to change,” he said. “Our whole species, if we survive.”
Distant Rain came up behind him. “There’s one more story,” she said. “A myth really, from before we learned to store memories and pass knowledge reliably from generation to generation.”
“Before civilization, then,” Prey said.
“Not exactly. We believe there was civilization even before we learned to store memories, and some technology, too, but knowledge could only be passed directly from individual to individual. We have no record of it, only stories told across the years. But according to those stories, we first developed the ability to manipulate the chemistry and genetics of our own body to combat a disease. Legend says a plague swept through the world that was so bad it threatened to wipe out our whole species.”
“The Death Scent,” Prey said. “But that’s just a story, isn’t it? A tale for children.”
“I’m not so sure. I think the plague was real, and we adapted ourselves to survive it. Or maybe it was the plague itself that first made us who we are, genetically altering survivors to be able to understand our own body chemistry through our sense of smell.”
