The area affected by the anomaly was too large to cordon completely, but warning signs had been hammered into the ground at regular intervals, and a barbed-wire fence surrounded the most dangerous areas, including the main compound, where several temporary structures had been erected in the remains of the abandoned neighborhood, including an enormous white-walled hangar. Quinn and Clo flashed their IDs at the gate and signed a digital logbook before being given brief instructions: protective gear was required at all times; they had to be out of the cordon by dark; all liability was theirs; etc. They were each handed a thick plastic packet, inside of which was a thin white hazmat suit, including soft head covering. They explained they had their own, but the guards insisted sternly that visitors were only allowed to wear EPA-approved protective gear. They tried to explain that their suits actually offered more protection, but the guard wouldn’t hear it, and after rolling their eyes at each other, they parked near a large dump truck and slipped the thin suits over their much more robust SCA uniforms.
The land had been razed as far as either of them could see. The anomaly was radioactive, which meant the material it deposited was as well, albeit less so, and every inch of earth to a depth of six inches had to be dug up and carted off by train to the Nevada desert. Trees, grass, homes, absolutely everything inside the anomaly had been pulled down by the EPA, whose backhoes were still hard at work in the distance. There was nothing left. It was apocalyptic.
“What a mess,” Clo said through her head covering, which muffled her voice.
After several moments of bleak silence, a noticeably short man in a much fancier orange suit and black galoshes walked over to greet them. Ezra followed.
“I’m Nelson,” he said through some kind of suit-mounted speaker. “Gary Nelson. I’m the site director here for the EPA.”
“Nice to meet you, Gary.” Quinn took his hand. “I hear you got a body for us.”
“Yes. Well, there’s that, too. We didn’t touch it, as ordered. We kept it in the temporary structure there.” He pointed to the enormous tarp-walled hangar, but he was already walking in a different direction.
Quinn noticed that Ezra had wrangled one of the nicer suits, whereas his own made it difficult to see. The flexible plastic of the visor had been folded inside the case, and the crease cut right through Quinn’s line of vision. The hood was also poorly ventilated, and Quinn felt like he needed to shout over the sound of his own breathing.
“Is it still very radioactive?” he asked.
“Only where we’re working. But chronic exposure even to low levels can cause all kinds of long-term problems. Best to be careful.”
“You said ‘that too.’” Clo also raised her voice to be heard. “Was there something else?”
“Yeah, I’ve been briefing your colleague here.” He motioned to Ezra. “The house and body can be preserved. We could even move them if you needed us to. It’s the other one that’s the problem. We weren’t sure what you wanted us to do with it.”
“Other one? You mean another body?”
“No.” Gary shook his head.
“You just have to see it,” Ezra said ominously.
“It’s down in grid six-nine. We can ride in this.”
Gary motioned to a small covered ATV, one in a row, all marked with the EPA logo. It was a tight fit that required Ezra’s feet to hang off the back, but they got everyone inside, and as the tires rolled over bare, crumbly earth, Quinn watched men and equipment slowly working in small, distant teams. One group was spraying liquid from tanks on their backs which gathered into a rolling red stream, almost like flowing lava. The ATV drove through it.
“Helluva operation you got here, Gar.”
“It’s not toxic,” he said. “It helps absorb radiation and also nitrogenates the soil. Best thing for this place is to get the plant cover back as soon as possible. Is it true what they say? About what happened here?”
“I dunno. What do they say?”
“That you guys disabled the anomaly with a cryogenic bomb.”
Quinn nodded once. “Something like that.”
In the distance, an enormous wheeled machine dug up the landscape as it crept forward. Two spoked spindles at the front turned over each other and chewed everything: trees, dirt, rocks, human debris. All of it got pulverized and carried to the back, where it was sprayed into the back of a dump truck.
“You know,” Gary said, “I have a degree in chemistry. Lots of experience cleaning up dangerous compounds.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s just. I heard you guys were hiring. So, maybe . . . You know.”
Quinn gave Clo a look.
“You wanna be a Crimes Division officer, Gar?”
“You guys got all the cool stuff. I heard Arkane made you pulse rifles.”
“What’s a pulse rifle?” Clo asked.
“You don’t know?” Gary turned. He seemed shocked.
“If we did,” Quinn told him, “we couldn’t say, now could we? Something like that would have to be kept secret.”
“Of course.” Gary made a zipping motion over his visor near his lips. “So, how about it?”
“Well, unfortunately, all that stuff has to go through the director. But if you wanted to submit a resume, I’m sure he’d take a look.”
“I did. I wondered if maybe you guys could put in a good word.”
“That we will, Gar. That we will.”
After a short, bumpy ride, the ATV stopped at a small rise.
“This is it.”
Clo stood slowly, eyes glued to the object in the wide, shallow depression below.
“Whoa . . .”
“That’s what I said,” Ezra told her.
An enormous metal sphere rested still in the dirt.
Gary got out and walked toward it. “We’ve been dousing it with liquid nitrogen every ten minutes,” he said. “We’re not sure if that’s doing anything, but since cold worked on the big one, we thought it was better to be safe.”
A man in a white hazmat suit sat in a lawn chair near the sphere reading a book. Next to him was a liquid nitrogen dispersal backpack, complete with tank and heavy-nozzled sprayer.
While the others stood staring, Quinn approached the dull sphere. It was almost twice as tall as him and perfectly smooth. He reached out a gloved hand to touch it, but stopped a few inches away. He could see his own dark, blurry reflection. It was warped and twisted even though the surface didn’t appear to be.
“It’s okay,” Gary explained, running his hand across the surface. “It’s completely inert.” He knocked on it, but there was no sound. “Seems to be solid.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Well, according to FEMA, it wasn’t here originally, which meant it must’ve formed after you guys knocked that thing out.”
“Like a spore,” Ezra said.
Clo took a step back. “You mean it could make another one of those things?”
“It’s just a guess,” Ezra added quickly. “But single-celled organisms often form spores when environmental conditions become too hostile for growth. Spores found on the exterior of the International Space Station survived in a vacuum, constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, for decades. Spores have survived inside Antarctic ice cores for tens of thousands of years, only to be successfully revived.”
“That sounds like it should be illegal,” she drolled.
“It is,” Quinn said. “The court ruled the Extinct Species Resurrection Act applies broadly to microbes.”
“Well, that’s good to know.”
Quinn followed Clo in a slow circuit around the large sphere. It was eerie.
“And you’re sure it hasn’t grown?” he asked.
“Yup,” Gary said. “Hasn’t changed at all. It’s 3.47 meters in diameter, exactly the same as when we found it. We’re trying to keep it below minus 30 centigrade. That seems to be doing the trick.”
“Well . . .” Quinn sighed. “Someone’s gonna have to take this thing to the containment facility. And find a way to keep it cold on the way.”
Slowly, everyone turned to Ezra, who blushed under his hood.
Quinn glanced to the inert sphere once more. “But let’s clear the house first so Gary and his team can finish their work.”
“We’d appreciate that.”
“Then, Ez, you’re gonna have to take point on this.”
“Why me?” He almost pouted.
“Well. Because your theory about it being a spore is the best we got. And because you don’t have any homicide experience. And, well, because there isn’t anybody else.”
He sighed disappointedly.
“Next time,” Quinn consoled him on his way back to the ATV.
They rode back to the main compound, where Quinn saw Sheriff Landry waiting by the main gate. She was in her regular jacket and uniform. The guards clearly didn’t like her lack of protective gear, but she apparently agreed not to move from the gate, so they tolerated her insubordination.
“Can’t stay away, can you?” she called as Quinn walked over.
“Sheriff,” he said, taking off his helmet. They shook hands. “Good to see you. How’s Delmer?”
“Oh, sittin’ in jail.”
“I thought you agreed to tear up all his warrants.”
“The old ones, sure. I didn’t say anything about anything new. He assaulted one of those army guys.”
“The one who tazed him?”
She nodded. “He knows damned well he can’t go around punching people in the face. Even if they deserve it.” She held up a packet of documents paper-clipped to a manila envelope.
“Ah. You got it.”
“You wanna tell me what it means?”
“I sent it early because I thought you might want your lawyers to take a look at it.”
“I’d rather hear it from you.”
“Fair enough. That document says that due to a lack of resources and subject matter expertise, you officially request the investigation into these events be led by the Crimes Division of the Science Control Agency, US Department of Education.”
Sheriff Landry smiled wryly. She knew there was some hidden significance to the transaction he was proposing, but she also knew that, whatever it was, Quinn was deliberately protecting her from it, so she let him talk, and when he was done with his spiel, she signed the packet in three places without fanfare.
“There.” She handed it back. “We good?”
“We are excellent,” Quinn said, extending his hand again.
The sheriff took it. “I know you got all this nonsense goin’ on, but if you can, you should stick around for some pie.”
“Pie?”
She motioned down the road. “Town’s having a little do. You know, to celebrate not being wiped off the map’n all. I can think of a few folks that’d like to shake your hand.”
“Well, if it’s not too late when we’re done, we’ll stop by. Or I will. I can’t speak for the others.”
“Can’t say I’d blame them if they skipped out. I’m not much for these things either. But you know how it goes. Got an election coming up.”
She winked and walked back toward her patrol car.
“What’s that all about?” Clo asked from several paces back.
“Just a joke. She’s a shoo-in.”
“I meant that,” she said, pointing at the packet in Quinn’s hand.
“Oh.” He held it up. “Nothing exists to the director that isn’t on a piece of paper. So, here’s paper.”
Clo unlocked the rental car so Quinn could put it inside. “And what’s he gonna do when he sees that?”
“Hopefully, not have an arrhythmia,” he joked.
Clo scowled. “Something going on I need to know about?”
“Nope. Just typical agency bullshit.”
She thought for a moment. “He told you not to investigate it.”
Quinn cocked his head. “Not exactly.”
“I don’t get it. Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing we’re supposed to investigate?”
“To be fair, I think the director sees this whole episode as a failure.” He motioned to the decimated landscape. “He wants us to focus on threat reports because he thinks that’s our best chance of getting ahead of this kinda stuff, of stopping it before it happens.”
“Bad guys aren’t gonna apply for a science license.”
“Yeah, well, try telling him that.”
As the pair headed toward the enormous white hangar, Clo nodded back toward the car. “Are a couple signatures gonna be enough to convince him?”
“Dunno. I’m having a hard time reading the man.”
“Might that be because he’s wasting away in a hospital bed?”
“Maybe. Part of me says he’s got some sort of plan, that he wants FEMA to issue their incident report absent a root cause so he can use the omission as an excuse to wrangle for a bigger budget or something. Or, maybe we’re the pointy end of a cover up.”
“A cover up?” Clo scowled. “For who?”
“No idea. Then again, part of me also thinks he’s just a career bureaucrat who can’t see beyond his own nose, and if the incident report comes out absent any progress on the investigation and people start demanding answers, he’ll just throw one of us under the bus and introduce a bunch of reactionary policies. Either way, I’m trying to head him off at the pass.”
Clo shook her head as they went through a decontamination tunnel. Signs instructed them to raise their arms as jets of treated air hit their bodies.
“You’d think that after something crazy like this they’d back off a bit and let us do our jobs.”
“Yeah, well, no matter where you are, management always thinks we exist to support them rather than the reverse.”
The giant white hangar had no floor. Under their feet was the same bare dirt as outside. Resting on it at even intervals were all the things salvaged from the chaos, including everything inorganic, which was mostly trash, arranged by size, along with several of the strange spires Quinn had seen from the air. Multiple trees that had been partially replicated by the anomaly stood in a cluster like a charcoal sculpture of a glitched forest. At the back of the enormous space was the boarded, derelict house, which stood alone against the white wall of the hangar.
“That’s not at all creepy,” Clo said.
Ezra had prepared their equipment on a folding-leg table in what would’ve been the home’s front yard.
“Everything’s working,” he said as the others approached. The spherical drone hovered in the air behind him.
“Coms check,” Quinn said.
“Loud and clear,” Thalia replied from her desk at Section 08.
“Drone’s on camera duty,” he told her. “Record everything.”
“10-4.”
“Ez, you’re handling equipment and taking samples.”
“Got it.”
“I don’t have to tell you all what almost happened here, how close this was to a tragedy. A unknown technology darn near swallowed an entire town.” Quinn paused to let that sink in. “Someone is responsible for that. Several families lost everything. Three people are confirmed dead. Two seem to be accidental, according to our friends at FEMA. The third”—Quinn pointed to the house—“is certainly not. Based on the state of the body, we’re proceeding as if this was a murder. However, we should not immediately assume it’s related to the anomaly. It could be this guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The kids Ez and I spoke to said he’d been hanging around the abandoned neighborhood for a couple months. Maybe it was just bad timing. Or, someone might’ve saw the anomaly as an opportunity to rid themselves of a body. Or, neither of those. That means for today, our job is two-fold. We have two separate lines of evidence we’re tracking. We need to discover the identity of this man and what happened to him, and we need identify the cause of the anomaly and how it got loose, taking this house as the point of origin. For that reason, as we go through it, I want Clo and Kripke to focus on the anomaly. Thalia and I will focus on the murder. When we’re done, we’ll switch up and go back through the whole thing again to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Make sense?”
Everyone nodded.
“All right. Let’s get to work.”
The house had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and small garage on a simple plan. The front door opened to the living area, which connected to a dining nook and adjacent kitchen, where one side of the sliding door to the back was shattered. The other was empty and had once been covered by a large sheet of plywood from the outside. The wood had since been forced out, presumably by the growing anomaly. Same for the windows. White light scattered by the translucent walls of the hangar entered at gaps and crevices in the ceiling and lit everything in uneven beams, like tiny spotlights, including the bits of dust that floated in the air.
“Certainly didn’t want anyone spying on him,” Clo said from the kitchen. “This place was locked up tight.”
She was examining a large rolling battery from which wires emerged and snaked down the hall.
“I got a laptop cord here,” she said. “Keep an eye out.”
“Roger that.”
The heavy block battery was lined in green plastic, indicating it was “eco-friendly,” which probably meant it was part of a solar generator. Only the panel wasn’t present.
“Looks like he charged elsewhere and swapped the batteries with each visit,” Clo said. “Definitely trying to cover his tracks by not leaving panels up.”
The front bedrooms were empty save for debris, strips of torn carpet, and the odd piece of broken furniture. Some moss and a few saplings sprouted from gaps in the floor near the corners, which got more light.
“Bucket in the hall bathroom,” Quinn called. “Looks like he rigged a rain catch. There’s a tube coming down from the roof.”
The house hadn’t had water or power in decades, but as long as the pipes to the old sewer weren’t blocked, the toilet would still function if the reservoir were manually filled. Quinn found several empty five-gallon containers of water.
In the master bedroom was a plastic tool cabinet that seemed horribly out of place, along with several recently broken pieces of scientific equipment. Quinn didn’t recognize any of it.
“Looks custom,” Kripke said from the radio.
“Any ideas, doc?”
“I dunno. Maybe biology stuff.”
Clo snorted into the radio. “Man damn near won a Nobel Prize and that’s his description. ‘Biology stuff.’”
The others chuckled.
“Ha-ha,” Dr. Kripke drolled sarcastically. “I would like to remind all of you that I’m feeling a computer replication on a Braille screen.”
“Ez,” Quinn called. “Make sure you get detailed shots of all this equipment, inside and out. If we can’t find the specs, we may have to digitally reverse engineer it.”
“Got it.”
A pair of wires from the hall wrapped around the master bedroom and into the master bath, where the tub had been lined in a pair of tarps, one blue and one white, which hung over the side. Resting inside the tub amid more broken glass was a specialty stand meant to hold something circular, or so the round metal opening at the top suggested. But whatever it was, it was gone.
As he turned back to the bedroom, Quinn’s eyes caught the momentary iridescent reflection of the veins of dark material running through the walls and ceiling.
“See something?” Thalia asked, watching from the drone.
“Maybe. Can you stitch together some images to simulate an aerial view of the floor? I wanna see what this entire house looks like from the sky as if it had no roof.”
“Sure. Just give me a sec. But while I’m doing that, check out the mat near the front. Computer flagged something on infrared. Partial boot print. Fresh. But it doesn’t look like our guy was wearing boots. Could be our murderer.”
“Roger that.”
Quinn found the “mat,” which was actually a flat piece of cardboard apparently used as a doormat. It had been pushed or accidentally kicked to one side.
“I see some marks on it that could be tread,” Quinn said. “But I can’t make out a print.”
“It’s okay. I have a clean image. And I have that composite you asked for.”
“That was fast. Can the drone project it?”
“Sure. One sec.”
The spherical device hovered in the center of the living room and projected and image against the wall of the dining nook. It looked exactly like what Quinn had requested. A photograph of the house from the air as if it had no roof.
“Can you highlight the veins of material?”
“Um. I think so. As long as they have a distinct refraction in IR or—yeah, here. UV does it. I’ll overlay.”
Immediately, everyone could see the pattern Quinn had sensed in the room. The veins of material throughout the house all radiated outward from a single point.
“Jesus,” Clo breathed.
“The origin isn’t the house,” Quinn said, turning to the corpse. “It’s the body.”
He walked around it slowly.
“What are you looking for?” Thalia asked.
“Some kind of entry or exit wound or something.”
But there was nothing. Quinn knelt in front of the man and looked at his extended arm and painfully distorted face.
“Looks like he was in a lot of pain,” Clo said.
“It was inside him,” Quinn said softly.
Ezra covered his mouth. “You mean, like, it ate its way out?”
Quinn nodded. “Looks like it.”
“Why wouldn’t he move?” Clo asked. “Run for the bathroom. Something.”
Quinn stood and wrapped one hand around the man’s limp left wrist, as if he were holding the arm up. He wrapped his other hand around the man’s throat.
“Because whoever beat the crap out of him was holding him here. Left-handed. Like this.” He let go and stood back. “Clo, what was the name of that paleontologist we interviewed about helping us with the illegal resurrection of extinct species?”
“Umm . . .” She opened her phone and scrolled through her notes. “Washington. Dr. Shepard Washington. Out of College Station. Not too far from here, actually.”
“That’s what made me think of it. Get him on the phone. Tell him we need his help with a murder, and ask if we can bring the body to his lab. I’ll need all his contact information, too. Ez, go find your friend Gary. Tell him we need to get the body rigged for transport.”
“Transport?”
Quinn’s phone rang and he reached for it. “Promise him a job if you have to. I want this in College Station tomorrow.”
“Um. Okay?”
The caller ID said Dr. Chang.
“Is that who I think it is?” Thalia asked through the radio.
Quinn turned to see the drone in the air behind him. He turned his radio off and stepped outside to answer the call.
“Commissioner,” he said. “How are you, sir?”
“Agent Quinn, I’m going to make a very unusual request, and I’d like you to listen to it and say nothing but your answer. Can you do that?”
“Of course, sir.”
“I assumed so. Legally, I am obliged to tell you that there are others on the line listening to this call, but unfortunately I am not at liberty to introduce them. There’s a grave issue of international significance that is taking a rather long time to sort out and which, for the moment, seems to depend entirely on your answer to the following question: Did you, or did you not, receive a call from Ms. Tesla approximately three days ago?”
Quinn scowled. “I’m sorry, sir. That went in a completely different direction than I expected. Are you asking if I got a call from Nio?”
“Yes. Please answer yes or no, and we will let you get back to work.”
Quinn paused. “In other words, I’m not allowed to ask why you’re asking me this.”
“That is correct.”
“Is she okay? Where is she?”
“I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you that she’s safe and that I am personally handling the matter.”
“What matter?”
But his boss’s boss didn’t say.
Quinn knew Dr. Chang wouldn’t call unless it was serious. What he couldn’t know—what someone was making sure he couldn’t know—was whether it was the truth or a lie that helped his friend. She hadn’t called. He hadn’t heard from her in weeks, in fact. But if she had used him as an alibi, he would need to lie to preserve her good name.
But it was the fact that the others listening couldn’t be named that he suspected was the most relevant. That must give the threat away somehow. But then, there were only a handful of agencies that would act that way. It wasn’t the FBI. Erving would just call and ask without all the cloak and dagger. That suggested one of the state security services. Given Nio’s ties, one in particular.
“Agent Quinn?”
Then there was Chang. He had to play his role as determined by the law. But he wouldn’t hang Nio out to dry. He would’ve given Quinn a clue.
But what?
“We really must have your answer.”
Quinn lowered the phone and shut his eyes and ran back through the short conversation in his head.
There’s a grave issue of international significance that is taking a rather long time to sort out.
That was it.
Dr. Chang’s hands were tied and he was asking for more time.
He wanted Quinn to stall.
“Agent Qu—”
“Sir, I understand what you’re asking,” he said with special emphasis. “But I’m afraid you’re not giving me much to go on. It’s a simple question, I know—or ostensibly so. But since I’m not allowed even to know the context, I have to assume there is some significance being deliberately withheld that has some bearing on me personally. For that reason, I must invoke the privilege guaranteed to me under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and neither affirm nor deny that a call was received.”
“That’s bullshit!” someone yelled. A woman. Possibly with a Boston accent. “Answer the damned question!”
“I have,” Quinn said. “And unless one you is hiding behind one of these vehicles with a warrant, this conversation is over.”
He hung up.