by Romi Hart
Riley touched his wrist. She lowered her voice so only he could hear her. “I need to know for certain you’ll follow Victor’s orders out there. Don’t fly off the handle and go rogue on me, okay?”
He spun around to gape at her. “Of course I will! You know I will. How can you even ask that?”
She shrugged. “This will be your first deployment in the Quag. I know you’re loyal to the Crest, but you’ve always worked in Ogru-Kuche before. I just need to know you won’t let your first command go to your head. I need to know you’ll do what Victor says even if it means NOT engaging with these guys.”
Malachai stiffened. “Of course. I’ll always follow orders.”
She went back to observing her people. “Good. That’s all I need to hear.”
Now it was his turn to lower his voice. He cast a glance at her profile, surveyed the troops, and came back to studying her. He looked over at Victor, but his brother had his back to Malachai. “Listen to me. You’ve got a thousand hours more experience in this shit than I do. No one has to draw me a fucking map. This is his way of bringing me in on the leadership. I know that. Just between us, you’ll be the commanding officer on this mission. If you make a decision, I’ll ride with your authority. I don’t want to fuck this up. Consider yourself in charge of everyone, including me. Are we clear?”
She rotated her bright eyes to his face. “Yeah. We’re clear. I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’re loyal to Anarock. That’s the most important thing. You’ll follow Victor’s orders. You can’t fuck up as long as you do that.”
Malachai shook the tension out of his shoulders. He knew he could count on Riley for this. “Just don’t tell him I said so.”
She didn’t make a joke out of it. She didn’t even confront him with the fact that he was the one who insisted she tell Victor everything. She only nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I won’t tell anybody.”
He nodded, but he couldn’t look at her. He left and skedaddled to the armory to get his gear in order.
5
Isabelle sat at her workbench and did her best to concentrate on her computer screen. She kept drifting off thinking about the wreck. She kept reliving over and over the moment when the truck whizzed past her face. The wind brushed her cheeks. Malachai’s sturdy solidity surrounded her. He picked her up with no effort and carried her out of danger.
Where was he right now? He probably had a girlfriend. A guy like that couldn’t be single. That was impossible. Why else would he reject Isabelle’s overtures so diplomatically?
She hauled her awareness back to her screen. A spreadsheet of the department’s equipment order ran to dozens of pages of tiny squares, each one containing an utterly meaningless number.
Her vision blurred. She pictured him turning around before her eyes. His shoulders sloping under his suit fascinated her to the exclusion of all else. He moved in every direction with easy grace. Nothing disturbed him, not even that truck.
His soft, brown eyes darted one way and then the other. Every expression appeared ordained by Fate itself. Everything he did, everything he thought and saw and said impressed her as weighed down by cosmic significance.
She couldn’t think this way about him because he was so good-looking. She couldn’t be that shallow. His looks only reinforced the deep purposeful intent behind every twitch of his eyelashes.
Who was he? He wouldn’t tell her anything about himself—not that she really got a chance to ask. He made a few cryptic comments about his family, but he never really explained anything.
He must not know much about women. If he did, he would know that kind of thing only made a girl curious, especially one who earned her living solving mysteries just like him.
She cast a glance toward her handbag. She had stuffed the bloody tissue from the accident in there. She told herself at the time she would throw it away later, but she never got around to it. It was still in there, crammed at the dusty bottom along with pens that didn’t write and lighters that didn’t light.
She had a piece of him. She didn’t have him, but at least she had something. Fuck, she must be getting desperate if she used a filthy old tissue as a substitute for a guy who didn’t give her a second thought. She really needed to get out of the lab and go on a real date.
Blocking the tissue out of her mind, she forced herself to pull closer to her desk. She rested one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. She had to send this order and review her subordinates’ reports. She didn’t have time to daydream.
She scanned the spreadsheet for the thirtieth time, but it contained nothing new. She sent it without caring much if anything was missing or not. What difference did it make when all was said and done? So a top-secret military lab would have to wait another twenty-four hours for a box of 10mL pipettes to show up. The world wouldn’t stop turning. Lives wouldn’t be lost.
She flicked over to the staff reports and clicked open the first one. It listed the DNA results from a family the Border Patrol took into custody near South Padre Island. That was all the way over in Texas, so what the Christ was this report doing in New Orleans?
Apparently, some poor benighted Mexican family decided to take a skiff from Playa Bagdad just across the US border. They cooked up the brilliant idea to pack ten people into a boat barely big enough for five and ride it around the motherfucking US border to land in the swamps of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas side.
Needless to say, that worked out about as well as could be expected. The boat foundered, of course, and discharged its passengers in one of the most gator-infested stretches of coast north of the equator. The father got attacked by a gator—or maybe it didn’t quite play out like that. Either way, one of the kids, a ten-year-old boy, jumped in to defend his father.
Turns out the kid had some kind of superhuman strength. He broke the gator’s neck just in time for a Border Patrol boat crew to see the whole incident through their binoculars from off the coast. They apprehended the whole family and bundled them off to the nearest immigration containment center.
That begged the question why these DNA results ended up on Isabelle’s desk. The Border Patrol could have sent them to any one of a dozen military labs in San Antonio for analysis.
She scrolled down to view the results, but she didn’t analyze them herself. That was her subordinate technician’s job, not hers. She was the lab supervisor, not a military analyst. Adrenaline could have given the kid extra strength to save his father’s life. What other explanation was there? Once she ascertained that the tech ran the tests correctly, she flicked the report to her own superior officer.
She pulled up the next report. It was another DNA report from the same party. She read through seven more identical reports. By the end, she barely looked at them at all. She checked one or two trivial details and passed them on up the chain of command.
The next document in her inbox was a confirmation of a previous equipment order. She didn’t even look at it. She turned aside…..and spotted her handbag again. The tissue…. DNA…. A demonic hint of an idea crept into her brain.
She could DNA test the tissue and bring up every personal detail on Malachai Griffin from the government’s classified database. She could get his home address, his personal phone number, his income tax records, his criminal background—everything she could possibly want to know was in that tissue.
She rotated her stool around to put the handbag behind her back. She worked for the US public. She couldn’t use military equipment to DNA test an innocent man. She didn’t do that. She protected the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Malachai wasn’t that. Not a chance.
Anyway, she already gave up on Malachai. He wasn’t interested—at least, he wasn’t interested enough to show it. That made him as good as not interested. He said so and she had no reason to doubt it. If he already said no more than once, what more did she really need to know?
She skimmed another ten reports without thinking about Malachai once. S
he read clinical diagnostic tests identifying immune factors from returned servicemen. The tests revealed strange side effects upon repatriation to the States from certain classified deployments no one knew about. She read a very curious report on a group of Australian SAS men whose fingerprints shifted and changed their patterns every forty hours.
She frowned over the results. The Australian Army turned these guys over to NATO. NATO had them confined in a secret prison in the Swiss Alps. The doctors fingerprinted them every two hours. They had documentation of the changing fingerprints.
Isabelle furrowed her brow even more. This was impossible and yet the evidence turned out to be incontrovertible. The report included a screed of bloodwork for analysis. The email that came with it asked her to check if anything in their bloodwork suggested what could be causing the change.
What could possibly cause a change like that? Anyway, the NATO pathologists ought to be able to see that for themselves. Why send the results across the planet to get her to check?
She’d seen some crazy shit in this job. Just when she thought she’d seen it all, something like this turned up. She scrolled down to the bloodwork results. Everything in them suggested they came from healthy men in the prime of life. Even their DNA tests came up normal.
DNA. Malachai. That niggling suggestion caught her unawares. She glanced over at her handbag. Aw, what the fuck. Whatever she did, the results would never leave this lab. Malachai would never know she ran his blood because she would never use what she found to track him down.
She pivoted her stool and seized the bag. She ripped the zipper open and rummaged among hairbrushes and flashlights until she located the tissue. She pulled it out and put it on her desk. She shouldn’t do this, but she already knew she would. She had absolutely nothing to lose and working in a top-secret lab had to provide some benefits. Didn’t it?
Her fingers trembled running the test. She dropped reagent into a petri dish to isolate the sample. Once she did that, she slipped the petri dish into the FISH reader. She fidgeted on her stool waiting for the indicator light to change color.
What the fuck was she doing? When did she become this anxious teenager waiting for some jackass to call when he already told her point-blank he wasn’t interested?
The light changed from orange to green. Her heart fluttered when she faced her computer screen, but of course, she had to wait another five minutes for the results to load.
First, a bar appeared. The green portion of the line crawled toward completion. The percentage counted up at a glacial speed. 16%. 58%. 72%.... Did it always take this long or was she losing her mind?
At last, it clicked over and the bar vanished. Database search complete. A file blinked onto the desktop. She held her breath clicking it open. The biographical information fed onto the screen.
Malachai Ambrose Griffin.
DMV registered address: 2000 Louisiana Avenue, New Orleans.
A tendril of ice water ran up Isabelle’s spine. That couldn’t be right. Louisiana Avenue? That was in the heart of Central City. Such a clean-cut guy couldn’t come from one of the most poverty-stricken and dangerous inner-city neighborhoods in town. That made no sense at all.
Besides, 2000 Louisiana Avenue was a busy intersection of buildings and stores. The residential parts of Central City spread around it. She couldn’t think of any houses or apartment complexes in the area.
The screen winked one more time and another file appeared. FISH results. She opened the document and a bunch of coded gene combinations read across her view. She skipped down to the immune results. First came a whole lot of garbled immune factors along with their titer rates.
Twenty or thirty of them read normal, but the next series contradicted everything she knew about biology.
IgM: titer 27800 mg/dL
IgG: titer 58900 mg/dL
IgA: titer 30000 mg/dL
IgD: titer 15000 mg/dL
She knit her brow at the numbers. This was all wrong. These results were several thousand times the normal human level. There must be something wrong with the machine.
Another raft of data came up down below.
IFN-alpha: titer 0 mg/dL
IFN-beta: titer 0 mg/dL
IFN-gamma: titer 0 mg/dL
Now she knew for certain something was seriously off. No way could a human being survive with zero Interferon levels. Malachai would have to be dead or terminal in a hospital bed for that to be right.
Farther down the page, her jaw dropped when she read the Transforming Growth Favor-beta levels. They were off the charts. They were beyond off the charts. They were unreal.
Normal human Transforming Growth Favor-beta was produced by B cells, macrophages, and mast cells, but when she checked the titer percentages of those cells, they came up normal. Where was he producing all this Transforming Growth Factor, then?
A bunch of hormone levels deepened the problem. Erythropoietin. Glucagon. Growth Hormone. Thyroxine. Epinephrine.
She scowled at them. She hadn’t seen hormone levels this high in anyone except hardcore methamphetamine addicts.
Testosterone. Dehydroepiandrosterone. Mineralocorticoid. The androgen levels were also way too high. She might feel tempted to suspect they were what gave Malachai such a magnetic effect on females, but anything this high should have killed him.
She almost hated to read the rest of the report, but when she scanned down the page, she got her answer. The report spat out a whole lot of jumbled numbers and letters that made no sense at all.
ROA: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 201 mg/dL
EFP: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 9 mg/dL
POA: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 48 mg/dL
UWF: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 394 mg/dL
K23: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 85 mg/dL
57-12: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 7 mg/dL
38456-149: FACTOR UNKNOWN: titer 3498 mg/dL
3-40958-3490578=139407156=0349861=134-9856: FACTOR UNKNOWN
671-3408912-=3580367: FACTOR UNKNOWN
She blinked at the page, but those fateful words didn’t go away. Factor unknown. Where could all these unknown immune factors be coming from? Unknown factors in a person’s blood usually translated in the scientific world as pathogens. These unknown elements, whatever they were, didn’t seem to be causing Malachai any medical hardship—quite the opposite. He was healthy and thriving.
Her fingertips hovered over the keyboard. What exactly could she search to find the answers to her questions? She hardly dared to enter the request.
Something weird was going on. She cast her memory back to her encounter, first with Riley and later with Malachai alone. They both knew something. This must be why they didn’t want Isabelle hitting on Malachai. They knew something about him they didn’t want her finding out. He said his family didn’t mix with outsiders.
Riley must have found out if she married Malachai’s brother. That must be what he meant when he said this dictate to avoid contact with the outside didn’t apply to her.
Isabelle attacked her keyboard. She would find out. Whatever it was about him that they wanted to keep a secret, she would find out. Fuck all that. No one was going to hide anything from her without her permission.
She navigated to a different database. Then she cut and pasted the unknown immune signatures into the search window. Her fingers trembled when she hit Enter. The database ran away before her eyes. She let her eyes blur. This could take a while.
The machine startled her by beeping right away. She gaped at the desktop. She didn’t understand what she was seeing.
A picture of a Komodo dragon appeared in front of her. She examined the huge lizard. The image showed a large black monster straddling a dead deer. The creature rested its hooked forepaw on its prey’s shoulder and cast a murderous glare toward the camera.
Next up came a picture of a reptile flying through the air. Wings of skin extended from its sides as it glided from one tree to another. Down at the bottom, the words stood out from the page: flying dragon lizard: Draco vo
lans.
Something was way fucking wrong with this. The next image depicted a very ordinary horned toad from the American Southwest, but Isabelle didn’t like where this was going.
The next photograph made her skin crawl. A dinosaur specimen spread its tiny, spiked flame-red wings and bared its tiny fangs at the viewer. The caption at the bottom listed, Dorygnathusaurus pelagicus, the four-winged, spiny-hipped dragon.
Those words tiptoed up her back and her hair stood on end. She couldn’t wrench her eyes away from the screen. What were these blood factors doing in Malachai? How could he possibly have anything in common with these creatures? Yet the results seemed to speak for themselves.
She did her best to discard them. It was impossible, absolutely impossible. She skipped back to the top of the page to the FISH results of the genetic combination readout. She copy-and-pasted that into a different spreadsheet search engine.
Her blood boiled waiting for the results to come up, but something told her they would be the same. How could this be? Sure enough, the results came back a lot quicker this time. The same four pictures appeared.
She flicked them shut in seconds. She couldn’t look at those awful pictures. She swiveled her stool around so she wouldn’t see her computer at all. Now she wished more than anything that she never even thought to DNA test Malachai’s blood. She never should have opened that Pandora’s box. Now she couldn’t shut it.
That was the real problem with working as a pathologist in a top-secret military lab. Mysteries crossed her desk all the time. Her natural curiosity drove her to solve them. She couldn’t leave them alone. She would be dwelling on this crazy situation until she found out what exactly caused these results.
She cast her mind back in time to remember Malachai the way he was when she bumped into him and Riley on Canal Street. He stood so straight and square in his suit. He stood right in front of her studying her with that penetrating gaze of his, but he looked different to her now.
She couldn’t erase those reptiles from her mind’s eye. She saw them overlaid on top of his memory. She couldn’t wipe them out. They made him look like…. well, like a monster hidden under a handsome exterior.