by A. G. Riddle
Adeline shook her head.
“They are extinct. This is another message. Can you guess it?”
Adeline thought for a moment. “They hunted bison?”
“Yes. But more. It tells us when. They hunted them a very, very long time ago. They lived a very long time ago. Taken together, the artists are telling us: ‘We were here. We think the way you do. And we lived a very, very long time ago.’”
He led her deeper into the cave, to a painting on the wall. It was a doe, standing alone, regal. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he whispered.
She nodded.
“Not half as beautiful as you.”
A few feet away, they stopped at a small alcove where several holes had been dug. Metal containers were stacked up.
He opened one, revealing long bones, of legs, Adeline thought. Another held part of a skull.
“These are the artists?” she asked.
“Perhaps. Or someone like them. But these bones are much more. They are part of a larger message, sent across time, waiting for us to find, to study and understand when we’re ready.”
Adeline bunched up her eyebrows.
Her father seemed to read her confusion. “These bones are like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.”
Adeline knew the story well. During a great famine, Hansel and Gretel’s parents were afraid of starving. They were so scared that they led their only two children into the woods and left them there, ridding themselves of two mouths to feed. But Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs along the way, marking the path back home. To the children’s horror, they discover that wolves had eaten the bread crumbs, stranding them in the dangerous wilderness.
Adeline considered the story, but she couldn’t figure out what it had to do with the bones. “Bread crumbs to what, Papa?”
“The truth. Someday, we will find all the bones like these. They will mark a path, just like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, and we will finally know how we became what we are… and what we are destined to become.”
He squatted down to look her in the eye. “The bones are pieces of a puzzle, left for us to find someday—when we are ready to put them together, when our technology can unravel the mystery. It will be the greatest discovery of all time. We only need to find the pieces. Would you like to help me search for them?”
Adeline nodded.
“Someday we will. But right now, the world is like the woods in Hansel and Gretel. Dangerous. You’ve seen the wolves.”
She knitted her eyebrows.
He smiled. “The mean man on the train.” He tucked her hair behind her ear. “But they will never harm you. When your mother wakes, she will take you to a city on the sea, and you’ll sail away, to another city on the sea, in a faraway place that your mother knows well.”
He gripped her shoulders. “You’ll return when it’s safe.”
“And you’re coming with us.”
He said nothing.
She shook her head.
He gripped her tighter. “I can’t.”
“Why, Papa?”
“They want my work. They would chase me to the end of the Earth for it. I’ll go back to Berlin, and hide what I’ve found. And wait. You and your mother will return when the world is out of the woods. And we’ll go off and find the rest of the bread crumbs. Together.”
Chapter One
The shouts woke Dr. Peyton Shaw. She reached down and tucked the heavy wool blanket into her sides, trying to get warmer. A space heater buzzed a few feet away, but the small office was still frigid.
Beyond the closed door, the shouts turned to excited conversation. Peyton caught only phrases.
“No genomic match.”
“Definitely not a Neanderthal.”
“… a new human species.”
The office’s only window was a wide piece of plate glass that looked out on the ship’s cargo hold. The cavernous space had been converted into a research lab for the mission, and it was always teeming with activity. The glow of fluorescent lamps seeped into the office, casting it in a pale light, like the streets of London on a foggy night. Peyton wanted to go out and see what the commotion was about, but she was still exhausted from her last dive to the shipwreck. So she lay in bed and listened, her eyes drifting to the walls covered with photographs of bones and dead bodies. It looked like a crime scene investigation was underway.
Peyton was used to investigations and uncomfortable quarters. She had spent her life investigating outbreaks in hot zones around the world. The biggest challenge of her career had come last month, when the X1 pandemic had ravaged the world. Billions were infected. Thirty million had died, including many of Peyton’s colleagues at the CDC and students in her EIS program. The losses had been hard, especially once she learned the truth about the deadly event.
In the course of tracing the pandemic, Peyton had learned that the outbreak was an act of bioterrorism. Yuri Pachenko and his organization, the Citium, had unleashed the pathogen on the world for one reason: to offer a cure. But the cure was more than it seemed. It stopped the pathogen, but it also contained a nanotechnology called Rapture.
Little was known about Rapture, other than that it was part of a larger device called the Looking Glass. When combined with two other technologies, Rook and Rendition, Rapture and the Looking Glass would give Yuri control of every person on Earth.
Already struggling in the wake of the millions of deaths caused by the pandemic, governments around the world were now desperate to prevent the completion of the Looking Glass. They were searching the world for the Citium, but they had very few leads to go on, and that search had been fruitless so far.
Lin Shaw, Peyton’s mother, had offered another solution. She insisted that the only hope of stopping Yuri lay in the research from a competing Citium project. That research was aboard the Beagle, a Citium submarine that Yuri had sunk thirty years ago. Lin had served on the Beagle and was more knowledgeable about the vessel than anyone alive. She believed the data and samples aboard the submarine would reveal a code buried in the human genome, and a revelation that would rewrite human history.
Many remained skeptical of Lin’s claims, and for good reason: until recently, she had been a member of the Citium. She had also been cryptic and unwilling to share what she knew. But her promise was good enough for Peyton. If there was even a chance that the research on the Beagle would stop Yuri and the Looking Glass, Peyton would go to the ends of the Earth to find it. In a way, she had.
Two weeks ago, in Alaska, she, along with her mother, had boarded a Russian icebreaker, the Arktika, and sailed north toward the Arctic Circle. Four days into the voyage, everyone gathered on the deck to watch the sun slip past the horizon for the last time. They worked in darkness after that, the sun never rising. It was as if they were a ship out of time, in another dimension, where the laws of the planet didn’t apply. The only natural light came from the aurora borealis, which made the place feel even more alien. Its phosphorescent green, blue, and orange streaks reminded Peyton of the first time she saw them—a mere three weeks ago, on the Shetland Islands. She had reunited with her father there. And spent time with Desmond Hughes after thirteen years. That seemed like a different lifetime now. A dream. And a good one.
For the researchers on the Arktika, this mission was about stopping the Citium and making a scientific discovery of historic proportions. For Peyton, it was about that as well—but also much more. Yuri and the Citium had taken both her father, her brother, and Desmond from her. Her father they had killed; Desmond they had captured. The Beagle was the key to stopping the Citium, but she hoped it would lead her back to Desmond. Her mother had promised her that it would.
Peyton rolled onto her side and looked up at the longest wall of the office, half of which was covered with a map of the sub. Sections they had explored were highlighted, yet although they had been making dives from the Arktika to the Beagle for ten days now, and cataloging everything they found, they’d still explored less than half of the massive nuc
lear submarine.
Below the map was the decrepit coffee machine. Peyton desperately wanted a cup, but she didn’t dare turn the noisy thing on. Her mother lay only a few feet away, on the other small bed in the office, sleeping soundly. Lin had slept very little of late—and she had barely allowed anyone else to, either.
Peyton threw the blanket off and pulled a thick sweater on. She slipped into her pants and placed a small glass heart in her pocket. The item was the only personal effect she had brought with her from Atlanta. It was all she had left of Desmond. She carried it with her to remind her why she was here—and to keep going, no matter what.
Quietly, she opened the door and stepped out into the ship’s cargo hold, squinting momentarily at the bright lights. A bank of computer stations lay just beyond the office, with a dozen technicians peering at large screens, typing, sipping coffee, and occasionally leaning back in their task chairs. Five research scientists hovered over them, pointing at the images and text displayed.
“Could have diverged before AMH.”
“Or an isolated population—i.e. floresiensis.”
“We could call it Homo beagalis—”
“We’re not naming anything yet, ladies and gentlemen. It’s specimen 1644—that’s what the researchers on the Beagle labeled it, and that’s its name for now.”
Peyton recognized the last voice: Dr. Nigel Greene. He was an evolutionary biologist leading the team analyzing the samples brought up from the Beagle.
At the sound of Peyton’s footfalls on the metal floor, he turned and, seeing her, immediately smiled.
“Sounds like you all won the Super Bowl,” she said.
The British scientist cocked his head. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She nodded toward the screens. “Found something?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Indeed.”
Nigel made a show of telling the other scientists and techs to “carry on,” then lightly touched Peyton’s back, corralling her to an empty computer workstation. He spoke in a hushed tone, as if what he was about to say was a closely held secret.
“We just received the first data set back from Rubicon. The samples from specimen group one are all from extinct species—as your mother predicted.” He leaned over and worked the computer, pulling up an image of a long bone lying in a metal case. “We suspected specimen 1642 was a femur bone from a canid species. We were right.”
An image appeared of what looked like a large wolf.
“It’s from a dire wolf. They inhabited North America from roughly 125,000 years ago until their extinction 10,000 years ago. Some of the best fossils have been found outside Los Angeles, at the La Brea Tar Pits.” Nigel studied the artist’s rendering. “They were magnificent creatures. Imagine a wolf weighing roughly 150 pounds with a massive head and jaws. They died out with the Pleistocene megafauna, near the end of the last glaciation. Or so we thought.”
He brought up a graph that Peyton recognized as a carbon-dating test.
“The specimen recovered from the Beagle is roughly 9,500 years old,” he said. “Which means it came from an animal that walked the Earth 800 years after the youngest known dire wolf. That species’ timeline just got rewritten.”
Nigel worked the mouse. “That’s not all.”
An image of four rib bones appeared.
“Any guesses?”
Peyton exhaled. She really, really wanted that coffee.
She had requested that Nigel and his team keep her in the loop on what they found. It was outside her area of expertise, but it was in her nature to throw herself into her work, and she had always been naturally curious, especially when it came to questions of science. And deep down, she held out hope that knowing what was down there would increase her chances of stopping Yuri—and getting Desmond back. Now she sensed that Nigel had another motive for describing what he had found, though she had no idea what that was.
“I’m guessing they’re the bones of an extinct species.”
“Ha. Yes, but which—”
“Nigel, I have no clue.”
“Really?”
“I’m an epidemiologist. My expertise is keeping us from going extinct.”
Her rebuff did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. “Right you are. Well, anyway. The fossils are from an American lion.”
Peyton had never heard of that species either. She again wondered what he was working up to.
An artist’s rendering appeared on the screen. It looked to Peyton exactly like an African lion, only much larger.
Nigel spoke in a professional tone, as if he were narrating a National Geographic special just for Peyton. “The American lions emerged about 340,000 years ago. We think they diverged from the Eurasian cave lion at some point and made their way across the Bering Strait to North America, where they diverged further. They were giants. They’re still one of the largest types of cats to have ever existed—roughly 25 percent larger than modern African lions.”
He minimized the screen and turned to Peyton. “Like the dire wolf and many other large mammals, they became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. The youngest fossil dates to 11,355 before present. Or so we thought. These bones are far younger—around 9,500 years old, like the dire wolf. We’re assuming they were recovered from the same site, possibly the La Brea Tar Pits, which is the most abundant source of American lion fossils.”
He paused. “Taken together, the fossils imply an interest in the Quaternary extinction event.”
Peyton squinted—she wasn’t following.
“Ah, that’s the extinction of mostly large animals around the time the last ice age ended. It’s perhaps one of the greatest scientific mysteries—well, at least for an evolutionary biologist like myself.” Nigel held his hands out. “Imagine the world roughly 12,000 years ago—it was a land of giants. Mastodons. Saber-toothed cats. Giant condors. Ground sloths. Saber-toothed salmon. At the same time humans were founding the city of Jericho, massive beasts walked the Earth, dotted the skies, and swam in the oceans. Some had been around a lot longer than us—tens of millions of years. Then, in the blink of an eye—in evolutionary timescales—they were gone.”
Nigel paused dramatically.
“For years, researchers have desperately tried to figure out why. Is that what they were studying on board the Beagle? Did they find the source of the Quaternary extinction event?”
Peyton shifted uncomfortably. “Hard to say, Nigel.”
“Because you don’t know?”
For the most part, Lin had kept the research team in the dark. She had told Peyton a bit more, but not much more. Only that the scientists on the Beagle had been testing what they called a “second theory of evolution”—a revolutionary hypothesis that would radically change our understanding of what it means to be human, a discovery as fundamental as gravity. For whatever reason, Lin hadn’t shared that information with Nigel or the other researchers.
Peyton realized then why Nigel was walking her through it. He wanted to know what Lin had told her. He was hoping to learn exactly what the Beagle researchers were studying. That put her in an impossible position. She needed to speak with her mother.
“Is that all, Nigel?”
The pudgy biologist grew animated again. He turned back to the computer and brought up a photo of a small human skull. “Saved the best for last. We were able to extract a DNA sample from a tooth. It’s human, but the genome isn’t a match for ours.”
“Everyone has a different genome.”
“True enough, but each species—and subspecies—has a different… template, if you will. Our genome is 98.8 percent identical to chimpanzees. Every person and chimp has different values in their sequence, but the framework is the same: twenty-three chromosomes. Neanderthals are even more similar to us: their genome is a 99.5 percent match to our own.”
Nigel pointed to the picture of the skull. “And this mystery human is even more closely related to us. A 99.6 percent match. That’s extraordinary. A genome we’ve never seen before
. And this person died around 9,000 years ago. They are perhaps our closest extant ancestor—or cousin. We don’t know if they diverged from the human family tree before we evolved or after.”
He studied the picture. “We’re assuming it was recovered near or at the same site as the lion and wolf, but that’s just guesswork.” He glanced toward the office Peyton shared with her mother. “It would be extremely helpful to know what you all have found in the offices—any notes associated with the bones. Maps of where they were found…”
“It’s not my call, Nigel.”
“Perhaps, but she listens to you. Those bones have been down there since the Beagle sank thirty years ago. Who knows when they were recovered. And what else they found. We need context to figure out what we’re dealing with here.”
Peyton shook her head.
“Please, Peyton. This is vitally important. I’m not sure you appreciate the gravity of this discovery. We’re literally rewriting history here.”
A sharp voice startled Peyton. “We’re not rewriting history.”
Lin Shaw stood only feet from them. She looked haggard, but her voice betrayed none of her weariness. She walked closer, glanced at the image of the skull, then looked away, as if she found it unremarkable. She focused on Nigel. “History is history, Doctor Greene. It’s only forgotten and rediscovered. In our case, we’re merely recovering what the brave crew of the Beagle rediscovered.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“You’ll know when we have all the pieces. And it’s time we recovered more of those pieces. Have the Russians prepare to launch the submersible.”
Nigel glanced at his watch. “It’s only been six hours since the last dive.”
“Your point?”
“The crew is exhausted—”
“I’ll see to crew morale. Get it done, Doctor Greene.”
His gaze drifted to the floor as he nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
To Peyton, she said, “Coffee?”