The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  Desmond read their business plan and was impressed. CityForge had a great idea. It wasn’t strictly part of the Looking Glass, but urbanization was a helpful precursor. He decided to fly the founders out to San Francisco for dinner. He insisted Avery come along.

  It was the first time he had been back to her apartment since their first meeting that morning months ago. He knocked on the door and waited. A moth circled a glowing yellow bulb, knocking against the metal shade.

  The door swung wide. Avery stood in a black, form-fitting dress, her hair down, the blond locks seeming to glow against the fabric. Her blue eyes sparkled. A silver necklace hung around her neck with a locket he had never seen her wear. He was speechless.

  She glanced down at herself. “I had to borrow the dress.”

  “I’m… glad you did.”

  She grabbed a clutch off the console table. “Don’t get used to it.”

  He laughed as she locked the door.

  The dinner was marvelous. He listened mostly, and talked to the founders about how important their work was. Avery drank two glasses of wine and facilitated the conversation. Desmond realized it was the first time they had been together outside the context of Phaethon. It felt like something they were doing together, as if they were partners, co-mentors to the young entrepreneurs. He agreed to join the CityForge board, and to make an investment of $150,000.

  When he parked at Avery’s apartment complex again, he got out to walk her up, almost without thinking about it.

  “Door-to-door service, huh?”

  He fell in beside her. “Oh, I’d feel terrible if you got lost.”

  “I’m sure.”

  She unlocked the door and turned, a coy grin forming on her lips. “This wasn’t a date, you know?”

  Desmond held up his hands. “Whoa. Who said anything about this being a date? Wait, are you saying it was a date?”

  She pushed the door open. “Good night, Des.” She stepped inside, glanced back. “And thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For helping those guys.”

  “They’re good guys.”

  “Yeah. There were three good guys there tonight.”

  Chapter 38

  Lin led Peyton through the Cave of Altamira’s winding passageways, her lantern held high, the light and shadow playing on the stone walls. Each time they approached a cave painting, Peyton paused, but Lin trudged on, eyes fixed on the uneven ground.

  At the hidden chamber, they had divided into three groups: Peyton and Lin, Avery and Nigel, and the two SEALs, who had remained to guard the sealed cases.

  In the dim light, Peyton saw a cave painting ahead on their left. Four legs, a large body, no antlers. A doe.

  “Mom, look.”

  “It’s not it,” Lin said without even turning her head to look. A second later, she said, “It’s just ahead.”

  Peyton held her response, but she was certain now: her mother knew exactly where she was going. A theory formed in her mind. She would soon test it.

  The passage opened slightly into a small chamber with more paintings on the walls and a few scattered on the ceiling. Lin walked straight to the back-left corner of the room and stopped, squinting, clearly surprised. She held up the lantern and illuminated a painting of a doe, standing proud, its lines drawn in black and red. Beside it stood a buck with seven points, painted completely black. Below the two adult deer stood a fawn, less than half the size of its parents.

  Now Peyton was sure.

  Lin squatted and held a hand out to the fawn, ran her finger across it. The black came away like soot from a fireplace. Peyton was taken aback at her mother’s brazen desecration of this ancient site.

  “Mom—”

  “It’s not original,” Lin said quickly. Almost to herself, she whispered, “It wasn’t here before.”

  Peyton moved to her mother and squatted in front of the painting. “It wasn’t here when you visited before.”

  Lin continued wiping away at the fawn, which was disappearing line by line, starting at the bottom, like a curtain being lifted.

  Peyton pressed the point. “When you visited with Doctor Paul Kraus.”

  Lin kept wiping. Just a little of the fawn remained. Then it was gone.

  “Who was your father.”

  Lin’s eyes snapped to Peyton. “That took you long enough.”

  Chapter 39

  “He’s my grandfather,” Peyton said, coming to grips with the revelation.

  “Yes,” Lin said. Her hands were covered in the black charcoal paint.

  “He was a Nazi.”

  “He was not. He was a German, but not a Nazi. Your grandfather was a good man. One caught on the wrong side of a war that consumed the world.”

  “He brought you here.”

  “In 1941.”

  “That’s why he chose this hiding place, isn’t it? Altamira is special to you.”

  “And to him. This is a very, very remarkable place, Peyton. It is perhaps the oldest evidence we have of the cognitive revolution. It was a singularity whose impact is still rippling through our reality.”

  Peyton studied the cave painting, of the doe and buck standing above the now-erased fawn. “What happened here in 1941?”

  Lin took a deep breath. “Papa woke me up late one summer night and told me to pack only the things I couldn’t live without. Well, I was a child, so you know what that meant: dolls, a dollhouse, a train set. I had a lot of toys; I was an only child, and they had doted on me. And books, of course. I had just learned to read, and I couldn’t get enough of them. Grimm’s Fairy Tales was my favorite. And Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

  Peyton smiled. “You’re Alice.”

  “So it would seem. I surprised him. I packed all of my books. The suitcase was bursting at the seams and far too heavy for me to lift. When Papa saw my suitcase filled with books, the toys in a pile off to one side, he was so proud. He emptied his own luggage and filled it with my toys. He knew what was coming and that I would need them.

  “We left on a night train out of Berlin, westbound toward France, which had already fallen and been under German control for over a year. The British had escaped the previous summer at Dunkirk. The border crossing between France and Germany was uneventful. But when we reached the Spanish border, they interrogated us. To the border guards, we looked like another German family escaping. But Papa talked our way through it.” She paused as if remembering something.

  “And you came here? To this cave?”

  “Yes. He led an expedition here. It was a cover though. One morning he woke me up early, led me inside the cave, and showed me the paintings. That was a special moment—the first time he had given me a glimpse of his research and how his mind worked.”

  Lin looked at the cave painting. “Our journey ended here. The original painting was only a doe.”

  “He added the stag and fawn.”

  Lin nodded. “They symbolize our family. He was protecting us. We left on a ship bound for Hong Kong that day.”

  “Why Hong Kong?”

  “My parents thought we’d be safe there. They were wrong. My mother—your grandmother—was a scientist too, and a Chinese national with dual British citizenship. Her family had lived in Hong Kong for fifty years. Her brother was still there. The city had been under British control since 1841. It was called the Pearl of the Orient—a major trading hub, financial center, and a strategic location with a deep harbor.

  “In 1941, the Chinese and Japanese had already been at war for four years, and it was bloody. The Battle of Shanghai involved almost a million combatants. Chiang Kai-shek lost his best troops and officers there. They never recovered. The following month, the Japanese took Nanking, the Chinese capital at the time. And what they did there… was inhuman. After the losses, the Chinese were on the defensive. China and Germany were still allies at this time; the Germans had trained the best Chinese officers. And the German military advisors advised their ally to use perhaps their only weapon against
the Japanese invaders: land. China’s interior is vast; conquering it would stretch out the Japanese supply lines and divide their army.”

  “I thought Japan and Germany were allies in the Second World War?”

  “Eventually. The relationship between Japan and Germany was somewhat antagonistic before the war. Japan had been a British ally in the First World War, had fought against German troops in Asia, and had taken all of Germany’s territory. Japan was also a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles that punished Germany for the war. But six months after Shanghai and Nanking fell, Germany switched its alliance, recalled its advisors, and stopped giving military aid to China.”

  Lin studied the painting of the buck and doe. “Anyway, when we arrived in Hong Kong, the Sino-Japanese War had bogged down for years, with seemingly endless battles on the Chinese mainland. My parents assumed that the Japanese would never attack the British, as that would divide their focus; China was a big enough prize. With Mother’s only family in Hong Kong and British troops guarding the city, she and Papa both thought we’d be safe there, that the British would never give up the city and that the Chinese would fight to retake it if they did. These were reasonable assumptions, but they were wrong. On both counts.”

  Lin rubbed the black soot on her fingers, as if she were trying to wipe away dried blood. “Five months after we arrived, on December seventh, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, they invaded Hong Kong. The British and Canadian forces fought for eighteen days, but they were outnumbered and surrounded. We were bombed day and night from the air, stormed on the ground, and shelled from the sea. The last troops surrendered on Christmas Day. We called it Black Christmas. The occupation was… humanity at its worst. They starved us, tortured us, and some of us they just loaded on trucks and boats and carted off to be used as slave labor. When the Japanese invaded, there were 1.6 million people living in Hong Kong. When the war was over and the British returned in 1945, there were less than 600,000. A million people dead or gone. Nearly two out of every three. My mother was one of them.”

  Lin studied the painting of the doe for a moment, then reached out and began wiping away the buck beside her. “When my uncle returned me to Germany in 1946, my father wasn’t the same man. He was a shell. He blamed himself for my mother’s death, for making the wrong choice on where to send us. Maybe the war had changed him, too. It had changed me. I was only five years older, but I was no longer a child. I hadn’t been a child since…” She looked around. “This place, this cave, in this very corridor, is where he told me I was going away. This is where my childhood ended.”

  Peyton wanted to reach out and embrace her mother, but she knew her better than that. Lin Shaw needed space as she revealed this secret she had carried for so long.

  “After the war,” Lin continued, “there was only the Looking Glass for him. He saw it as his way to atone. His duty. Our relationship wasn’t like that of a father and daughter; we were more like partners in this great work. We had seen how evil and dark the world could be. We wanted to end that forever.”

  The buck was gone, and her hands were covered in the dark soot now. She took a cloth from her pack and began wiping it away.

  “That was our bond, and the thread that ran through everyone in the Citium back then. In Stalingrad, Yuri had gone through an experience similar to my own in Hong Kong, though on a larger scale. We shared our stories and found that, at least back then, we saw the same world and were dedicated to the same cause. Your father had lost both of his parents in the war too. Going through what we did… it changes you. You can’t help but change. You have to. To survive. But some of us, like Yuri, had wounds deeper than they seemed. He proved capable of things I never imagined.”

  She traced a finger over the cave wall, where the fawn had been. “No matter what happens after this, Peyton, you must promise me that you will do whatever it takes to stop Yuri. No matter the cost.”

  Peyton studied her mother. “What do you mean—what happens after this?”

  “As I said, my childhood ended here. My life was dark and difficult after. I believe Papa had another reason for hiding his inventory list here: he’s telling me that my life is about to change again. Darkness lies ahead. Hardship. He’s telling me that I will have to make difficult choices—like he did. And that they might not be the right ones.”

  She pressed her fingers into the wall, and it gave, flakes of plaster raining down. Peyton’s eyes widened as she realized it was actually just a plaster layer, and behind it was a foam block. Lin pulled out the block, took a folding knife from her pack, and cut the foam away, revealing a sealed plastic box.

  She opened it with a pop. A sheaf of loose pages lay inside.

  “Like him, I’ll try to protect you, Peyton. But you may have to finish this.”

  Peyton glanced at the smeared lines of the painting, at the buck that had been wiped away, at the child that had been ripped open, the secrets the father had left inside now pulled out into the open. And the doe, painted so many years ago, staring at her, just like her mother.

  “Promise me, Peyton.”

  “I promise.”

  Chapter 40

  Desmond didn’t know when it happened, but something had changed inside him, like a season that had ended abruptly, a long winter that had broken. Everything seemed new again. Exciting. He looked forward to going to Phaethon Genetics, especially to meetings he knew Avery would be attending. He found excuses to join projects she was on. And he thought about her in the hours in between.

  Yuri often asked him about Lin Shaw, and his response was always the same: “Nothing suspicious.”

  Desmond arrived one morning for a meeting at Rendition Games to find that the prototype of the device he had devoted a decade to developing finally worked. He and Yuri celebrated that night at Desmond’s home. Conner was there too. It was like the three of them had landed on the beach of a new world. They all felt that anything was possible, that they had turned the corner on an impossible task. Desmond soon learned there was more work to do.

  “What’s your plan for testing it?” Yuri asked.

  Desmond hadn’t given that much thought. He had been singularly obsessed with making it work. “Not sure. I was thinking we’d start with animal trials. Primates. If it looks good, move on to human studies. Run an ad for volunteers. Maybe—”

  “And how would we explain what we’re doing?”

  “Maybe a neurological study, or—”

  “That would open us up to regulatory approval. Oversight. And even if it didn’t, it would, at the very least, expose part of what we’re doing.” Yuri drew a folder from his briefcase and pushed it across the coffee table.

  Desmond opened the folder. It included a profile of a company called Pacific Sea Freight, along with travel routes for one particular cargo ship. “I don’t understand.”

  “We need a place to test Rendition. A large space—out of the way, beyond prying eyes. A secure location.”

  “A sea freighter?”

  “It’s ideal if you think about it.”

  Desmond scratched at his hairline. “Well, not really. What if the subjects experience adverse events? We should be near a hospital.”

  “Even more to my point. The subjects need to be very close to medical help—and not just some crowded ER room with overworked staff. Specialists trained to deal with the sorts of issues that might arise.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We’ll transform the ship into a floating hospital and laboratory.” Yuri put his fingers together and steepled them. “And it offers a third advantage.”

  Desmond waited.

  “Recruitment. This ship,” Yuri nodded down at the folder, “the Kentaro Maru, puts into ports around the world. We could recruit subjects with diverse genetics.”

  “They’d need to be informed of the risks. In fact, we need to figure out some idea of the risks before we even get started.”

  “Certainly. But we could also target specific populatio
ns. The terminally ill. Prisoners governments want to get rid of.”

  Desmond opened his mouth to object, but Yuri continued. “They and their families would be well paid. Again, we’d have health professionals close by in case anything happened. We need to move quickly now, Desmond. With the Looking Glass complete, we’re more exposed. If someone is going to betray us, it will happen now.”

  Finally, Desmond nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good,” Yuri said. “Let’s talk about the specifics.”

  Desmond looked at the file. “Do we own this company, Pacific Sea Freight? The ship?”

  “Yes. We have for about six months.”

  That didn’t surprise him. Yuri was always a step ahead.

  “Where’s the Kentaro Maru now?”

  “Docked in San Francisco. Fully staffed with contract medical personnel, drawn mostly from the third world, all bound by non-disclosure agreements. We’re ready for the trial, Desmond. Right now.”

  “Well, it’s going to take me a few days to wrap things up here—”

  Yuri held up a hand. “I have a better idea.”

  Desmond raised his eyebrows.

  “Stay. Let Conner and I take care of this.”

  “What?”

  “Rook is complete. So is Rapture. Neither require our attention. We can test Rendition for you.”

  “No one knows Rendition better than me—”

  “Are you sure? You were the architect, but the people who developed it are the ones we need to make adjustments. They should oversee the test. But there’s an even better reason we need you here.”

  “And that is?”

  “Lin Shaw.”

  “Lin—”

  “Could be planning something, Desmond. If she is, she’ll strike now. You’re close to her. You’re the only person in the Citium who’s in a position to watch her.”

  Desmond exhaled and thought about Yuri’s words.

  “And there’s something else.” Yuri glanced at Conner. “This is an opportunity for Conner to take on more responsibility. We need somebody we trust to oversee the security on the ship.”