The Evolution of Claire

by Tess Sharpe

  But she’s a playful, curious, and funny miracle. And as I stand there, watching her skim the Gyrosphere across the water, I know, with a certainty I’ve never felt about anything before, that this is where I belong. For good.

  Which makes me even more determined to see if my theory about Izzie’s notes is right. What if Pearl gets sick next? Or Lovelace? What if the antibiotics stop working for Olive or Agnes? They have to build up a certain degree of immunity. It can’t be good for all the dinosaurs to be on so many medications just as a precaution.

  My mind’s made up.

  I have to get my hands on that algae.

  I just have no idea how to do it.

  It takes me two days to gather everything I need. And then, on our afternoon off, Tanya hangs out with Ronnie and I stay back in my room, waiting. At breakfast I asked Justin to come up, and just a few minutes after I finish packing my bag with everything I need, he knocks on the door.

  I’m nervous, but I get right to the point.

  “Will you do something for me even if sounds really risky?” I ask when I let him into my room.

  “The question every person loves to be asked,” Justin says. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  I take a deep breath. “I need to break into the Gyrosphere Valley. I have to collect a specimen near the waterfall.”

  “And you don’t want to just ask one of the trainers if you can go get it?” He raises an eyebrow. “Or Dr. Wu?”

  “It’s complicated,” I say. “I think…I think I may have stumbled upon something. But I’m not totally sure. And I have to be before I tell anyone.”

  “Even me? Because I know you well enough now to realize you aren’t telling me the whole story here.”

  I flush and look up at him. Ever since I met him, he’s proven over and over again who he is: someone good and kind and willing to help. Someone who cares about me in a way that I didn’t know I could be cared about. And I want to trust him. I do trust him.

  But I don’t know if I should trust anyone with this. With Izzie. With her words and her thoughts and her drawings, which are so personal but resonate with me so deeply.

  And if something happened to her here—if this place is the reason she’s dead—that needs to be found out. Her work needs to be finished. Especially if it helps the dinosaurs.

  “I’m not ready to tell the whole story yet,” I say. “Is that…is that okay?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Even if I want you to break the rules?”

  “Claire, you’ve been getting me to break the rules ever since we met,” he says. “Brilliant women are clearly a weakness of mine.” He grins, pushing his glasses up his nose. “When do you want to go?”

  “The security guards do a shift change at six,” I say. “The trainers usually head back from feeding time around then too. There’s a little window of time when it’s just trainers in the valley. If we tell them we’re doing a night-vision Gyrosphere test for security like before, they’ll probably believe it.”

  “And just slip in before the next security shift takes over?” Justin asks.

  I nod.

  “How do we get out, though?”

  “We use Bertie’s code to open the gate from the inside,” I say. “She gave it to us during the test run with Pearl. It’s not the code to get in, but it’s the code to get out.”

  “You’ve got this all figured out,” he says, looking impressed.

  “This is really important,” I say. “I wouldn’t ask you to do it if it weren’t. I promise.”

  “I know,” he says, with the kind of faith I hope I’m worthy of. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  “Seriously?”

  He smiles. “Joyride among the dinosaurs? Mysterious specimen collecting? Playing sidekick to cute, smart girl? It’s a science geek’s dream. Kind of can’t say no.”

  He’s always coaxing this laughter out of me. The kind that makes me bite my lip, trying to suppress it, but it comes out anyway.

  “You are just…” I don’t even know how to finish my thought. He’s a lot of things. Really good things. Exciting things. “Thank you,” I finally say. “It would’ve been a little too irresponsible, even for me, to go out there alone.”

  “I agree. Especially when you’re dealing with a waterfall. We won’t be jumping off, I take it?”

  I shake my head. “Kind of the opposite,” I say. “We’ll be going behind it.”

  * * *

  My plan to avoid the security guards works perfectly. The spare Gyrospheres are kept up on the bluff, and we wait until the guards leave before sneaking up and activating one. We roll down just as the trainers appear, finishing the afternoon feeding, and we wait until one of them catches sight of us.

  “Hey, you two,” Sarah, Bertie’s second-in-command, calls through the gate.

  “We’re doing some tests in the Gyrosphere at dusk,” Justin calls. “Ryan said you’d let us in. He had to go deal with something for Oscar. Prepping for the Raptor delivery, I think.”

  “Cool,” Sarah says, accepting the lie. She goes over to the keypad and punches in a code. After the gate swings open, we roll right in. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks!” I call out as we zoom past them, Justin gunning the Gyrosphere a little. We only have so much time before the security guards start their night patrols.

  “Well,” Justin says. “That was kind of easy, actually.”

  “I’ve noticed how the brains of the park don’t exactly associate with the brawn,” I say. “When the guards show up, it probably won’t even occur to Sarah to ask about our test run.”

  “I noticed that too,” Justin says. “First thing I’d change if I were in charge.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  He nods. “Teamwork and camaraderie across specialties is key to harmony and rooting out problems in a place like this. When you don’t just go to work, you live and breathe and love and lose all in the same place, with no respite? It can wear on you if you don’t have a support system.”

  “A family,” I say.

  “Yeah. A park like this, it’s a living, breathing thing, every aspect of it. Sometimes you’ve got to nurture it. Sometimes you’ve got to be hard on it.”

  “I like that,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  We zip along the valley, up and down the hills. There are no dinosaurs in sight—but that makes sense. After feeding time, it’s snoozing time. They’re likely all lolling near the watering hole, taking advantage of the last bit of sun before it sets. I hope we come across a few of them. I want to see how Pearl is getting on with her new toy.

  Once we reach the tree line, I have to take Izzie’s map out of my pocket. Justin glances at it when I do, but he doesn’t ask any questions. He probably thinks I made it, not some mysterious dead girl.

  “We’re going to want to head right, which is north,” I say. “If we keep going in that direction, we should hit the base of the waterfall instead of coming at it from the top.”

  Justin shudders. “Oh God, can you imagine? Going over a waterfall in this thing?”

  My skin crawls at the thought. “Nightmare,” I agree. “Do they float?” I look around at the Gyrosphere’s door seals. “They’re definitely not airtight.”

  “Lucky we’re going to roll up to the waterfall, not over it, then,” he says. “Do you know how deep the water is? Or how we’re going to get behind the falls?”

  “I’ll have a better idea when I see it,” I say.

  “So you haven’t seen it—yet you have a detailed map. Interesting.”

  “I’m a girl of many secrets,” I say, because he’s not the only one who can play the rogue.

  “That’s for sure.”

  We dip and curve through the trees, the late-afternoon sunlight filtered thro
ugh the lush leaves. We bump against a tangle of vines and over a few rocks, and my stomach twists as I remember what happened the last time we were in a Gyrosphere.

  The farther we venture away from the open valley into the cool, wet embrace of the rain forest that edges this part of the habitat, the darker and closer it gets around us. And then I hear it: a rushing noise. Water.

  “Oh my gosh,” I say as the Gyrosphere pushes through a long curtain of vines, revealing the waterfall and the dazzling blue pool beneath it.

  “That’s even prettier than the one at the resort,” Justin says.

  The dark stone cliff the waterfall spills over is covered in an explosion of plants growing from the rushing waters, wild and undisturbed. Birds flit in and out of the streams of water springing from the rocks, where they’ve built their nests. The waterfall is on the small side, so it should be easy to access the rocks behind it, where the algae grows.

  We come to a stop before the ground gets too rocky, and then Justin’s eyes widen.

  “Claire, what about the alarm?” he asks.

  “Eric showed me a trick,” I say. I reach forward and tap in the code he’s given me.

  Manual Override, the screen flashes.

  “Where did he learn that?” Justin asks.

  “Apparently one of the security guards showed him. He’s been driving around with them a lot, getting footage, and they got tired of him setting off the alarm whenever he stopped to find a better shot.”

  Justin shakes his head, looking torn between frustration and amusement. He presses the button to open the doors, and they spring open. We climb out and I grab my bag, swinging it over my shoulder.

  “Look,” I say, pointing to the large footprint in the sand near the banks of the waterfall. “One of the Brachiosauruses was here.”

  “Maybe they take the dinosaur version of a shower,” Justin suggests.

  “That I would like to see,” I laugh. But maybe, in a way, he’s right. If the algae is making the dinosaurs sick, maybe it affects only the ones who hang out here, munching on it while they bathe. It’s a small lagoon, the smallest body of water in the valley, in fact, so the Triceratops herd might not be as drawn to it—unless they’re independent minded, like Lovelace.

  I set my bag on one of the bigger volcanic stones that Mount Sibo spit out hundreds of years ago, and I pull out the sealed plastic bag I’ve filled with everything I need: specimen tubes, rubber stoppers, petri dishes, gloves, stickers for labeling, and tweezers.

  Justin eyes them. “So what are we collecting?” he asks.

  “The algae that grows behind the waterfall,” I say.

  He glances over his shoulder. “We’re going to have to swim.”

  “Thus the plastic bag.”

  “Forever the Girl Scout.” He grins, doing that one-handed yank-off-the-shirt move that guys always seem to pull off effortlessly. It’s like their version of hair flip, I swear.

  “I brought towels and everything,” I say, patting my bag.

  “My heroine,” he says, taking off his glasses and placing them carefully on the rock.

  I pull off my own shirt, my bathing suit underneath it. I place my folded clothes neatly on the rock and grab my plastic bag of supplies.

  “Ready?” I’m feeling a little nervous about jumping into water full of algae that could be poisonous. Why didn’t Izzie write more about it?

  Because she probably died before she could.

  The thought is constantly lurking in the back of my head now. It makes me even more nervous.

  We wade into the water together—it’s warm and bubbly and so clear, I can see strings of algae tumbling through the water with every move we make. The rocky floor drops off deep after a few steps in, and I swim across the pond one-handed, holding the bag of supplies over my head as Justin follows me. He hefts himself up onto the ledge next to the falls, then holds out his hand to pull me up.

  “Careful, it’s slippery,” he shouts over the tumult of falling water beside us. The spray drenches my hair and body, but there’s something incredibly exhilarating about being so close to the falls. It’s so powerful, the might of nature herself, carving through stone and mountain to create something beautiful…and possibly deadly, if the algae is the source of the infection.

  There’s a massive stone ledge behind the falls, and walking behind the water is like entering a portal to another world. The roar of the water blocks out every other sound, and the jagged stone walls behind the falls are a wash of green, algae growing on every available surface, glistening like fuzzy emeralds against the dark volcanic rock.

  “Don’t touch it,” I tell Justin quickly, grabbing his hand as he reaches out.

  He raises an eyebrow at me. “Do you think it’s going to eat me?”

  “Possibly,” I admit, opening my bag of tricks and pulling out the specimen tubes, handing them to him. He opens them as I snap on a pair of gloves. Next come the tweezers and petri dish. I use the tweezers to delicately scrape the algae off the rock and into the petri dish, and then I transfer the algae into the collection tubes. I label the stoppers with different-colored dots: red, blue, yellow, and green to indicate where I collected the specimens: the right side of the falls, the left, the central, the upper, and the lower. You want all the information you can get when you’re testing multiple variables.

  Before I seal the specimen tubes, I bend down and let water trickling from fissures in the stone half-fill each tube so the algae stays hydrated until I can test it. I want it in as close to its home environment as possible.

  I fill one final tube chock-full of algae with no water for the field test I plan on doing, pop the stopper in, and add it to the plastic bag full of specimens. Now I have the whole range—enough to test in the field, enough to test in the lab, and hopefully, enough to find out exactly what is so harmful about this plant.

  After our collecting is done, we swim back to shore, and those towels I packed come in handy. My hair is dripping down my neck as I dry off. I set the specimens carefully down on the rock, feeling a flash of triumph—I’m one step closer to finding out what Izzie discovered.

  “So what’s next?” Justin asks as he puts his shirt back on. His hair is still damp and it’s falling into his eyes in this totally fairy-tale-prince way that is distracting, even with this possibly amazing scientific discovery spread out in front of me.

  “Acid versus alkaline test,” I say. “I couldn’t find the pH test strips in the greenhouse, so I thought I’d do it the old-fashioned way.” I pull a second bag from my satchel; it holds bottles of vinegar and distilled water, along with a box of baking soda.

  A slow smile spreads across his face as he reaches over and grabs his glasses. “You know, Claire,” he says as he puts them on, his voice serious, “I already told you I liked you. You don’t have to woo me with fun, off-the-cuff chemistry experiments.”

  I burst out laughing, and he grins, pleased.

  “You even have a garlic press to extract liquid from the plant matter to test it more accurately,” he sighs. “Be still, my heart.”

  “It’s stainless steel too,” I say, plucking it out of the bag.

  He clutches his chest exaggeratedly, making me laugh more. I like how I get to play along with him. I’m not the most jokey person, but he always makes me feel clever—almost witty.

  “I’m not so sure how it’ll work on algae, though,” I admit.

  “Let’s find out,” he says. He grabs the unlabeled specimen tube and the tweezers off the rock and hands them to me. “This your test group?”

  I nod, taking them from him. I slide on another pair of gloves as Justin sets out two fresh petri dishes on the rock. I feed the algae into the garlic press, filling the chamber with the silty green stuff and then squeezing it through the fine holes. Green liquid drips into the dish, and I repeat the process for the second
dish until both are full with a wash of gooey algae juice.

  I press a red sticker onto the bottom of one of the petri dishes, because you never want to be asking yourself “Wait, which dish did I add which solution to?” when you’re doing an experiment. And then I pour the bottle of vinegar into the dish. Justin and I both lean forward with bated breath.

  Absolutely nothing happens.

  “Okay…so not alkaline,” Justin says.

  My stomach leaps, because this is further confirmation that Izzie’s hypothesis is right: the algae is acidic.

  I turn my attention to the unmarked dish, pour in a measure of distilled water, wait a minute, and then add the baking soda.

  “Claire!”

  Justin grabs my shoulders, pulling me back as the solution in the petri dish doesn’t just start to bubble—it smokes and spits, spraying all over the rock.

  My eyes widen as the liquid continues to bubble fitfully over the rim of the petri dish. I grab the bottle of distilled water, pouring it over the solution and the rock, praying that I didn’t just do some ecosystem damage. I mean, it was just baking soda—it shouldn’t have reacted like that…right?

  As if he’s reading my mind, Justin says, “That shouldn’t have happened,” his eyes almost as wide as mine. He looks down at the other specimen tubes, his eyes alight with interest. “That was a way extreme reaction. What’s in this algae?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But this just confirms it’s the plant I was looking for.”

  “Ah, yes, your mysterious map,” Justin says. “Gonna fill me in?”

  “Soon,” I promise. “But we need to head back. It’s getting dark.”

  He looks up at the sky. “Yeah, let’s get going. We wouldn’t want to come across Pearl in the dark. She might decide the lights on the Gyrosphere are fun to chase.”

  “Oh God, I hope not,” I say. “Bertie says she’s doing really well with her sphere.”

  “Did I ever tell you how cool it was that you figured that out?” Justin asks as we trek back to the Gyrosphere. My shirt is sticking damply to me, my suit still wet enough underneath to be uncomfortable.