She growled in frustration. Her chair would have to wait. Someone else would have to take the samples while she set up decontamination procedures.
The limousine arrived before the Bradleys. It glided like a black shark through the chaos that was the military camp at the end of the highway. She paused to watch it come. Despite the black tinted windows, she somehow knew that it carried someone she didn’t like. Someone that was going to make her life hell.
The limo did not fail to deliver on her expectations. The back door opened and an impossibly handsome man got out as if he owned the highway, the sky and the sun. It was her stepbrother, Yves, whom she unaffectionately nicknamed Crown Prince Kiss Butt. Yves was a testament to her stepfather’s power; he was strictly a civilian with no useful ability except as a spy for his father. Yet, here he was, passing through all the various military blockades to arrive like royalty.
It surprised her that the forest drew Yves like a magnet. He was a creature of the city; his idea of “country” was his father’s mansion on the Palisades outside of New York City. On weekends he could barely be stirred from the indoor pool, shimmering with reflected light.
She locked down the urge to use his distraction to run and hide. She wasn’t a grieving ten-year-old anymore. If he turned his sharp tongue on her, she would give it back a hundredfold.
He stood staring at the forest for several minutes. Finally he tore his gaze away from the trees to look down at the edge of the highway. The end of Earth’s ecosystem was marked with a sharp line, mere millimeters in size, where everything was reduced to fine particles. He looked upward where an aurora-like effect danced in the dusk sky.
He turned finally to lock his gaze on her.
Her stepfather had an exotic pedigree. He claimed to be part indigenous Scandinavian Sami and part French. Yves was more of the same with almond-shaped eyes of stunning green and hair that was a rich honey walnut and a face that whispered possible blood ties to the Great Khans of the Mongol Empire. Life had been entirely too kind to him; he still looked twenty.
She certainly was no longer ten. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“We’re the largest defense contractor in United States.” Yves walked past her, focused on the forest. “I’m here as a consultant.”
Consultant? Maybe if he’d brought a pet scientist on a leash with him, but he seemed utterly alone. Yves was smart, spoke multiple languages, and had a stunning grasp of history, but advanced physics wasn’t in his playbook. What was he really doing here?
She had already heard rumors floating through the camp that the government was grinding to a halt as various factions started to argue over who had control over the area. Homeland Security, FEMA, and the National Guard were all claiming to be top dog. She hated to ask Yves for help; he was the second-to-last person on the planet that she wanted to be indebted to. The entire planet, though, was at risk. Yves had more connections than she did. He had an entire army of employees and a political network spanning multiple countries. If he were busy playing god with them, he wouldn’t have time to spare to bother her. It would be a win-win for her.
“Yves, all communities downriver on the Ohio and Mississippi plus probably the Tennessee River need to be warned of possible biological contaminants.”
He flicked his hand in negation. “There is no need.”
“If this ecosystem can thrive on Earth…”
“It cannot,” he stated firmly. “Earth lacks what it needs to thrive. There is no danger.”
“I have a dinosaur on ice that says otherwise.”
“It would die within a week on Earth. Yes, on its own world, it would destroy all in its path, but here it would be betrayed by the very genetics that made it so fierce. It would die a slow and painful death as all its cells cry out for the thing that Earth cannot provide. It is like slowly suffocating.”
“And you know this how?” Lain asked. “Or are you just making random guesses and full-out lies?”
“History repeats itself. This is not the first time something like this has happened. Only the evidence has always neatly erased itself, so science has never acknowledged what folk tales hold to be true.”
“Fairy tales?”
“Atlantis. El Dorado. Garden of Eden. Avalon. Baltia.” Because he knew she didn’t recognize the reference he added, “an island that Pliny the Elder described supposedly entirely made of amber. The seven caves of Chicomoztoc of the Aztecs. Alfheim, land of the elves in Norse myths. Hawaiki. Gorias, Finias, Murias and Falias. Irkalla. The Kingdom of Saguenay. Over and over again, all across the world, in every culture there are stories of other worlds. Lost places. Because we’ve never found evidence of them on Earth, scientists have always dismissed thousands of years of oral history.” He waved his hand at the forest. “Once upon a time there was city called Pittsburgh.”
Lain didn’t recognize any of the names after Avalon and hated that she needed to take his word that so many existed. “Nothing like this has ever been recorded in the last hundred years.”
“A hundred years: a blink of an eye.” He took a small glass ball from his suit’s breast pocket. “Humans started to use stone tools nearly three million years ago. What is a hundred years compared to that?”
He stepped down off the highway and onto the forest floor. Lifting the ball to his mouth, he said a word she didn’t recognize. It flickered faintly. Sweeping it back and forth, he walked into the forest.
“It still proves nothing about this flora and fauna being unable to thrive in Earth’s ecosystem!” Lain shouted after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
When he didn’t answer, she guided her wheelchair carefully down off the thick lip of the highway to follow him. The legs sank deep into the forest debris but her chair was able to pick its way forward.
Yves stopped a dozen feet into the forest, screened from the road by tall ferns. The glass ball gleamed brightly in his hand. He spoke a second unfamiliar word and the light extinguished. Tucking away the ball, he took what seemed to be a piece of glass out of a pouch and laid it on the ground. With a grease pencil, he drew odd hieroglyphs onto the glass.
“What are you doing?” She nudged the wheelchair closer.
“Nothing.”
She laughed bitterly at the obvious lie. “I’m not ten years old anymore.”
“And yet you still haven’t learned to keep your nose out of my business.” Yves held up his hand, finger upraised in warning that he wanted her silent. He was the type of person that wouldn’t let the fact that she was in a wheelchair stop him from using whatever force he felt necessary to get his way.
She was tempted to ignore his request; she’d learned how to fight in the military. Even in the wheelchair, she could defend herself. She had a weird disquieting feeling, though, that he would seriously hurt her if they got into a fight. They were screened from the road. No one had paid any attention to them leaving the encampment. Another helicopter landed with a loud thumping of blades that drowned out all other noise.
Lain silently reached down and checked that the pistol was still tucked in beside her useless legs.
Yves took her silence as obedience. He dropped his hand and focused back on the glass. He drew several more symbols on the glass then said a foreign word. The symbols gleamed faintly and then a pale dome appeared over the glass and gleaming lines traced an odd pattern underneath.
What the hell?
The pattern looked like some type of map. There were a multitude of lines running like water, and a handful of bright motes. The contours hadn’t matched up to the three rivers that lay inside the zone. The lines indicated two “streams” in the immediate area, one of which they were standing directly on. She could see no water.