“Wil thinks it’s some kind of vault, from another species. Put here to ensure their DNA survives forever. He said scientists have already done something like it up north, in Norway, I think.”
“A vault,” DeeAnn mumbled incredulously. “An embryo vault.”
“Steve Caesare calls it something else… an alien ARK.”
DeeAnn gasped. “Holy-”
“That puts it in a different perspective, doesn’t it?”
“My God,” she whispered. “An ark?”
Alison nodded. “But instead of sending animals, they sent embryos. And seeds. Wil thinks the liquid inside the tubes is some kind of nutrient, keeping them all alive.” She lowered herself onto the edge of the table. “Now you can understand why Steve is going back. Because somehow what ended up in that water, and those plants, also ended up in that little capuchin monkey.”
“That’s why he’s so old,” DeeAnn whispered, incredulous.
“That’s the theory. The plants were destroyed, but the DNA strain is likely still preserved in the monkey. And since our DNA is so similar to his, it may also be transferrable.”
DeeAnn dropped her gaze to the table, shaking her head. She was stunned. After several seconds, she looked back at Alison. “Okay, wait. What does all that have to do with us, and Sofia?”
“I don’t know. The effects seem too similar not to be related, but I can’t understand how we would have picked it up. Maybe the water was trickling down to the ocean or something?”
“Wouldn’t that mean you’d then have these giant plants popping up all the way down to the coast?”
“Probably. Which means it has to be something else.”
“Right. Besides, once it got into the ocean, you’d probably have everything growing like crazy underwater too. Maybe-” DeeAnn shrugged, but suddenly fell quiet when she looked back at Alison, whose jaw had dropped and her face had begun losing color.
“Oh my God!”
“What?”
“OH MY GOD!”
DeeAnn looked confused. “What? What is it?”
Alison leaped up. “It IS in the water! The ocean!” She spun around to face Dirk and Sally, who were still watching them. “I SAW it! I saw it and didn’t even realize!” She peered up at the top of the enormous tank. “That’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“Don’t you see?!” Alison cried. “Sofia! None of the guys were in the water with her. Only me. But I’m not the one who brought it back. It was DIRK AND SALLY WHO BROUGHT IT BACK!”
“Holy cow.”
“Holy cow is right!” Alison grabbed her backpack again and dug into the small pocket in the front, retrieving her car keys. She then dropped the pack and began running for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To get my phone!”
19
The Florida Everglades was truly a sight to behold for anyone seeing it for the first time. Spanning nearly half the state, the Everglades rested upon a large limestone shelf, causing water leaving enormous Lake Okeechobee to form a slow moving river stretching more than sixty miles wide and one hundred miles long — a river flowing steadily through vast sawgrass marshes and mangrove forests to the southern half of the state. That was where it emptied into Florida Bay and the Caribbean Sea beyond.
Now, over a century after the first large-scale projects were proposed, a network of over 1,400 miles of canals and levees were harnessing a huge portion of the Everglade’s massive water supply. The result of which were dozens of modern cities that could never have existed without a huge, yet shallow, river called the Everglades.
The late morning air was growing warmer from the southwesterly wind blowing gently through the endless marshes, leaving behind only slight ripples across the clear, shallow water. Too slight, in fact, to affect the fifteen-foot-long canoe gliding smoothly in and around one of many mangrove systems.
The lone woman held her paddle steady on one side, turning back out into the small channel before switching sides and rounding another outcropping. The tangled roots jutted far out across the water, slowly making their own crossing as if trying to reunite with those on the other side.
The mysterious Everglades was her favorite place in the world after studying for four years at the nearby University of Miami. She’d spent weeks at a time deep in the Everglades studying its vastly complicated ecosystem and biological systems. And the deeper she went, the more beautiful it all became.
The woman paddled slowly among the trees, allowing the canoe to coast against the soft ripples as she examined a sprawling manchineel tree, reaching ominously from the bank. The manchineel was one of the deadliest trees in the world, native to Florida. Its leaves were highly toxic as was its small flowering fruit, resembling a small apple. The tree was legendary for its poisonous sap, used for centuries by Carib Indians to poison the tips of their arrows, ensuring a long agonizing death for their enemies. A poison which held perhaps the most tragic and ironic reputation in history, being used to kill in battle the famed explorer Juan Ponce de León, who was searching for the legendary fountain of youth.
The manchineel was also the tree on which she had done her senior thesis. She was fascinated by the sheer power of its biological design, and deadly toxins, all wrapped in a cocoon of natural beauty and innocence. A plant-based eukaryote that could destroy an animal eukaryote so quickly, from a single brush, that it was one of the closest things she’d seen to an evolutionary anomaly. It was not the only poisonous plant in the world, but its efficacy and speed of eukaryote destruction put it in a class all its own.
The universe was balanced. Of that, she was sure. There was no existence of light without darkness or heat without cold. No death without life. Contraction and expansion, amorphous and formed, the list went on and on. What truly fascinated her about the manchineel tree was the rarity of those toxins coming together in an evolutionary process creating something so deadly. Including some toxins which still remained unidentified.
To her, it was proof that even the longest biological odds existed somewhere. And if one organism had evolved into a nearly perfect killer, its very existence suggested there could be another, somewhere, that had evolved into the perfect healer. An organism whose existence was just as much an anomaly as the manchineel tree.
And she thought she’d found it. No, she was sure she had found it. But so had someone else and the events that unfolded as a result were devastating. She’d briefly had in her hands the greatest biological anomaly in history, just days before it all came to a violent end.
She was aboard the Bowditch when it sank in a twisted heap of fire and steel. She was one of the crewmembers who made it off in time, thanks to one man who, in the face of the worst possible situation, still managed to save most of the lives on his ship. The same man who died trying to save his chief engineer below deck. In the end, the Captain was the greatest hero she had ever seen. And he was more than just a captain, he was her father. A father who didn’t just save his crew… but one who stood between death and his own daughter, and won.
Her eyes began to well up again as she pulled the paddle up and onto her lap, allowing the canoe to slow to a stop again, against the water’s soft ebbing.
Her father was gone. Her hero. Her dad.
Neely Lawton’s tears came again, as though they would never end. A week alone in the solitude of her Everglades still wasn’t enough to help heal her broken heart. She knew it would take time and yet she still didn’t want to let go. She didn’t want him to simply become a memory, or images she thought of periodically. She didn’t want him to fade.