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ON A REMOTE PACIFIC ISLAND, SOMETHING NEW HAS BEEN BIRTHED. SOMETHING NOT OF THIS WORLD…
Dr. Holly Truong is a woman haunted by her past. Specifically, her relationship with her mother who abandoned her as a child to go do research in an obscure corner of the world. So when she receives news that her estranged parent has been found dead under mysterious circumstances in faraway Melanesia, she is compelled to put everything on the back burner and go in search of answers.
Waiting for her there is something completely unexpected. Recreation of alien life, made possible by a private SETI program called Metis Eye. Unsettling and fascinating in equal parts, the creatures represent life as never encountered before—an evolutionary pathway only hinted at but never perfected on Earth.
However, she soon finds out that there’s more to the island than meets the eye. Lurking deep within its forbidden zones is something far more terrifying than biological horrors. A secret, that if left uncovered, could spell the end of civilization itself. And there are people who seek nothing less.
As conflict over control of the island looms, Truong is on a clock to decipher the clues left by her mother and reach the prize before anyone else. But that’s the easy part.
The hard part is staying alive.
Read from the book
Hunger gnawed at Ricky Dunn’s insides as he ran. A thunderstorm had just passed, and as he crashed through the rainforest, his labored breaths rang out like little pistol shots in the wet air it had left behind. Twigs snapped beneath aching legs that had seen no respite in hours.
He didn’t know what he was running from. Only that he must get out of the jungle at any cost. That fall in the stream earlier had come as a blessing, with the cold water bringing him out of his fugue state, but much of his mind remained frustratingly blank.
What had happened back there? There had been others, he was sure. They were nothing but blurry shapes now, stripped of names and faces. Blurry shapes that ran and died helplessly while he watched from somewhere, hidden.
His last coherent memory: someone falling, a bullet screaming nearby, and then… nothing.
In the perpetual gloom of the rainforest floor, he couldn’t even guess how long it had been since the incident. Not without his wristwatch, which he seemed to have lost like the rest of his stuff. Only the white mark on his hand offered any proof that he had possessed one at all.
Surely more than a day: he remembered curling up in a hollow at night, covering his ears and trying to sleep while the jungle sang to him with the sound of flutes.
Don’t be silly. You’re imagining things. Jungles don’t sing.
There was even lesser evidence for the rifle—just the absence of weight as he ran, making him feel naked and exposed.
How on earth could he have lost a goddamn rifle?
Keep moving, the voice inside urged, which seemed to know more than it let on. Introspect later. Clock’s ticking.
Ticking to some unknown end.
If navigating the tortuous terrain was all he had to contend with, it wouldn’t have been so worrisome. But since the stream, he’d begun to notice something new. Every time he stopped to catch his breath, a sharp coppery scent would assault his nostrils, putting his senses on high alert. It felt utterly alien in contrast to the dank notes of the jungle. At first he assumed it was some flower—there were plenty in this part of the jungle—but better judgment soon dispelled him of the notion. He was being tailed. There was no other explanation. Someone—or something—was in close pursuit.
Which begged another question: why was he still alive?
The answers were there, just temporarily out of reach. Temporarily, because the reptilian instinct that had kept him alive so far was receding, letting higher cognitive functions in. Even as he ran certain basic facts kept trickling into awareness.
Drip, drip, drip, like liquid into an IV line, feeding his information-starved brain.
His name was Ricky Dunn. Middle name Walter—after his father. Born in Des Moines, Iowa. He still lived there, with his wife Gail, and his son, two-year-old Jeremy. There was a baby girl on the way—they hadn’t decided on the name yet. He was an army veteran: the Rangers, 3rd Battalion. Now he worked in the private sector. As to his present whereabouts, he was on an island, somewhere in the South Pacific.
Purpose unknown.
That last part needed more prying. Nevertheless, it felt good to be in charge again.
It would be another indeterminate stretch of time before his luck changed. He blinked, unable to believe it at first. But he wasn’t dreaming: the golden yellow beams of sunlight penetrating the tree trunks ahead were real. Gone was the stifling claustrophobia as well, driven away by gusts of wind laden with a salty tang.
The sea. His troubles were nearly over.
Trembling in relief, Dunn collapsed against a tree. At last! No more running. No more—
As he struggled to fill his lungs with as much of the sweet sea breeze as he could, the metallic odor came to him again. It felt close. Real close. Almost as if—
Run, you fool!
Summoning the last reserves of his strength, Dunn charged through the final stretch of trees into the open. Only to halt because there was nowhere else to go. About fifty yards ahead, the land dropped off into the vista of a wide, empty ocean. The jungle had terminated in a cliff.
On his right, the ledge climbed further into a promontory, sharply silhouetted against the orange globe of the setting sun. But it was not true about there being nowhere to go. As his dark-accustomed eyes slowly adjusted to the light, he saw that the slope on his left was navigable. It led to a muddy beach about two klicks southwest.
Dunn nodded gratefully at the welcome sight. He probably had an hour before it got dark. He could spend the night at the beach and, in the morning, hike and swim along the coast down south.
Why south?
The settlement. There’s a settlement down south. People who can help.
The idea, however, instead of giving him hope made him recoil with a sense of foreboding. His mind kept returning to the rifle. He needed it—somehow, everything depended on it.
Then, acting on its own volition, his right hand traveled to his chest, where it felt something hard nestled beneath the shirt.
My other gun! I didn’t lose it after all!
Feeling giddy with a renewed sense of purpose, Dunn reached under the shirt and unclipped the holstered weapon. His trusty Smith & Wesson M&P. The weight on his practiced hand said it was loaded.
Just then the jungle behind him rustled, making him spin around. He didn’t have to search very hard to locate the source—it was standing in plain sight next to a bush, watching him watch it.
The alien.
Colored beads of light moved inside its skull like fireflies doing the mating dance. Dunn stared, surprised at his lack of surprise. The alien. Not, Jesus, what the hell is that thing? As if he’d expected the creature to be there, standing on all fours just like that and bobbing its nightmare-inducing head in discontinuous little jerks just like that.
Yup. It was this abomination that had been stalking him all day and the night before. How could he have forgotten those crazy lights flipping on and off as it darted about in the dark?
He racked the gun and aimed. Time to die, freak.
But his fingers didn’t follow through. Maybe it was the sight of the bizarre creature that did it, but right then all his repressed memories came flooding into the forefront with the semblance of a dam bursting. A moan escaped his lips as he dropped his gun and staggered back a step. He now remembered every single horrible detail: his mission, those awful deaths, how the situation had turned, seemingly in the blink of an eye…
Most importantly, he remembered the real reason for his seeking the edge of the jungle.
All strength seemed to leave his body as he fell to his knees in the grass and laughed. Peals of bitter mirth rang hollowly among the trees like a bell about to shatter. It had all been for nothing. A cruel joke. All day he’d been running for nothing. He’d been tricked into coming here—and by his subconscious no less.
Reeled in like a blind fish on a hook.
The creature slunk back into the bushes, startled by his incessant cackling.
Not for nothing. Do what you came here to do.
Dunn wiped his eyes and picked up the gun, his heart suddenly heavy with regret. Right. The endgame.
He backed away, taking care not to trip on the stony ground. To his relief, the creature remained where it was. He then turned and hurried to the cliff’s edge—there was no telling how long this latest spell of lucidity would last.
As a brisk wind climbed the escarpment and ruffled his sweat-matted hair, he found a seat among the rocks and turned his gaze towards west. Towards home. The dying sun had infused the towering cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon with fiery reds and violets, lending them a desolate beauty that seemed morbidly apt. Dunn allowed himself a forlorn smile. Not bad as far as last sights go.
There was no escaping the island—he saw that now. But breathing your last while lying face down in the muck of the jungle floor, and then having your body gnawed at by those… ball things was no way for a soldier to die. This was clean. Dignified. The real reason his autopilot had brought him here.
Some sixth sense warned that the alien had stepped out from the jungle behind him. He pictured it approaching stealthily like a cat on the prowl.
Let it. I don’t care. Dunn took a final look at the ocean, closed his eyes, and stuck the pistol’s muzzle inside his mouth. He willed his last thoughts to be of his wife and kid, and the baby he would never see.
However, to his infinite frustration, what occupied his brain in the final milliseconds before the bullet tore through it was a solitary, nagging worry.
He was wrong about the island. He’d been wrong from the very beginning.
And now, no one would ever know.
A cold wind blew across the Sacramento River.
Holly Truong lowered her binoculars and pulled on the drawstrings of her hoodie, wondering why she hadn’t put on an extra layer underneath. She’d been in such a big rush to load everything into the car and drive to the test site. And David had been of no help at all—he’d started making last-minute changes to his code the moment the trail cameras pinged them confirmation on the birds.
He was still working, furiously tapping away at his laptop inside their Honda CR-V.
In truth, there was no reason to complain; after all, cold autumn weather was perfect for finding large flocks of starlings. There was a group of about five thousand right there on the wooded islet not far from her spot. Another six or seven thousand congregated on the far bank, on the big transmission tower amidst the freshly harvested cornfields. Twelve thousand in all, give or take. A good number. Bigger than last time, but not so big as to overwhelm the drones she was about to launch.
Today was going to be different—she could feel it in her bones. No crashed drones this time. No code bugs, no freaky CPU lags. Just sweet, glorious success. All they had to do was let the algorithm do its job and not screw things up by meddling. Easy.
At least, that’s what she told herself. Herding mice with cats, David called their endeavor, and when feeling less optimistic, she’d have wholeheartedly agreed.
Brushing aside a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail, she shot the blond man inside the car an impatient look. “Sun’s getting low.”
Of half-Vietnamese and half-Irish-American descent, Holly had a naturally ambiguous face that was hard to read. Her jet-black hair framed an oval face with a rounded chin and a button nose, making it appear softer than she usually felt, while her slim, wide lips with their droopy corners made her look preoccupied even when she was in the best of moods. Dreamy eyelashes fluttered over a pair of probing green eyes, further muddying the waters.
“Nearly there,” he replied. “I’m readying the config file. How many drones are we deploying?”
“Eight. Start with two, then scale in increments of two.”
This did make him look up. Rising from his seat, he craned his neck to peer at the islet. “You reckon there are so many?”
“I see four clusters: one on the islet, two on the far bank, and one on this side. We take the group on the islet and sweep northwest to the pylon. Then cross over to this side, gathering what we can in a west-to-east arc.”
“Ambitious today are we, hon?”
She winced. The dreaded h-word, always at the wrong time. David wasn’t just her research partner: he also happened to be her boyfriend. The problem was, she liked to keep the worlds separate, and he rarely did. Right now, she was an ethologist and a postdoc scholar from Sacramento’s UC Davis; David, an Assistant Professor of Engineering who specialized in swarm robotics. They were collaborating on an interdisciplinary project part-sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture. If they could demonstrate proof of concept with today’s numbers, they’d be assured funding for another six months. A lot was at stake. “Hon” just trivialized everything—it felt like they’d just finished drawing up the grocery list for the week instead of deciding on a move that could significantly affect their near-term careers.
“Should I program a flock shape?” he asked.
“Nothing fancy tonight. Set the drones to free-react. We need longevity and we need cohesion.”
“You got it.”
She hurried to the Honda’s trunk and took out two of the sixteen drones nestled inside. Quadcopters with lightweight 180mm carbon-fiber frames, each had an onboard 64-bit computer for making tactical inflight decisions. More unusually, mounted on each drone was a custom-built plastic casing made to look like a peregrine falcon—the starling’s mortal enemy.
“Config’s ready. Uploading it to the drones now.” David said finally, easing some of the tension that had set in her shoulders. She released the first two drones and watched as they flew toward the islet. The birds gave each other cries of alarm and noisily took to the sky.
Starling flocks, or murmurations, could range in size from a few hundred birds to colossal swarms millions strong. Fast, extremely agile, and capable of behaving as a seeming hive mind, murmurations routinely confused predators much faster than them. While this made the birds very successful in evolutionary terms, it also made them a highly damaging agricultural pest. There was great interest in finding a way to direct the flocks away from cultivated areas.
Her hands moved fast, reaching into the trunk for the next pair of drones, waiting for the blinking LEDs to go green, then releasing them in the air. Meanwhile, the birds flew to the opposite bank, where a smaller group joined them from the fields.
There was a simple mechanic behind the seeming complexity of a murmuration. All each starling did when flocking was maintain a fixed distance from its seven nearest neighbors. The Rule of Seven it was called, and the neural net algorithm running on David’s laptop exploited this very behavior to predict and control the swarm’s movements in 3D space. The first two drones were the push—the proverbial stone that set the avalanche in motion. The others would draw the flock in, shape it, and keep it confined to a predetermined aerial path.
Tonight’s goal was to guide the birds to a drop-off point half a mile south.
As the drones closed in, the murmuration responded, temporarily stretching into a corkscrew pattern. Then the rear ranks caught up with the middle and turned the whole thing into a ball shape again.
So far, so good, she nodded encouragingly at David.
Rather than acknowledge her, he frowned at his screen. Holly could tell he was looking at the 3D composite graphic of the swarm, rendered with data from the drone cameras. Something was bugging him. She picked up her binoculars and trained them on the pylon. Immediately, her heart sank.
She’d estimated an additional seven thousand birds at most. Now, as the birds roosting in the grain silos behind the tower began taking to the sky, she realized she’d been horribly wrong. She’d undercounted by a factor of four, if not more.
After swearing under her breath, she said, “We need more. Twelve, more like.”
“Twelve drones! Are you serious?”
“I underestimated. I’m sorry.”
“Need I remind you we have never deployed so many at once?”
Theoretically, the algorithm could handle two dozen drones, but in practice, silicon reflexes were no match for wetware honed by millions of years of evolution. A drone getting in the way of a fast-turning flock was not a pretty sight.
“You fixed the pathing problem, didn’t you? You’ve been working on it the whole week!”
“Yes, but—”
“Then what are you afraid of?” she said, throwing out a challenge.
The rapidly snowballing swarm drew ever closer to the tower. She slapped the car door animatedly. “David! They are not going to be here tomorrow waiting for us to have another try. We may not find a flock this big for weeks.”
“Okay, okay.” He started typing, flashing the new configuration to the machines. Worst case, he could override the algorithm and take manual control of the drones with the joystick by his side.
The new drones flew wide before closing in. A few gained altitude and raced ahead, trying to swoop in from the opposite direction. At the tower, a great black mass rose into the sky and engulfed the approaching murmuration like a monster mother devouring her young. Holly gasped. The combined swarm was huge. Now she wasn’t sure if even twelve would be enough.
Yet somehow the murmuration held. It turned and moved toward the river. Once there, the collective hung over the water, as if confused about which way to go.
She closed her eyes and prayed. Please don’t go downriver. Please don’t go downriver. Please—
The birds headed downriver. At the same time, her phone began to ring.
Not now!
“There aren’t enough drones pushing from downstream,” she cried, ignoring the insistent trilling.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me. Hon, we can’t.”
“David, stop pussyfooting around! All sixteen, now!”
Shaking his head, he began typing anew. “Bossy, bossy. There! You can send them to their deaths.”
When she looked up after releasing the last of the drones, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The murmuration had finally turned in their direction.
“Hell yeah! Here it comes!” she hollered in delight.
The evening light bouncing off the birds’ iridescent plumages made the roiling mass shimmer with alternating waves of auburn and black. More birds from this side of the bank rose to meet the group. A surge of electricity ran through her body as the swarm came rushing toward her, blotting out parts of the sky. The sound of thousands of flapping wings filled the air.
We did it! We’re steering the avalanche!
“Holding pattern time,” she shouted as the birds passed overhead. “Let’s see if we can sustain it for two minutes.”
David moved the murmuration to a spot a little distance away. There the swarm twisted and danced in mesmerizing whorls—left, right, up, down, forward, and back—though always staying inside the imaginary boundaries laid down by the drones. The drones themselves were at various places, some right next to the murmuration and some much further away, all positioned by the arcane math of the neural net. The couple beamed at each other. Obviously, there would have to be many more trials, but today was a big win.
Their celebration was cut short by a sudden chorus of shrieks. Holly stared, confused. The murmuration now seemed erratic, less fluid—as if it were dealing with stresses and strains it wasn’t accustomed to. The birds were still following predictive behavior, but some new factor was stretching those intuitive mechanisms to breaking.
“Goddamn falcons!” David said, gleaning off the sky cameras. “I see three. There may be more.”
He wasn’t talking about the drones. The actual peregrine falcons were at the scene. With the starlings’ freedom of movement severely restricted, the falcons were probably picking them off like items off a buffet table. No wonder there was chaos in the ranks.
“I’m pulling back the drones,” he announced.
“No! Cancel the holding and take them to the drop-off point.”
“It’s not worth the risk. We can always try again.”
“And the falcons are gonna be there again. You can’t have thousands of prey without predators nearby. This has to work in the real world, David.”
The starlings settled their debate. The murmuration broke into two, four, and then eight groups. Next, it was pure pandemonium as fifty thousand birds launched themselves in every possible direction. Holly tried to run to the car but was quickly engulfed in a storm of wings and panicked shrieks. She threw herself on the grass and shielded her face. She could hear the confused birds hit the car as David cursed and fed new vectors into the drones.
The chaos lasted several minutes before the sky was clear again. When she rose, the ground was littered with feathers and bird poo. And the occasional dead starling. The peregrines were nowhere to be seen. They were probably stuffing themselves silly somewhere.
“How many did we lose?” she asked glumly. Her cheeks burned with the humiliation of defeat. It was all her fault. She should have listened to David.
“Five down. Luckily, none seem to have fallen in the water.”
He hopped out of the car and came to her. His six-foot-two, muscular frame made her look small in comparison, even though she was above average height. “Are you okay?”
“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
David placed a finger on her lips. “No need to apologize. I wouldn’t have listened to you that last time anyway.”
The drones that had escaped crashing were now gently touching down on the grass around them. Holly looked at them unhappily. “Still…”
He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Sometimes you can be as stubborn as a rock, but sometimes that’s what it takes to get the job done. You made a call; it didn’t work out. Big deal. We’ll try again.”
She nodded. “On the plus side, the configuration held.”
“Absolutely. We should be proud. If not for the hawks…” He shrugged. “I’ll think of some tweaks to the algorithm.” Then a crooked smile broke his lips as he thumbed at the car’s rear seats. “Meanwhile, I know of a way to put this behind us.”
It was hard to tell if he was joking or being serious. Knowing him, probably a bit of both. “Yeah right,” she said, rolling her eyes but also pleased that he wasn’t upset. “What grown woman doesn’t dream of doing it in the backseat of a car?”
Blessed with the temperament of an eternally huggable golden retriever, David was never one to let life’s little snags sour his mood. Holly was twenty-nine, and he, three years older, but he made her feel like they were a couple of pining teenagers. The fact that they were nearly two years into their relationship mattered little to him.
Not that she was complaining. After her father had passed away, she’d been terribly lonely for a long time. With no other family to lean on and no time for dating, she had immersed herself in her work, banking on twelve-hour days to fill the emptiness. So when a handsome but unknown Assistant Professor of Computer Science approached her out of the blue, enthusiastically gushing about her research paper on starling flock dynamics, and how he saw a practical application for it, she had been intrigued—and not just by his project proposal.
By the time he summoned the courage to ask her out—a few weeks into their collaboration—she’d taken to David Callahan’s infectious energy like a fish to water.
David was deeply in love, too. Holly secretly knew from a mutual friend that he was waiting for their trip to Paris in December to pop the question.
She nudged him away with her elbow. “Go fetch the crashed drones, Casanova—it’ll be dark soon. Do you want me to help you look?”
The drones had high-fidelity GPS transmitters accurate to a few meters. “I’m good. You should get that.”
Her phone was ringing again.
***
It was an international call, country code +675. You better not be a telemarketer, she thought as she watched David walk away. “Hello?”
“Ms. Holly Truong?”
“Yes?”
“Hi. My name is Jim Mooney. I am calling from the US embassy in Papua New Guinea.”
“Sorry, from where?”
“Papua New Guinea. It’s near Australia. Do you happen to know a Miss Myra Summers?”
The name sounded both intimately familiar and distant, like a well-known melody she hadn’t heard in a long time.
“You there?”
“Yeah.”
“Myra Summers. Do you know her?”
She gulped. “Myra Summers is my mother,” she said after another pause. Used to be. Until she packed up and left.
“I see. I’m afraid I have some bad news. I regret to inform you that your mother passed away last night here in PNG.”
What in the blazes is he talking about? “I’m sorry—who are you, and what do you want?”
“Jim Mooney. United States Embassy. I know this must be difficult for you. I assure you this is not a prank call. You can call the embassy board and verify my number if you wish. Your mother was found dead in the Emerald Dive Resort at Alotau. Are you aware she was staying there?”
“No…”
“Are you aware she was in PNG?”
“No.”
“Do you know why she might be visiting here?” When Holly didn’t respond, he asked, “Was she on prescription medication of some kind? Any substance abuse history?”
“No.” Her responses were automatic, coming from a far-off place.
“It’s just that the preliminary cause of death seems to be cardiac arrest caused by an overdose of phenobarbital. It’s a sedative commonly used to treat seizures. Of course, we’ll know for sure only after the coroner’s report is out. Bear in mind that this is a police case, and repatriation of her remains could be delayed.”
On again being greeted by silence, he said, “It’s understandable if you’d like some time. I can call you back. The embassy—”
She realized only a few seconds later that she had hung up and was staring into empty space. Mom is dead? That’s not possible! There must be some mistake. Besides, why would anybody call her regarding Myra? How did that man even get her number? A different Myra, for sure. She’d have to call him back and set it straight.
On her phone’s browser, she searched for “Jim Mooney, United States Embassy, Papua New Guinea”. The top result took her to an official page of the embassy. Jim Mooney was listed under the Consular and Visa Services section.
Not a prank then.
“Mooney,” said the voice from before when she dialed back.
“It’s Holly Truong.”
“Hi. I was about to call you. Sorry about the disconnection —the phone service here can be very unreliable.”
“Look, Mr. Mooney, I think you have the wrong person.”
“You are Myra Summers’ daughter, isn’t it?”
“My mom’s name does happen to be Myra Summers, but—”
“Are you telling me there’s more than one Myra Summers who has a daughter named Holly Truong?”
The finality of the statement felt like a door being slammed shut.
It’s not possible. There’s no way…
“Why did you call me?” she blurted.
“What a strange question. When a US citizen dies alone overseas, the embassy tries to contact the next of kin.”
“I am her daughter, but we’ve been estranged for a long time. We don’t keep in touch.”
“Ah. So you didn’t speak with her recently? Say in the last twenty-four hours?”
“We haven’t spoken in many years.”
Holly was eleven when Myra left her and her father, Philippe Truong. There had been some sporadic contact over the phone in the following years, but the calls had stopped completely around the time she turned seventeen.
“Not according to the police,” the man said. “They tell me she dialed your number from her room at 12:26 am local time. The time of death was soon after that.”
What is he talking about? Myra never called me!
“Actually,” he continued, “I didn’t know you were related until you told me. I just dialed the last number she called. I got your voicemail the first time.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“Ms. Truong,” he said, a little briskly this time. “I understand if you don’t want to be involved, but facts are facts. Anyhow, if you can point me to another family member, I’ll get off your case immediately. Her husband? Any siblings of yours?”
“I am an only child. My father is dead. She, too, was an only child. I don’t know if she remarried. She…erm, was not very sociable.”
“That’s unfortunate. Not a problem though. The embassy can take it forward from here, but we’ll need you to sign a waiver.”
“Okay.”
“If you give me your email, I’ll send the forms across. An electronic signature will do.”
She told him.
This is not right. She does have a family—it’s just not me. “Wait,” she said. “There is someone who’d want to claim her.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Last I know, he was running a biotech company in your neck of the woods. Myra was working for him. I don’t remember the firm’s name, but the umbrella company is called The Cantor Group. Cantor’s a Fortune 500 company.”
“I know Cantor. Their subsidiary C-Tel is a major telecom provider in PNG. Who is this person?”
There was a bitter taste on her tongue as the syllables rolled off it. “Adrian Tate.”
“Got it. Any relation to the fella who owns Cantor? A Roland Tate, if I remember right.”
Adrian fucking Tate. And his equally horrible father, Roland. Sir Roland Tate now, after he went back to the UK and received his knighthood. Two rich schmucks, who, despite having everything in the world, had stolen the one thing that mattered to her the most.
She could barely mutter a yes before she hung up again.
David returned cradling one of the crashed drones. “Are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”
More like a zombie that crawled out of the grave. “I… uh, need some time alone. I’m gonna take a short walk.”
“If you’re still upset about the drones—”
“It’s not that.”
He shrugged as she patted him on the cheek and waved a quick bye. It wasn’t nice leaving him in suspense, but she didn’t want him fussing over her. She didn’t know how she felt or was even supposed to feel—she had to figure that out first.
The gravel-strewn trail crunched under her sneakers as she walked along the riverbank. The starlings had settled down in their roosting places by now and silence lay over the river. The sun had gone hiding among the clouds again, prematurely calling in a foggy dusk that wrapped around her like a cold but protective shell.
Cold but protective. Those words perfectly described the mother she remembered. Myra had never been abusive or neglectful. She had always taken care of her daughter’s needs promptly and efficiently like a drill sergeant. Just not the emotional ones. For that, there was always Dad.
Which was why the real Myra had always remained a mystery to Holly. And now it looked like she’d forever remain a mystery. The only other person who could have told why she’d really left had evaded the subject all those years—just like he’d evaded telling Holly about his cancer diagnosis until he couldn’t hide it any longer. She scooped up some pebbles and tossed them into the water idly, watching the ripples form and expand. Inevitably, her thoughts turned to the only answer she’d worked out for herself. You left me not because I was a bad child but because I was not good enough. You left me because I was not Adrian.
There was an unshakeable truth to it that years of counseling had not succeeded in refuting. For Myra, Adrian had always come first. Even though he was older than Holly by eight years. Even though he was not flesh and blood. Myra’s marriage to Philippe and the decision to have Holly seemed like no more than minor aberrations in a life dedicated to one cause and one cause alone. The cause of Adrian Tate.
Walking back to the car, she remembered the last time she’d seen him. It was at his new luxury yacht—he too was scarcely more than a child then. Old enough to own a boat but not old enough to buy beer.
It was her first time on such a marvelous thing. She couldn’t believe anyone could possess something like that, let alone the boy she’d been forced to refer to as brother all her life. All she knew was that he’d dropped out of college to start his own company. Something to do with satellites. Or the internet. Whatever the company was, it no longer existed. He’d cashed in soon after and disappeared with his yacht.
Only to reemerge a year later, claiming to have started something new in the middle of the Pacific of all places.
He must be nearing forty now, Holly thought as she trudged in the dusk. Maybe Myra had burnt that bridge too. Why else would she list her daughter with whom she had not spoken in a decade as an emergency contact and not Adrian?
No, that’s not correct. Mooney said that Mom called me. There was nothing about an emergency contact.
But she’d received no calls since last night.
She stopped. Uh oh.
Before starting the lecture the previous afternoon, she’d put her phone on mute. She had forgotten to change it back until later today. Fingers shaking, she took out the phone and checked the call log. Sure enough, it showed a missed call at 6:26 a.m. The country code was +675. Papua New Guinea.
Could she have left a message?
Her mouth felt dry as she dialed the code to access her voicemail.
Holly barely recognized the raspy voice coming out of the phone’s speakers. What’s more, the call kept cutting in and out, turning into almost pure noise at the end.
“Holly! It’s Mommy. I know it’s been a long time and you—mad at me but listen—don’t have much time—I’m—called—Emerald Dive—Alotau, Papua N—remember playing Peter Pan with mommy? Pirates, maps, treasure—our special game. Of course—played all the time—ember Tinkerbell—same place each time?—same place this time too—do mommy a favor—very, very important—you find Tinkerbell and—to—named—he—remember don’t—Laurence—please—for me. Do not under any circumstances give it to—else—in great danger—wants to—us all—should never fall in his hands—If he—”
She replayed the message thrice before she gave up trying to understand it. This was no final farewell; just some rambling nonsense about god knows what. Find Tinkerbell? What the heck?
Something about a man named Laurence. Great danger. Should never fall in his hands. Tinkerbell should never fall in his hands…?
She didn’t know any Laurence. She didn’t know anyone nicknamed Tinkerbell. For all intents and purposes, it looked like she didn’t know the woman at the other end either.
A sense of defeat weighed on her shoulders as she dragged herself back to the car. David had finished collecting the drones and was waiting for her. Without saying a word, she hugged him fiercely, letting him wrap her in his warm, strong hands. “Someone called about my mom. She… died last night.” And then, like a levee breaking, the tears finally came.
***
“You should start making arrangements.”
They were at their shared condo—a rental. David was peering into the fridge, deciding what to cook for dinner.
Plopping on a couch, she raised an eyebrow at him. “Arrangements to bring her remains here?”
“Or you going there.”
“Ha!”
He stopped rummaging and glanced at her curiously. “Don’t you want to see her one last time?”
“You realize you’re talking about the woman who left me when I was eleven, right?”
“She’s your mother.”
“She doesn’t get to reclaim motherhood by dying. It’s something you earn.”
“People change, hon. Feelings change. You can bandage over regret, but you can never undo it.”
Holly crossed her legs on the couch and glowered at David. “Let me get this straight. You want me to spend money I don’t have; take days off I can’t; leave in the lurch all my students and the three projects I have running—including one with you, in case you’ve forgotten; and fly thousands of miles just so that I can say goodbye to the cadaver of a woman who didn’t give a hoot about me?”
“There’s nothing you can’t put off for a few days. If it’s a matter of money, I can—”
“No, you doofus! It’s a matter of principle. I’m just not inclined to genuflect on the altar of Myra Summers. I had a parent who loved me, and it was not her.”
“There’s nothing good here,” he said, closing the door to the fridge. He walked across the room and picked up his jacket from where he’d thrown it on the armchair. “I’ll go around the block and get some takeaway. Something warm and comforting—you sure could use it. Give you some space to ponder?”
“There’s nothing to ponder,” she defiantly announced as he closed the front door.
But soon, she was checking out a travel website. Just out of curiosity, she told herself. It would be an exhausting journey if she decided to go. Unsurprisingly, there were no direct flights to Alotau—an obscure place she didn’t know existed until then. At such short notice, she could only find a multi-hop route that went through LAX, Brisbane, Australia, and finally, Port Moresby in PNG.
No way.
A few minutes later, she was donning her coat and sticking a post-it note for her boyfriend. “Went to the old house. Need to check something. You start without me.”
***
As she drove, a hazy memory tugged at her mind. A memory of happy times. The house, a four-bedroom duplex near Tahoe Park, was Myra’s bequeathal to Holly. Myra herself had inherited it from Holly’s grandparents. Briefly, Holly had lived there when Philippe and Myra had relocated to Sacramento from San Francisco. It was around the same time Adrian had gone off in his yacht.
Both had satisfying careers in San Francisco: her dad was a pilot for a freight carrier, and mom, a research scientist for some big pharma company. Presumably, they thought moving to a different city would allow them to work on their failing marriage. In reality, it had turned out to be the final nail. But little Holly didn’t know or care what the reasons for the move were. For the first time in her life, she had her mom all to herself with no Adrian to suck up all the attention.
Theirs wasn’t a typical sibling rivalry. Adrian was an adopted child of the Tates. He lived in a multi-million-dollar mansion in Palo Alto; she in a down-to-earth neighborhood in San Jose. Their worlds should never have collided and yet they did. Every time he came over, she had to be the bigger person. Give up your room—Adrian is staying for just a few days. Don’t bug him—Adrian’s been through a lot. Let him have your stuff—he’s like your brother. You always wanted a brother, didn’t you?
But Adrian wasn’t like a brother at all. He was sullen, moody, and barely spoke to her. He didn’t even pick fights—as if acknowledging her presence meant lowering his standards. He woke up screaming at night, rousing the entire household. When he was staying over, everyone had to walk on eggshells. When he left—always reluctantly—Myra would spend the next few days in lengthy video calls comforting him, checking his schoolwork, and generally forgetting she had a family that needed her.
Philippe didn’t like these intrusions either, but Myra’s bond with Adrian was stronger and went farther back in time than anything he had with her. So maybe it wasn’t entirely a surprise to him when Myra one day decided to pack up and leave. She was going halfway around the world to work in this company Adrian had started. The marriage was over as far as she was concerned. And no, she didn’t want Holly coming with her—the new place was not a good environment to raise a child.
The time was a quarter past nine when Holly parked her car at the curb. A neighbor’s dog barked somewhere in the dark.
Philippe had put the house under rent soon after, using the income to set up a college fund for his daughter. At the time, the place was between tenants.
Holly couldn’t help but feel like an interloper as she unlocked the front door and turned on the lights. The smell of new paint was everywhere. Her eyes wandered warily around the empty living room before traveling up the stairs to the landing.
“—remember playing Peter Pan with Mommy? Pirates, maps, treasure—our special game—”
A familiar, fluttering sensation arose in her stomach as it suddenly struck her.
Myra was talking about a scavenger hunt they used to play in the house. She would hide the treasures, and Holly would run around trying to find them.
“Remember Tinkerbell?—same place each time?—same place this time too”
As a child, Holly used to be afraid of heights. Myra’s idea of helping her overcome the fear was to hide her Tinkerbell figurine on the ceiling fan in Holly’s bedroom and make her climb for it. Hangman’s Tree. Different rooms corresponded to different locations in the story. Tinkerbell was always the first item in the scavenger hunt, to be found at Hangman’s Tree. There was no avoiding it because the next clue would be stuck on the doll.
Her uneasiness turned into anticipation. Did Mom leave something for me up there? After all these years, can it still be there?
Grabbing a high stool from the kitchen, she went up the stairs to her old room, her nerves tingling with anticipation. She placed the stool under the fan, and after climbing on it, ran her fingers over the dust-covered surfaces of the fan blades.
Nothing.
She felt foolish. What did she expect? The ceiling fan was not even the same one from before—the fittings in the house had been replaced over the years. As for the doll, Holly was quite sure she’d disposed of it in some yard sale long ago. She didn’t like hoarding junk—especially junk that reminded her of her mother.
Holly glared at the fan with hostility before turning away and heading back downstairs. First, there was the disappointment of the message; now, this.
However, much to her surprise and annoyance, Myra’s message kept replaying in her head on the drive back.
Find Tinkerbell.
Very, very important.
Great danger.
The mutterings of a mad woman or was there some hidden meaning behind the words?
If Tinkerbell wasn’t in the house, where then?
She was shaken out of her reverie by a car honking behind her. Mouthing a silent apology, she signaled for it to pass before pulling over to an empty spot by the curbside. There she sat for a long time, lost in thought.
Maybe David had a point. Myra had seen a chance to escape a loveless marriage and a child she didn’t want and had taken it. Perhaps it was for the best for everyone involved. Maybe the cryptic message was just her way of expressing emotions she never could while alive. Just her way of saying, I know I was not a good mother to you, but please don’t forget me.
Nobody wants to be forgotten.
Sighing, she started the car. It was already happening: instead of anger, she felt pity for the woman. Maybe in time, it would morph into understanding. But to get there, she had to first say goodbye. Properly. Myra may have left long ago, but her shadow had stayed, a constant companion that never failed to remind Holly of what might have been. Of how she was not good enough.
It was time to return it to its owner.
***
The next morning, David stayed back to pack and book their tickets while she drove to the university. There was housekeeping to be done before she took leave.
He’d been adamant about accompanying her. Papua New Guinea was a beautiful country with some of the last remaining wildernesses on the planet. But also a restive one. Latest news reports said that tribal skirmishes had broken out in parts of the country. And Port Moresby, the capital city, was widely held as one of the most dangerous cities in the world for women. Holly was sure she could take care of herself, but she didn’t push back too hard. Secretly, she was glad he was coming—she’d need all the emotional support she could get.
As she drew into the parking lot of her building at UC Davis, Holly realized she’d forgotten to inform Mooney about her visit.
The phone rang for some time before it was answered. “Hello…?” an uncertain voice said at the other end.
“Jim Mooney? Hi, this is Holly Truong.”
“Who?”
“Holly Truong. We spoke yesterday.”
A pause. “Oh, yeah. About Myra Summers. Jesus. It’s two in the morning here.”
She felt like kicking herself. “I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry. I guess I’ll call back later.”
“It’s okay,” Mooney said. She heard sheets rustling in the background. “I’m awake now. Did you not receive the forms? I sent them soon after our call.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I’ll be coming there after all.”
“I see,” the man said after another pause. “I shall let the hospital at Alotau know to expect a visit from you. When are you flying?”
“Tonight. I’ll send you my itinerary. Mr. Mooney, I must have appeared abrupt before, but I very much appreciate you reaching out to me yesterday. Thank you.”
“Wait, don’t hang up. You want to hear this.”
Holly tensed. What now?
“Yesterday, because you said you didn’t want to be involved, I called the C-Tel office in Port Moresby.”
“C-Tel?”
“It’s a subsidiary of Cantor. I told you—they run telecom here in PNG. I was trying to locate that biotech firm. I didn’t have to search too hard. The C-Tel receptionist’s ears perked up as soon as I mentioned your mother’s name. They were expecting to hear from her, you see. And here’s the kicker: they said she went missing last Friday.”
“Went missing?”
“Yes. From the island the biotech firm is at. It’s in the neighboring country of the Solomon Islands. They said one of their supply boats went missing, too, along with the two locals who sailed it. Hoping your mother would eventually turn up, they sent a memo to all regional offices, asking them to keep an eye out.”
“I don’t follow. Are you saying she boarded the boat without telling anyone? Or that she was…”
“Kidnapped?” he said, completing her thought. “It’s possible. She was certainly traveling light: no passport, no ID of any kind, no luggage. Oh yeah—she checked into the hotel under a false name. The police were able to ID her only because she’d visited PNG before.”
Holly could only nod in bafflement.
“I spoke to this Adrian, by the way,” Mooney said. “Pleasant fella. He said that your mother suffered from blackouts and memory lapses. Apparently, she took the barbiturates for her insomnia. As to where she procured them in PNG is unknown. He also said he’ll take care of the funeral arrangements. So again, if you don’t want the trouble…”
So Adrian’s alive and kicking. “It’s no trouble,” Holly said, more forcefully than she intended.
“Fine by me. If you need any help with the local officialdom once you’re here, don’t hesitate to call.”
“That’s very kind. Thanks again, Mr. Mooney.”
“Goodbye.”
Such a nice man.
But what he said was very worrying. Myra, an addict who suffered from blackouts and memory lapses? And a kidnap victim? Didn’t sound like her at all.
Walking past the open bullpens in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Holly scanned for the tall, gangly figure of Melissa James, a Ph.D. student who worked with her. Melissa would be able to handle some of her workload while she was gone.
She didn’t find Melissa but glimpsed Linda Pearson seated at one of the shared workstations. Her face immediately lit up on seeing her idol. Linda Pearson was an emeritus professor at the university. A reputed virologist, she split her time between teaching at UC Davis and conducting research at one of the new industry-partnered Innovation Centers at the edge of the campus. Pearson also happened to be a close family friend. She and Myra went back a long way, to when they were best friends in high school.
After Myra left, Pearson had appointed herself as de-facto godmother to Holly, visiting her whenever she could, always bringing a toy or a book or her famous chicken pot pie, and most important of all, the womanly warmth and guidance the girl needed. It was from Pearson, not Myra, Holly had inherited her interest in biology. Pearson, not Myra, had bought Holly her first copies of Stephen Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life” and Diane Fossey’s “Gorillas in the Mist”. It was Pearson Holly had consulted when picking a college stream, and it was she who had been most overjoyed to learn that Holly had been offered a position at the same university where she worked.
Her joy at seeing her “Aunt” Linda vanished when she realized she’d have to tell her about Myra’s passing. She didn’t think they still kept in touch.
Pearson’s disheveled gray hair and the empty paper cups littering the desk said she had an early start. She often used the shared workstations in the department to pursue passion projects her corporate sponsors wouldn’t touch. This time the subject was some new virus she claimed to have discovered.
“Hi, Linda.”
“Oh hello, Holly,” Pearson greeted without taking her eyes off her computer screen. As Holly prepared to breach the subject, Pearson tapped the monitor. “I just received the bioinformatics report for the new samples. These are from Rio Grande in Argentina. It’s very widespread.”
Floating in the graphics box on the screen was a burgundy capsule with cyan-blue attachment spikes—a false-color rendering of the virus. Next to the box were columns of ATGCs, indicating it had DNA as the genetic material.
“Six hundred kilobases and it shows an effective mutation rate of zero,” Pearson drawled on.
Holly knew from previous talks that the subject of attention was a mimivirus. Mimiviruses, along with Pandora viruses, were the giants of the virus kingdom, sometimes packing as many as a whopping two million pairs of nucleotides. In contrast, the flu virus had only fifteen thousand base pairs. Pandora viruses could get physically bigger than some bacteria—full-fledged organisms that needed to eat, move, and reproduce on their own.
“Did you pin down its genealogy yet?” Holly said.
“Nope. Sequence fragments exhibit some similarity to lyssa viruses. Lots of junk DNA. Highly infectious too, with an R-naught of twenty.”
“So I could have it? You did say it’s harmless right?”
Pearson softly tittered. “You, me, and everybody. Judging by the samples I collected, I estimate three-fourths of the global population. It’s like the HPV virus—nearly everyone gets infected with it at some point. Most show no symptoms. Like HPV, this one too is great at evading the immune system. Plus, it has some unknown mechanism that limits mutation. I’d say that’s a pretty good definition of harmless.”
Holly shuffled her feet impatiently because she knew that a little lecture was coming next.
“Did you know that viruses outnumber stars in the observable universe by several orders of magnitude? It’s true. They are much maligned, but many are actually of great benefit to the host organism. Like phages that kill pathogenic bacteria. The viral microbiome is a symbiotic part of…”
If viruses ever achieved sentience, they couldn’t have found a better spokesperson than Linda Pearson. Any other time Holly would have indulged her, but it was getting late. “Uh, Linda?”
“Mmm?”
“It’s about Myra. My mom? Yesterday, I—”
Pearson wasn’t listening. She was scratching her head at the screen, lost in thought. She then rose abruptly, glancing at her watch. “I just remembered. I gotta rush to the sequencing lab before their priority queue fills up. I’ll catch you later, okay?”
Before Holly could say anything, Pearson had grabbed her handbag and was walking briskly toward the exit.
Well. I guess it can wait until I return. It’s not like they are still best friends.
She shrugged and surveyed the cubicles for Melissa once more. Now where is that girl?