Invasive (24 page)

She looks him over like he's gotta have an ant on him somewhere.
Or like maybe he's not even here, she disbelieves it so hard. “Did you get bitten?”

“Bitten? Bitten by what?”

“We need to—” Lightning bound up with a bone-cracking boom of thunder flashes off to the lagoon side. Suddenly Hannah's shaking. And she can't stop. “We need to get inside. Then we'll talk.”

“How do we do that? Place is locked up like a convent.”

She starts to formulate a plan. “We go around. To one of the windows at the lab. I can see in—see if anybody is . . .” But she can't say that last word.
Alive
. “We'll see who's left. And then—”

Behind her, a vacuum pop and an exhalation of air. And there stands Barry. “I told them I heard somebody!”

T
he storm seems like a vengeful spirit, a poltergeist bringing the full weight of its spectral sound and fury against those still trapped inside Arca Labs. It bangs and howls. The cannon-fire sound of thunder from nearby lightning is followed swiftly by the bone-break snap of a tree going over. The monsoon wails: a furious, unquiet dirge.

Hannah steps into the lab, and the first thing that happens is Einar meets her, face-to-face. He breathes a sigh. “I knew you would make it back to us.”

The power's on. Computers are up and running. “Kit?” she asks. “Is she still alive?”

She is.

Down on the floor, where she had been before, blankets behind her head. Her face is drained of color, her lips dark as if she'd been drinking merlot. Her eyes don't fix on Hannah, but as soon as Hannah steps up, they do move—they just look in the wrong direction.

Hannah grabs one of the two remaining EpiPens out of her pocket and jabs it into Kit's thigh. It takes a second, but then Kit's head tilts back and she swallows hard. Her eyes lose their rheumy clouds, and she takes a small breath—a mousy gasp.

And then Hannah is crying. The tears are happy in their way, but something darker lurks just below. She's tired and spent. The epinephrine charged through her like a scouring force—an abrasive sandstorm scraping her raw. She feels hypercharged and broken
down all at the same time. She knows if she doesn't get it together
right now
she'll drop into that dark well and sob until she passes out. She cries out and sucks it up.

Hannah tells them her story. She is careful to leave out the part where Will claims he didn't kill the man in that cabin in New York and that Will was no longer in possession of the colonies. For now, she keeps her story tight: he created the ants. It's not a lie. And until she has more
facts
and less
speculation,
the story remains.

The rest of them tell Hannah what happened in the labs.

Einar got the power back on, though the satellite was ruined, and nobody ever found the battery packs for the phones. Hannah wonders if Will had them stashed at Special Projects—but that lab is now underwater.

So, they have electricity, but no way to reach anyone off the island.

At least they can keep the ants out. The HVAC is locked down. So are the doors. Plus, the storm outside drove the ants away—Hannah hopes, she tells them, back to the nest. “Where I drowned them.”

Barry lets Buffy scurry from the back of one hand to the palm of another as he listens. Nancy sits at a computer, tapping away.

To Einar, Hannah says, “Those barrels you saw. They're gone now.”

His face tightens. “My gods.”

“Did you see any strange barrels?” Hannah asks Captain Dan.

Dan tells them what he told Hannah, about Will attacking him with a flare gun. “But no, I didn't see anything like that. Hell, I didn't see any of these ants at all.”

“What is he planning?” Einar asks her.

“I don't know,” Hannah lies.

“We should endeavor to discover as much about his plans as possible. More specifically, about the ants themselves. We have access to the local network. Perhaps he left us a trail of ones and zeroes to follow. Could be he has hidden his research—”

Nancy barks, “What do you think I'm doing over here? Surfing Twitter?”

“Well.” Einar laughs. “Apologies. Nancy, proving yet again why you are well above my intellect level.”

“One thing to look for,” Hannah says, “is how he protects himself from them. From the Myrmidon ants. I watched him crush one—the ants swarmed him, but they never bit.
How?
”

Ajay perks up. “What did the ants do when they swarmed?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Wait, that's not true, is it? “You know, they did do something. They carried the carcass of their dead colony mate away. Like some kind of ant funeral.”

“Hm.” Ajay turns away, lost in thought.

“So, what now?” Barry asks. Thunder tumbles above and the rain picks up, pouring down over the lab pod like ball bearings on a tin roof.

“We find out what Will was planning,” says Hannah. “We need to know where he took those ants. And warn others, if possible. We see what we can scavenge from his files, and then we get off this island.”

Einar says, “Someone will come once the storm abates. For now, we are safe. Relatively speaking.”

“We still need to get word out. Let's see if we can get some kind of communications up and running,” Hannah says. “The helicopter has a radio, right?”

Einar nods. “It should.”

Captain Dan laughs. “If we're gonna go to the helicopter, we might as well just fly the damn thing out of here. I was in the Navy. Used to fly a Seasprite but ended up on a Sikorsky Seahawk.”

“Then I'm up for a chopper ride,” Barry says, grinning from ear to ear.

Hannah can't help it: A smile crosses her face for the first time in what feels like forever. A flutter rises in her belly like a pair of white moths chasing each other. A strange, bubbly feeling:

Hope.

But that bright cloud is painted with a dark shadow: the murderer remains at large, and with him, colonies of these killer ants.

E
inar works through paper files in case something missed their attention, something hiding away from computer records in plain sight.

Hannah hovers over him. “Will said something to me as he was leaving. He said he hoped I would get to go home. And that he needed to go home, too. You have Will's files there. Where does he live?”

Einar stiffens, then stands. “I don't need to look in his file for that. He lives on Kauai. North Shore, or not far from it. He has a small house there, tucked away in the rain forest.”

“Do you think that's where he'd go?”

“Perhaps. He has a fiancée at home.”

An odd twist in Hannah's belly.
Jealousy?
“Then we need to head to Kauai.”

“Yes, I suppose we do.”

“Do you think he sent the other colonies around the world?”

“It seems to have been his plan. But maybe he took them home with him. Maybe that is another reason to go. Perhaps we can cut the knees out from under this biological apocalypse yet, Hannah Stander.”

“Don't trust Einar,” Ray says in a quiet voice, hooking her arm and pulling her toward the corner of the lab as she passes. “I've worked
with him. I've worked
close
with him. He's a genius. He's transformative. But the guy's not human.”

She yanks her arm out of his grip. “You're being dramatic.”

“Probably.” He sniffs. “Just be careful.”

Barry hands out more bug snacks. Protein bars and crispy mealworms. The protein bars taste like wall spackle, but the mealworms are like salty, greasy pork rinds. Hannah brings some to Kit, who still looks run through the wringer. “Someone needs to take care of
you,
” Kit says. The most she's spoken in hours.

“I'm fine,” Hannah says. But her face tugs tight and burns. Her arms and legs are covered in angry welts where the Myrmidons stuck their spears. The ants had already started their cruel work on her hands. Her fingers and the spaces between them are raw and red—as if sliced with little slips of paper. A few triangles of skin had been cut away, and she can move flaps of flesh by poking them. “You're the one who almost died.”

“I think you qualify as
almost died,
too.” Kit reaches up to touch Hannah's arm, and her hand shakes. “From the EpiPen.” She smiles—a weak, trembling expression. “It's actually just adrenaline, you know.”

“Huh. I did
not
know that.” It explains a lot.

“You learn something new every day.”

Suddenly Nancy is spinning in her chair and facing the rest of them. Her eyes are wide. Her jaw set tight.

“I found something,” she says.

“I thought it was nothing at first,” Nancy says, circling the mouse cursor around a single file folder. “It's the recycling bin. I bypassed it because I already checked the digital trash and didn't find anything. But then I realized—”

“That's not the recycling bin,” Hannah says, staring so hard at the screen the bright icons begin to blur together.

“No, it isn't. The icon has just been made to look like one.”

“And when you click on it?”

Nancy demonstrates:
click-click
. A window pops up. The file folder is locked. Password protected.

Einar sidles up next to her. His fingers tickle the air as if he's already typing. “May I, Nancy?”

“Knock yourself out.” She offers him the chair, but he instead stands at the keyboard. His fingers move fast. Hannah watches windows pop up and snap shut again. He switches the OS from OSX to what looks like a Microsoft installation. Then he's in the back end. Doing a
REGEDIT
on the registry—the cursor drifts to something-something
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
and he navigates submenu after submenu with alarming alacrity. As he types he talks, that crisp, curious accent accentuating every word.

“I was a bit of a hacker in my younger days. Mostly for the challenge of it—I like coding and this brand of coding is somewhat subversive.
Punk,
as it were, though aesthetically I was never really that. It always seemed to me that the hacker occupied the same niche as the American cowboy in your Wild West. Gunslingers at the edge of known civilization. Black hats, white hats. Some drawn into thievery, others taking the law into their own hands—justice both corporeal and social.”

He types, then highlights a gibberish string of characters, copies it into a notepad on-screen, then more clicking and typing. Hannah thinks he's grabbed the encrypted password and is now running it through a quick-code algorithm to unencrypt it.

But as he's doing so, she notices something else. Something not on-screen.

All of them have gathered around to watch Einar at work.

All of them but two.

Ajay is gone.

And so is Ray.

She looks back. Einar has the locked file opened and laid bare—vivisected like a pigeon, guts out for the scrying. He begins to open files, flinging them to the various corners of the large screen—spreadsheets and windows populated with dense notes about genetic chains. Images pop up in quick succession: macro photography of ants. Some small, some large. One ant is almost golden in color, another as black and shining as a mirror at night. A third is red as fire. And on and on.

“These aren't Will's notes,” Nancy says.

But Hannah has figured it out because the guilty ones always run, and she speaks at the same time as Nancy: “They're Ajay's.”