Invasive (25 page)

H
annah grabs Kit's wristband. Did Ajay go deeper into Arca? Or out into the storm? Which would be safer? Which would he choose? Arca could still be flush with ants seeking shelter from the rain.

Finding Ajay is a priority. First, to discover what more he knows that he hasn't yet told them, but also? Because
he
might be the one who has (or knows who has) the missing ant colonies.

But as Hannah strides toward the door, it hisses open and Ajay comes hurtling toward her. He crashes into her, then spins hard against a white counter, a beaker atop it pirouetting off the corner and smashing against the floor.

No. He didn't throw himself—he was
thrown
. Ray is stepping through the door now, his once-perfect hair finally gone wild like a garden gone to weeds. His face is midsnarl. “He got bit” is all he says.

Ajay is on the ground, shaking and shuddering. A stuttering sound out of his mouth as his jaw locks and unlocks:
gg-gg-ggg
. Barry stomps on a few ants coming off him. He blasts a cloud from the extinguisher, too.

Hannah backs away, but one of the ants crawls up the back of her hand. Mandibles open, hungry for her skin (or rather, what lives upon it). She's about to cry out—

A flash of something down her arm, a tickling sensation—a green blur that she sees now is a praying mantis. Buffy scurries forward at lightning speed, scooping up the ant on her hand and tearing it in half.
Rip.

Hannah stifles a scream as Buffy jumps off her hand and onto a nearby counter, greedily eating its Myrmidon prey.

That mantis just saved my life.

She might've needed the last EpiPen—and right now she needs that to help Ajay, to bring him back from the brink of anaphylaxis. She turns to grab the auto-injector, but—

It's gone.

Nancy has taken it. The small Filipino woman has it held tightly to her chest, like a prom date holding a beloved corsage. “No,” Nancy hisses with an animal-like desperation.

“Nancy,” Einar cautions.

“We need to give him the epinephrine.” Hannah keeps her voice calm and measured. “We need to save his life so we can learn what he knows.”

“
No.
It's our last one. One of us might need it.” Translation: Nancy thinks she might need it. “We found his data. We have what we need.”

Behind Hannah, Ajay's heels judder against the floor.

“Nancy.
Nancy.
Look at me. He could die without that shot. And if we want to know what happened here—if we want a complete picture of the events and a look at how to stop it—then he may know something that can help us. But he cannot give us that if his throat is closed and he dies from shock on the floor.”

The woman's eyes flit like nervous flies—to Einar. To Hannah. To Ajay and back again to Einar. She looks down at the auto-injector in her hand, and slowly, her fingers start to curl away from it—

Einar says, “If you don't give it here, I'll fire you. Then I'll sue you. I have a team of lawyers swimming the oceans around me like hungry sharks. I'll be glad to chum the waters with you, Dr. Mercado.”

Nancy's fingers tighten again around the EpiPen.
Damn it,
Hannah thinks. Nancy starts to back away, and Hannah moves fast. Her hands strike out like the springing forelegs of the mantis and catch Nancy's wrists. Hard.

“Hey!” Nancy protests.

Hannah hooks her leg around the back of Nancy's and
pulls
. Nancy drops backward. As she falls, Hannah lets the woman's momentum take her—and yanks the EpiPen out of her hand as she goes.

Hannah stomps over to Ajay, crouches, and slams the auto-injector into his leg.

Ajay didn't go far into anaphylaxis before Ray hauled him back into the lab, but he still needs a few minutes to shudder and shiver and work it out. The look on his face as he recovers from shock is telling.

“Where'd you go?” Hannah asks Ray.

Ray stares her down, breathes out, finally says, “Ajay ran. I ran after him.”

“You should've said something.”

“I didn't want anyone following.”

She eyes him up. It seems like he's telling the truth. “How is it out there?”

“It's a horror show. People are stripped clean. They're dead. Everyone's dead.”

Hannah flinches. Such a waste of life. “How bad is the infestation?”

“The ants? Pssh. Not too many. But some.”

She has to hope that what she's learned about ants applies here, too: that these ants went back to the nest and she drowned them there. If not? That means they're still
here
. Or somewhere near.

Einar steps up to them. He doesn't even look at Ray. “Hannah, I'm sorry about pushing on Nancy. I misread the situation. You had it handled. I should have respected that.”

Hannah shoots him an icy look.
You almost cost us that auto-injector.
But she guards her tongue. “It's fine.”

“I think it's time to hold Ajay accountable. Will you ask the questions?”

“I will.”

“Then let us begin, mm?”

Hannah is not law enforcement. Interrogation is not a thing she does. What she does is interview, asking questions not to demand answers but to see where the conversation takes them. This is her approach with Ajay. Her questions are soft and simple but probing.

Tell me about your role with the Myrmidon ants. Tell me about Will. Were you in charge or was he?

This is what Ajay tells her:

“I did not know what we were doing. What
he
was doing. Listen, Will is an artist. A genius. I hated that about him but I respected it, too. When I got a chance to work with Special Projects . . . how could I say no?”

Here, a burning stare from Kit. Hannah is reminded that Will and Special Projects stole her mosquito project away. Ajay being brought to the Cove has to sting her.

Ajay continues: “I thought it was all theoretical. Will was in charge. I wanted to study with him, but I didn't want him to feel like I was a student. I wanted to impress him. To be his equal—”

“We don't give a shit about your psychological problems,” Ray says, and Hannah shoots him a look.

“The challenge was, how dramatic could it be? How far could we go engineering an insect? Something that was not precisely brand new—we are not gods creating life, not exactly—but something that would
appear
brand new because of how it was made not from a simple remix of two species but from a panoply of them. Harvesters. Leaf-cutters. Marauders. Drivers. I thought if we could crack this, it might open up the problems suffered with the pollinator project. And with my hand helping guide the project early on, it could never be claimed that it was all
Will, Will,
Will
.” Will's name drips with caustic venom, practically sizzling as it comes out of Ajay's mouth.

“When was all this? When did it all start with you and him?” Hannah asks.

“A year ago. Maybe more. Eighteen months.”

“He did all this in eighteen months?” Kit asks, incredulous. “How?”

Ajay offers a small, anxious nod. “Like I said,
brilliant
. I don't even know how, exactly. We started with the genome map of the Argentine ant. It was an incomplete map—so far they'd only gotten something like 216 out of 250 million base pairs with about 16,000 genes. Will and I did the rest. We already knew that the ant had 367 genes devoted to its sense of smell—compared to the honeybee's 174 genes. We knew they had cytochrome genes meant to detox the ant. But we also found genes that others had not—genes that indicated aggression, that dictated hunting patterns, breeding times and cycles. Will somehow took that knowledge and began to use it, the way you would solve a cryptogram puzzle in the Sunday paper, to decipher the genomes of other ants, too.”

“Did you know he had created the Myrmidon successfully?” Hannah asks.

Ajay hesitates. She pushes. Asks the question again.

His eyes squeeze shut. “I did. One day when everyone was at dinner and I had to go back to the dorm for a moment just to get a heartburn pill—I know, Indians are supposed to be able to eat spicy foods, but I cannot abide them—there, on my bed, was a . . .” He makes a face. “Present.”

Ajay describes a small Plexiglas box. Like the ones used to contain small quantities of mosquitoes or other insects. In the box was a mouse. And one of the formicariums: the black discs meant to carry small colonies.

“The mouse was not dead. It was still breathing. But most of its fur was stripped off, and half of its skin. Its whiskers twitched as the ants swarmed it, pulling it apart . . .” He stifles a sob. “There was a message on the top of the box. In Will's handwriting. It said,
We did it
.”

Hannah presses him on other questions:

Why did I see two sizes of ant?

“Some ants are polymorphic. They have castes, different sizes. Leaf-cutters have four castes: soldiers, guards, foragers, gardeners. Major, minor, media, and minim. It's the soldiers you may be seeing if you saw them in the nest. They develop as the nest matures.”

How are there so many, so quickly?

“He prototyped hundreds, maybe thousands of queens. And their life cycle is tweaked—usually it's six, maybe eight weeks. This is less than a week.”

So if they get established somewhere—

“Then it's over for us. They're destroyers.”

They kill everything living?

“No. Just living things with the
Candida
yeast. It's not on every creature.”

How did Will let them crawl all over him?

“I was thinking about that. You said they took away the carcass. The ant he killed?”

That's right.

“Ants are clean creatures. Obsessively so. They create these midden heaps—”

Hannah remembers Ez showing her the trays of ants—the corners blackened with piles of refuse and their own dead.

“—we don't know why they do it, but a good guess is so they keep pathogens to a minimum. And filth in general. An ant gets dirty, it obsessively cleans itself. It makes sense. Anything coating its antennae will limit its sensory abilities, so it is important for them to remain clean, as an ant is nothing without its senses. They carry their killed colony mates to the midden heaps, too. When some ants of certain species—like
Pogonomyrmex
—die, they release not only the alarm pheromone, but also oleic acid. That's how ants identify
one of their own dead. That's how they know who to take to the midden heap.”

What does this have to do with Will?

“Will may have covered himself with oleic acid. Or a mix of acid and something else. I saw that he had a few cans of Tinactin in his locker. Could be he has an antifungal in there, too. To mask the scent of
Candida
. Maybe he made it into a soap or a spray. Probably a spray. The ants crawl on him then, but do so with disinterest. They may investigate, as you suggest they did. But they would not bite.”