“Do you want to call someone and let them know where you are?” Ness asks.
I consider this. It surprises me. Not that he is aware of my trepidation, but that he considers I might want some way to allay those fears, some way to let my boss or my family or the authorities know where I am. “My phone is dead,” I tell him.
“You can use mine.” He offers it. I consider the wisdom of calling Agent Cooper, filling him in, but I wave the phone away. The gesture is enough. To actually make that call would do more harm than striking him, I sense. Trust must be met with trust. Ness puts the phone away.
“This is my lead scientist,” he tells me, indicating one of the women I saw in the laboratory beneath the lighthouse. She’s standing with her hands in her smock, looking worriedly at Ness’s wound, then suspiciously at me. “Ryan, this is Maya Walsh. Maya, Ryan.”
We shake hands. She has a firm grip; she does not smile at me.
“And this is Stewart, my chief geneticist.”
Stewart is smoking an old-fashioned cigarette. I wonder if this is a habit he picked up from Vincent or vice versa. He exhales a cloud of smoke, then shakes my hand. “The reporter, eh?”
“Not today,” Ness says. “Today she is only a friend. I want you to show her around.”
I follow Ryan and Stewart down the stairs to the back entrance, through the locked door held fast by Holly’s birthday. Ness follows. Inside, the others kick off their shoes and don white booties. I take a pair from the cardboard box and pull them on too, realizing that only Ness and I are barefoot, that he must’ve kicked off his booties in pursuit. Twice I catch Ryan shooting Ness an Are you sure about this? look. And I catch him nodding almost imperceptibly. There is great risk in bringing me here, I realize. And it’s a risk he had planned on taking a week ago. With or without me, he has decided to blow the lid off his work here.
“We do most of our research on this floor,” Ryan says as we head down to the vast space I ran through earlier. “Genetic sequencing takes place over there. We examine samples from the vents, looking for base pairs that confer temperature and acidic advantages—”
“So they’re real,” I say. “These shells grow themselves. They’re not, like, transplanted in.”
It occurs to me that this might’ve been where Dimitri Arlov worked. Maybe he took the murexes home because he was proud of them, or simply because they were beautiful, or as a memento.
“Yes, they … grow themselves,” Ryan says, hesitating as though she’s reluctant to say more.
Ness interrupts. “Maya knows enough of the science to understand how this works,” he says. “Just explain it.”
Ryan shrugs at Ness and then turns to me. “They’re real, but we designed them. We have complete DNA samples of hundreds of extinct species. We use their nearest living ancestor to breed the first generation. And then we create enough genetic diversity for the species to become self-sustaining. Technically, it’s a new species, never seen before. But it looks the same. And it should fill the same niche. Should give us the biodiversity we’ve lost, which may trickle up the food chain.”
“Show her the murex,” Ness says.
Stewart nods and leads us down the next flight of stairs.
“What makes you think these animals will survive in the wild?” I ask.
“We have tanks on the lower level with live rock and water samples taken from various offshore locations,” Stewart explains.
“What about—?”
“Predators included,” Ness says behind me. He then pardons himself. He’s dying to talk, I can tell, but seems to want all this to come from someone else. He’s trying to be an observer, and I can tell that’s hard for him. While Stewart takes me toward the rows of tanks, I watch Ryan inspect Ness’s gashed cheek.
“I’ve seen the murexes,” I tell Stewart. I spot some knobby whelks in a tank a few rows down. Large shells. “What about those?”
“The whelks,” Stewart says. I follow him to the tank. He reaches inside and pulls one out. I watch the slug’s foot retract and swell to plug its home. “These were the fourth species we revived. They can already handle acidity levels plus eighty.”
“Plus eighty?”
“Eighty years out,” he explains. “Where we project the levels to be eighty years from now, anyway. It should give them plenty of time to adjust on their own. But if not, we can help them along again. Our command of this is only getting better.”