“What is this?” I ask.
“Ptero blood. ”
I glance behind me. Dr. Gupta’s body might be gone, but the ptero is still there, draped over the metal tables. Mom’s dissected it already, weighing the organs and filling the entire lab with its foul odor, but she’s not quite done with it yet.
I try not to gag at the smell of the ptero’s stinking blood. When I cover my nose with the back of my hand, Chris shoots me a sympathetic glance.
“I want you to run the immunoassay on this,” Mom tells me. “We’ve been analyzing the victims—let’s look at the monsters instead. ”
“But we know what killed the ptero,” I say. My bullets.
Mom just silently hands me the sample and we work together to test the ptero blood.
When it’s all finished, Mom reads the report on the computer aloud. “Negative for everything,” she says. “Except gen mod material. ”
I gape at her. When I talked to Elder about the pteros before, I hadn’t really believed it was possible that they’d been genetically engineered by the first colony. Gen mod material was invented on Earth—Sol-Earth. It shouldn’t be here at all, and certainly not in a native alien creature. But it shouldn’t have been in Dr. Gupta’s blood either.
“Is it possible that this gen mod material is from . . . ” Chris trails off, looking uncomfortable. “Could it be from, er, Dr. Gupta?”
Mom shakes her head. “Too soon—the creature was killed before it had a chance to digest Dr. Gupta. ”
She should know. She did the dissection. She found the pieces of him in the ptero’s stomach.
“But how, then?” I ask. “How could a ptero possibly have gen mod material in its bloodstream? Could it have come from the planet?”
Mom stares intently at the sample of ptero blood. “It should be impossible. I talked to Frank, the geologist. He says there are minerals in the soil he’s never seen before. We’re talking about whole new elements to the periodic table! Which means this planet? It shouldn’t have anything that directly came from our planet, especially gen mod material, which was artificially created. ”
I don’t need to wait for her to finish the tests. I already know the answer—the ptero has gen mod material in its bloodstream because humans have been here before. And they did something. Something similar to what we’re doing to the horse and dog fetuses. Except they took it too far, and the creatures they made were monsters. Maybe the same monsters that killed them all, leaving behind nothing but the stone ruins.
As I watch my mother set up the rest of her equipment, I’m 100 percent certain that she has no idea what Dad knows about the compound past the lake. She still thinks we’re the first people here. I open my mouth, determined to tell her the truth Dad’s kept hidden, but no words come out. I have to hope that her tests can prove something, something that will save us.
There’s a determined set to her jaw, an impassioned focus in the way she works now. It reminds me of Emma and what she told me this morning. It seems as if everyone knows there’s something wrong with this world . . . we just can’t quite figure out what it is.
After several hours, the lab door zips open. Chris jumps up, startled—he’d fallen asleep while Mom and I worked. Elder steps inside.
He looks a little lost as he scans the room. “Colonel Martin said I needed to come here?” he asks loudly. His eyes see mine, and his mouth curves in relief, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He looks tired—tired of fighting Dad, tired of peeling back the layers of this planet and finding only half-truths and danger.
“Kit?” I ask immediately.
Elder shakes his head. “Still missing. You wanted me?” There’s a question in his voice.
Mom stands up. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’d asked Bob—Colonel Martin—to send you here before we found out that your doctor was missing. I’m surprised he still asked you to come; I didn’t mean for it to interrupt the search party. ”
“It’s okay,” Elder says heavily. “We had to break for lunch. ”
“In that case,” Mom says, standing. “This will only take a moment. ”
She motions for Elder to follow her back to where the tubes of fetuses are stored. Elder shoots me an inquiring look, and I realize that Mom has summoned him because I avoided telling the scientists about them earlier.
“We’re beginning the incubation process,” Mom says, showing Elder the tube, “and we weren’t sure what animals these are. Do you know?”
“Yes,” Elder says. His voice is polite but wary.
“Oh, good, I hoped so,” Mom says. “So what do we have here?” She stops in front of the cylinder filled with golden goopy liquid and little beans of cloned humans. Cloned Elders. Copies of the first Eldest, all exactly the same right down to their DNA, but none of them are my Elder.
“They’re—” Elder’s voice catches in his throat. “They’re human fetuses. Cloned. ”
Mom steps back, surprised. “Human fetuses? The FRX didn’t say anything about preserving cloned human fetuses. . . . ”