“What’s day-pah . . . um?” I can’t pronounce the word.
“Dépaysement. It’s like . . . homesick?” Emma shakes her head, her dark curls bouncing against her cheeks. “That’s not the word for it. It means . . . the way you feel when you know you’re not home.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. I don’t mean that I don’t understand the word—I don’t understand why she’s telling me this. Any of this.
“I learned long ago that home is a word that applies to people, not places. That’s why I didn’t mind signing up for this mission. Didn’t matter to me where I was—it mattered who I was with.”
Emma cocks her head—I hear it too. Mom and Chris are returning. “I’m giving you this,” she says, looking down at the glass cube in my hands, “because you—you and that Elder boy—you two don’t care about any military mission. You don’t care about what the FRX may want. You care about making this world home.”
“What do you care about?” I ask, searching her eyes.
“Doesn’t matter,” Emma says sadly. “I’m military. I have to obey the orders. You don’t.”
She glances behind her quickly. “Go,” she says. “Hide it.”
The urgency in her voice makes me spin around and dash to the tiny corner of privacy I have in my “room” made of tents and throw the glass cube into my sleeping bag, out of sight.
“Amy?” Mom calls.
I step back out. Emma’s gone.
“Ready?” Mom asks.
I’m sweating by the time we reach Mom’s lab in the shuttle—I’d love another thunderstorm to cool everything off. But then I remember the search parties and Kit, and pray that it doesn’t rain.
Dr. Gupta’s body is no longer in Mom’s lab, and I’m somewhat grateful for that. There were too many . . . pieces. Like Juliana Robertson. I swallow drily, trying to forget the ripping, crunching sound the ptero made as it ate Dr. Gupta.
Somehow, my mind drifts to Lorin. She was found dead too, but she must not have been killed by a ptero. The horror of Dr. Gupta and Juliana’s deaths has made everyone forget that it is Lorin’s immaculate, seemingly untouched body that is by far the creepier corpse.
“The geologists need to run more tests before they can use my help,” Mom says, already turning to the worktable in the lab. She holds out a vial of some viscous liquid. It’s dark crimson, almost black.
“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.