With growing anticipation Katharine watched as Rob pulled up a viewer, then copied in the full path of the jpg file. Almost there, she thought, we’ve almost got it. Until the screen went blank and a new message appeared:
PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSWORD NOW
Rob had tried a few possible passwords, ranging from anagrams of the words “artifact” and “serinus” to Takeo Yoshihara’s name spelled backward. To neither his nor Katharine’s surprise, none of them worked. “Who knows?” he’d finally sighed. “It could be someone’s mother-in-law’s birthday, or a random sequence of letters and numbers. And I suspect that if I just keep trying to break in, the computer will notice what’s going on and report me to someone.”
Katharine gazed dispiritedly at the monitor, unable to shake from her memory the disquieting images recorded on the strange video. “It’s probably not the right file anyway,” she said, disappointed. “What on earth would a tribe slaughtering some kind of primate have to do with air pollution?”
Rob shrugged. “I’m afraid you’d know a lot more about that than I would. You’re the bone person, remember?”
But Katharine had no answer. They spent a few minutes poking around in the directory named Serinus, but quickly discovered that without the password, only a single file was open to them.
A file that confirmed that Takeo Yoshihara and Mishimoto Corporation were indeed embarked on a major research project aimed at tackling the problem of global pollution head-on. “And making a fortune with whatever they discover, no doubt,” Rob remarked as they finished reading the file.
They’d abandoned the computer then, but for the rest of the afternoon, as Katharine concentrated on reconstructing the skeleton that had been exhumed from the ravine, the first faint tendrils of an idea kept reaching out to her. When Rob finally interrupted her to suggest they have dinner together, she realized that the afternoon had slipped away.
Though she was no closer to gaining access to the files containing the image of the skull and the video, the skeleton was almost complete. And the idea, though not yet fully formed, was starting to come together in her mind. “I think I’m going to finish this,” she said. “You go on, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
After Rob left, she called Michael and told him she’d be late.
“How late?” he asked.
“Only a couple of hours,” she promised. “And then we’ll go out for pizza, okay?”
“I guess,” Michael replied, and she heard the anxiety in his voice.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”
There was a long silence, then: “I’ll be okay. See you when you get home.”
She hung up the phone and hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t call it a day and go home now. But even as that thought came to her, the idea that had been poking at the edges of her consciousness all afternoon suddenly came together.
Once again she replayed the video in her mind, but this time, instead of trying to decide what kind of creature it was that she’d seen, she concentrated on how old it might have been.
If it was some kind of small primate, it would have been full-grown.
But if it wasn’t a primate?
More images flashed though her memory.
The way the tribesmen had stared at it.
The way its fear seemed to grow, and the look almost of surprise when the tribesmen had begun chasing it.
It had been so much smaller than the men.
And the woman had acted like …
The woman had acted like a distraught mother who had just lost a child.
A mutant?
Could what she’d seen on the video have been a mutated human child?
Mutated by what? Pollution?
Even as the question formed in her mind, so did a possible answer. Mount Pinatubo.
The volcano that had erupted in the Philippines less than ten years ago, spewing enough ash and poisonous gas into the atmosphere to make dozens of villages uninhabitable.
If alcohol and tobacco could harm a fetus, what might the gases disgorged from an active volcano do? Katharine’s eyes fixed once more on the skeleton on the table, but now her mind’s eye no longer saw the fire pit next to which the body had been buried, but the sulfurous vent a little farther up the ravine. What if the remains she’d unearthed were of someone who’d been born only months after an eruption of Haleakala?
Suddenly it became imperative to determine the age of the bones as exactly as possible, and try to correlate them to one of the last eruptions on Maui.
Or on the Big Island, where even now new vents were opening, releasing gases from the bowels of the planet?
She worked for three more hours, preparing bone samples and searching the Internet for the labs that could do the work most quickly and efficiently.
And now her mind was starting to fog with exhaustion and her whole body ached.
And she was already hours later than she’d promised Michael.
Leaving everything as it was, Katharine began closing up the workroom. She’d just turned the lights off and was about to lock the door when a sweep of headlights across the window caught her eye.
Leaving the lights off, she went to the window and looked out.
Michael sat staring at the television, trying to concentrate on the characters on the screen but unable to keep his attention on the movie for more than a few seconds at a time.
He kept thinking about Josh, clutching the bottle of ammonia in the rest room, sucking the fumes deep into his lungs, struggling to hang on to it when he’d taken it away from him.
And he remembered the look in Josh’s eyes just before he’d fled from the locker room. For a moment Michael hadn’t been able to recognize his friend at all. Josh had completely disappeared, replaced by …
What?
A wild animal.
The words came unbidden into Michael’s mind, but the more he thought about them, the more he realized that was exactly what Josh had looked like: a trapped animal, searching for a way to escape.
And for just a second, Michael recalled, he’d been afraid Josh was going to attack him, going to try to recover the bottle he’d yanked from Josh’s hands.
After school Michael had waited as long as he could, hoping Josh would come back, but when the bus had been ready to leave, he’d finally climbed onto it. All the way home he’d kept half an eye out, thinking he might see Josh’s truck racing up to overtake the bus, hear his horn blaring, and then find him waiting at the stop where he got off. But another part of him was just as sure that Josh’s pickup was not going to appear, that something terrible had happened to his friend.
Should he call the police?
And tell them what?
Repeat the weird story Josh had told him about Jeff’s strange behavior and his own flight from the cane field last night? But that would only get Josh in even more trouble than he was already in. And if something had happened to Jeff Kina in the cane field, wouldn’t someone have heard about it? After all, he’d heard the names of the two men who had died in the cane fire before he’d left schooclass="underline" fire workers on a routine patrol, killed in a freak accident. One of them had been the uncle of one of the guys on the track team. But nobody had heard anything about Jeff Kina.
When he got home, he called Josh’s house, but Sam Malani answered, sounding drunk, and ranting that when Josh got home he was going to beat the crap out of him.
Michael hadn’t called again.
Then, about an hour ago, he started feeling kind of funny again. It wasn’t too bad — not at all like when he’d had asthma — but for a minute he’d been tempted to call his mother. He’d chucked that idea as soon as it crossed his mind. If she didn’t make him go to the hospital tonight—“Better to be safe than sorry”—she’d definitely drag him back to Dr. Jameson tomorrow.