“Show me,” I tell him. “Prove what you’re saying is true, and then I’ll decide how I feel. I want to see what you’re doing up there. Make me believe you’re doing something good.”
This is the most I can give him, this opening, my willingness to have been wrong about him one last time. For the moment, with him wounded and bleeding and me untouched, I believe that I’m not in danger, that he isn’t out to hurt me. Not only is he the one bleeding, the anger is now mine alone. My own sins have been forgiven.
Whether Ness really meant to show me what lies beneath the lighthouse or not, the secret I’ve uncovered there puts all the rest into perspective. And I realize the truth of what he hinted at once, that the story he wants to tell will make a mockery of my pieces. Maybe the story that ran today, the one that will hurt Holly and perhaps no one else, enraged him because of my betrayal, not because of his desire for self-preservation. I allow myself to believe this as I follow him in the direction of the estate and toward a flight of stairs that winds up the bluff. I allow myself to consider that he was angry in the shower not for the damage I caused his family’s reputation, but because he feared I felt nothing for him, that I had been using him all along.
I nearly press him on this, but I choose to walk in silence.
We tread up creaking and salt-air-worn steps, palms on rough splinter-toothed rails, Ness climbing ahead of me. I remember following him into his house what seems like several years ago. A lifetime ago. I came here to write about the world he wanted to destroy, to hoard for himself, to spirit away—and now he says it’s a world he wishes to save, to protect. I feel a tug in every direction on the deepest parts of my soul, this compound wish to be with a man both dangerous and protective. A man who could wreck vengeance on my behalf, but never upon me.
My mother pointed this out to me on a shelling walk, before I went off to college. “You’ll love most the ones who can hurt you,” she warned me. It was a version of my father’s more pithy: “Men are pricks.” However stated, it’s a lesson that must tragically be learned, not told.
“You okay?” Ness asks as we reach the top of the stairs.
I nod, out of breath. He’s the one with twin trails of blood curving down his neck. He’s the one whose family name is besmirched in today’s paper. And he wants to know if a flight of stairs has wronged me. And in that question, and that steely gaze, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would burn the stairs into the sea if I hinted at any offense.
“I’m fine,” I say.
We follow the ridge toward the lighthouse. There’s a winding dirt path worn into the grasses right at the edge, and I realize that Ness must walk from the estate to his secret lair sometimes. Perhaps every day. This is where he’s been the last four years, watching the sun rise over the glittering sea to his left, then watching the sky redden and the planets and stars come out as he winds his way back home at dusk. All for what? I want to see. I want to meet the people in the white cloaks, these people who moments ago I feared. I see two of them far ahead, by the lighthouse. I see the jeep and the guards as well. They watch with hands shielding their eyes as we approach.
Fifty meters away, and the men get in the jeep as if to come out to us, but Ness waves them off. I see them hesitate for a moment, but then they drive sullenly away, disappointed perhaps at this tease of danger, this thrill of excitement, of actually being needed.
“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.”