When I craned my neck to get a better look, James became nervous.
“Ms. Spencer would prefer to show you these special exhibits herself. Someone accidentally left this open…”
“That’s a huge chunk of crystal, Jimmy,” I said. “Last I saw something like that was on the cover of a 1970s science fiction novel. And the bird skeleton… What’s the wingspan? Twenty feet? Is it a pterodactyl?”
“No, ma’am, it is not a pterodactyl.” James pulled a pair of brass-plated doors shut. “Argentavis magnificens. An extinct predator. Among the largest of her kind. She devoured prey whole. Shall we move toward the dining room?” He wiped his brow and checked his watch.
“The crystal. You simply have to give me the scoop, Jimbo.”
“Ms. Spencer awaits.” He led the way, and briskly.
“Does Manson handle the executions around here?”
He glanced over his shoulder, eyes glassy-bright. “Mainly, yes.”
A woman spends her early adult years at hatcheries and aboard fishing trawlers doing the honest labor of tracking and cataloguing salmon (that great Alaskan export), and nobody cares. Americans want their food marginally harmless in a marginally attractive package; the fewer details, the better. A woman gets attacked by a mass murderer and lives to tell, everybody wants a piece of the action.
Type Jessica M into any search engine and the auto-form will suggest Jessica Mace & Eagle Talon Ripper; Jessica Mace US Magazine; Jessica Mace Nude Photos; Jessica Mace Final Girl. Averna Spencer hadn’t merely followed my career as portrayed in the media, she knew my whole origin story—how a while back, I’d barely survived an apartment complex massacre and fire; how I’d risen from near-death and killed the killer; how I’d bailed on my fifteen minutes and vanished (like mother, like daughter). She’d also obtained facts regarding my unpublicized excursions on the road. Averna confessed her fascination regarding people who had confronted the vicissitudes of existence in an intimate manner. I took it to mean she’d burned ants with a magnifying glass as a kid.
We finished supper and wandered through her hanging gardens and lesser aviaries. Flocks of tropical birds dwelled inside a dome of sparkly mesh that protected a lush jungle biome. It would take the gross national product of a small country to stock and maintain such a preserve.
Our path wound through an imported jungle. Paper lanterns (grotesque busts of birds of prey) cast our primeval surroundings in the light of an animated Kipling adaptation. Climate control simulated the tropics. Humidity soaked my clothes and I almost believed the sliver of moonlight peeping through leaves was other than a subtly masked klieg.
She said, “You’re rather trusting for a woman who’s had her throat slashed. Do you jump into a helicopter with any total stranger?”
“Manson isn’t the kind of person you argue with.” I raised my voice to compete with raucous chatter of birds and mating frogs.
“Manson is an extension of my will. I made her.”
“Made her? As in Pygmalion?”
“Isn’t that the idiom the cool kids are using?”
“Yes. Do me next, pretty please.”
“I projected my life essence into her puny mortal frame and voila, a million-year evolutionary leap. It’s a messy process. Not for weak stomachs.”
Seemed an appropriate point to change the subject. “I read in an article that you employ a team of geneticists and zoologists. You want to protect endangered bird species.” Campbell and Ryoko’s dossier alleged that Averna Spencer hired mercenaries to shoot nest robbers and sabotage the infrastructure of land developers who operated in environmentally-sensitive regions such as South America.
“The science team pursues much grander designs,” she said. “We work to resurrect a spectrum of extinct species. Avian, reptile, amphibian. I’m worried for honeybees. As our apian friends go, so go we.”
“The research is conducted here, in house?”
“Yes, and in twenty-three other countries.”
“Good thing you’re loaded. Woman could burn through a fortune on fringe research.”
“She could. Or she could manipulate a host of international political actors to foot the bill. Drug lords, warlords, bored industrialists… It isn’t as difficult to separate them from their spare millions as you might think.”
“Any luck raising the dodo from the dead?”
“Sixty-eight percent of this aviary system is populated by animals that no longer exist in the outside world.”
I flashed to the giant bird skeleton in the private museum, and how the tall, crystal had seethed with a weird yellow fire. Decided to zip my lips. Averna’s stride, long and graceful, reminded me of her unnatural strength. Her friendly smile hinted at savagery.
“My most prized work isn’t specific to avian research,” she said. “I hope to create a trigger of human evolution. A radically accelerated process.”
“Mutation.”
“After a fashion.”
“Toward what end?”
“The ability to survive dramatic climate change. To withstand nuclear radiation and acid rain. To think faster. To dispense with antiquated paradigms of morality and ethics. To soar with the eagles and swim with the fishes.”
“Things mad scientists say for five hundred, Alex,” I said. “Any notable successes, a la The Island of Doctor Moreau?”
“Me, a scientist? Hardly. Certainly, I’m slightly bonkers and quite ancient. Old people acquire knowledge. We spread it around, for weal or woe. As to the matter of success, I’m banking on getting lucky tonight, at least. Let’s swing by your room for a nightcap.”
“Mine? Surely yours is more luxurious.”
She took my arm rather possessively. “I sleep hanging upside down from a trapeze bar in Aviary 4. It’s not a cozy rendezvous.”
All I could see was the mask of the devil bird in the video clip, the feather plume; her victim’s corpse tumbling toward the water; men and women screaming in a solarium, its walls splattered in gore. Averna, radiant and exultant as a blood god from the bad history books.
Half a magnum of 1928 Krug later:
“Final girls are a necessarily rare breed.” Averna studied my calloused palms, the yellow bruises along my shoulder. Her nails were trimmed close to the quick and unpolished. Dark specks of blood had gotten under some of them. “Your training regimen is fierce. No enhanced strength or ESP? No telekinetic powers?”
“I skate along on woman’s intuition.”
“No secret weaponry of any kind?”
“Apparently, I’m a mongoose. Natural weaponry. Rawr!”
“She kissed my (also bruised) belly. “I am curious what combination of pathology and trauma drives you to seek danger.”
“This from Miss I-jump-off-cliffs-in a-wingsuit?”
“Pretend a normal person you’d like to fuck asked the question. The event in Alaska opened the world for you.”
“Opened the world? Like I should be grateful? I never volunteered to get brutalized. I didn’t tip that domino. The attack fucked me up royal.” I resisted the urge to touch the scar on my neck.
“Or it awakened dormant DNA. Your latent adrenaline junkie gene.”
“You know how it is—at first, it’s about the rush, then the rush becomes a habit. After a while, you’re basically screwed.”
“Give it an eon. Who’s your favorite superhero?”
“Let me think…”