Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3)(41)
“So who put it there?”
“We don’t know,” Alison said. “But whoever it was …wasn’t us.”
DeeAnn’s eyes opened wide. “Wasn’t us?”
“They couldn’t have been. Dee, these things were advanced. I mean really advanced. Even Wil Borger couldn’t believe it. And there was enough dust on the ground to tell me that no one had been in there for a looong time.”
“How long?”
“Long. Hundreds of years, at least. Maybe thousands.”
DeeAnn was having as much trouble processing it as they had. “But…why? Why would someone…or something…put that there?”
“Wil thinks it’s some kind of vault, from another species. Put here to ensure their DNA survives forever. He said scientists have already done something like it up north, in Norway, I think.”
“A vault,” DeeAnn mumbled incredulously. “An embryo vault.”
“Steve Caesare calls it something else…an alien ARK.”
DeeAnn gasped. “Holy-”
“That puts it in a different perspective, doesn’t it?”
“My God,” she whispered. “An ark?”
Alison nodded. “But instead of sending animals, they sent embryos. And seeds. Wil thinks the liquid inside the tubes is some kind of nutrient, keeping them all alive.” She lowered herself onto the edge of the table. “Now you can understand why Steve is going back. Because somehow what ended up in that water, and those plants, also ended up in that little capuchin monkey.”
“That’s why he’s so old,” DeeAnn whispered, incredulous.
“That’s the theory. The plants were destroyed, but the DNA strain is likely still preserved in the monkey. And since our DNA is so similar to his, it may also be transferrable.”
DeeAnn dropped her gaze to the table, shaking her head. She was stunned. After several seconds, she looked back at Alison. “Okay, wait. What does all that have to do with us, and Sofia?”
“I don’t know. The effects seem too similar not to be related, but I can’t understand how we would have picked it up. Maybe the water was trickling down to the ocean or something?”
“Wouldn’t that mean you’d then have these giant plants popping up all the way down to the coast?”
“Probably. Which means it has to be something else.”
“Right. Besides, once it got into the ocean, you’d probably have everything growing like crazy underwater too. Maybe-” DeeAnn shrugged, but suddenly fell quiet when she looked back at Alison, whose jaw had dropped and her face had begun losing color.
“Oh my God!”
“What?”
“OH MY GOD!”
DeeAnn looked confused. “What? What is it?”
Alison leaped up. “It IS in the water! The ocean!” She spun around to face Dirk and Sally, who were still watching them. “I SAW it! I saw it and didn’t even realize!” She peered up at the top of the enormous tank. “That’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“Don’t you see?!” Alison cried. “Sofia! None of the guys were in the water with her. Only me. But I’m not the one who brought it back. It was DIRK AND SALLY WHO BROUGHT IT BACK!”
“Holy cow.”
“Holy cow is right!” Alison grabbed her backpack again and dug into the small pocket in the front, retrieving her car keys. She then dropped the pack and began running for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To get my phone!”
19
The Florida Everglades was truly a sight to behold for anyone seeing it for the first time. Spanning nearly half the state, the Everglades rested upon a large limestone shelf, causing water leaving enormous Lake Okeechobee to form a slow moving river stretching more than sixty miles wide and one hundred miles long –– a river flowing steadily through vast sawgrass marshes and mangrove forests to the southern half of the state. That was where it emptied into Florida Bay and the Caribbean Sea beyond.
Now, over a century after the first large-scale projects were proposed, a network of over 1,400 miles of canals and levees were harnessing a huge portion of the Everglade’s massive water supply. The result of which were dozens of modern cities that could never have existed without a huge, yet shallow, river called the Everglades.
The late morning air was growing warmer from the southwesterly wind blowing gently through the endless marshes, leaving behind only slight ripples across the clear, shallow water. Too slight, in fact, to affect the fifteen-foot-long canoe gliding smoothly in and around one of many mangrove systems.
The lone woman held her paddle steady on one side, turning back out into the small channel before switching sides and rounding another outcropping. The tangled roots jutted far out across the water, slowly making their own crossing as if trying to reunite with those on the other side.