The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(11)

“And?”

“The spider isn’t a Nazca Line.”

Melanie realized she was walking more quickly than was comfortable, but the café was in sight, and the thought of the temporary respite from the heat helped her to keep up the pace. “It sure looks like a Nazca Line,” she said.

“No,” Julie said. “The Nazca Lines look like the spider. All the other lines are about twenty-five hundred years old, as you said, but the spider’s older. A lot older. It’s ten thousand years old, give or take a little. It was there well before the other lines.”

Melanie slowed down as she reached the café steps. “So what does that have to do with us?” She glanced over her shoulder and realized that all three students had stopped walking. Patrick, Bark, and Julie were standing on the ground, three steps below her, looking up expectantly. “Well?”

Julie glanced at the two young men and they nodded at her. “It wasn’t just the stakes,” Julie said. “When he was doing the dig, he found something underneath the stakes, buried in a wooden box. He had some of that wood dated, and it’s the same age as the stakes. Ten thousand years. You’ll never guess what was in the box.”

Julie paused, and Melanie found herself getting frustrated. Pausing for dramatic effect, she thought, was overrated, and in the case of a gaggle of graduate students, annoying. But despite herself, she was fully curious and couldn’t stop from blurting out, “What?”

“An egg sac. At first, none of them realized what it was, but when he did, he suggested to his faculty advisor that they send it to our lab to see if we could identify it. They thought it was fossilized or petrified, or whatever it is you call it when something like that is preserved. Since the wooden box is ten thousand years old, and the egg sac was inside the box, the sac is probably at least that old too.”

“Huh,” Melanie said. “Okay. Tell them to send it to us so we can take a look at it.”

“He already sent it. It’s back in the lab. I, uh, I told him they could use our FedEx shipping code, so he overnighted it,” Julie said. The words came out of her mouth as though she expected Melanie to yell at her.

Melanie stifled her annoyance. Budgets had been tight, but not so tight that Julie couldn’t charge the shipping costs of a package if it was actually lab business. Though, Melanie wondered, how much did it actually cost to overnight something from Peru?

“There’s more,” Bark said. He was standing straight and staring at her with an intensity he usually reserved for when they were alone.

“More?” Melanie glanced at Patrick and Julie and then back at Bark. All three looked nervous and excited, clearly unsure if what they had come to get her for was as big a deal as they thought it was. “Well,” she said, hearing that her voice was sharper than she meant it to be. “Out with it.”

Bark looked at his colleagues, then back at Melanie. “The egg sac,” he said. “It’s hatching.”





The White House


“Nuke ’em,” the president said. “Just launch the nukes and be done with it.” She leaned back in her chair and looked at the young man hovering by her side. One of the new interns. Manny smiled. He couldn’t remember the intern’s name, but President Stephanie Pilgrim liked them young and handsome. Arm candy, of sorts. She was never inappropriate with them—thankfully, that wasn’t one of Manny’s many worries as White House chief of staff—but she definitely liked having them around. The president reached out and put her hand on the intern’s forearm. “How about you go get us a big bowl of popcorn or something, maybe some chips and salsa. All this talk of war is making me feel a bit peckish.”

“Come on, Steph,” Manny said. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

“I’m the president of the United States of America, Manny, and you will address me appropriately,” she said, smiling. “President Steph to you. And how am I supposed to take this seriously? It’s an exercise. The other team is out there in the heat of the primaries. Pretty soon they’re going to figure out which one of those clowns is getting the nomination, and they’ll start aiming at me instead of each other. In the meantime, we’re holed up in the Situation Room pretending that we’re actually going to go to war with China. Can’t I just order the nukes and call it a day? I’ve got more important shit to do than play war games to satisfy the army’s hard-on.”

“Technically, this one’s primarily a naval situation,” Manny said.

“How long have you known me, Manny?”

Manny didn’t say anything. He’d known Stephanie Pilgrim long enough to know she didn’t want an answer. Known her back when they were young and dumb and undergraduates. He was a freshman and she was a senior, and she went by Steph, not Madam President, and she liked to torture him in certain inappropriate moments by telling him she wasn’t wearing panties under her skirt. Not that she was particularly promiscuous. Even then she was careful about watching her reputation. She was already planning to be in the spotlight. But they had clicked immediately, and she had not only been attracted to him, she had trusted him. They hadn’t exactly dated, but before Manny met and married Melanie, he and Steph had had a sort of understanding that went beyond their professional working relationship. They’d come to that understanding again since things had imploded with him and Melanie. Well, not imploded. Dissolved was a better word. But finding himself free and uninterested in dating, and with Steph having to be careful about maintaining the illusion that she was in a happy marriage, it had been easy to fall back into their old pattern of occasionally sleeping together. For him, there’d been a bit of guilt. The guilt wasn’t about Steph. They were attracted to each other, reasonably decent in bed, and loved each other, even if they weren’t in love with each other. They respected each other and liked each other and didn’t have any secrets from each other. Neither of them was going to end up hurt. No, Manny felt bad about George. He genuinely liked Steph’s husband. Dr. George Hitchens was a nice guy. He was certainly an asset when it came to electability. Handsome and well-spoken, content to let Steph do her thing in the political arena, content to be a politician’s husband. He was blue blood, old money from Texas, smart enough to go to an Ivy League university and to graduate from medical school without having to pull any strings, or at the very least, without having to pull them hard enough that they unraveled in embarrassing ways. He’d practiced as a dermatologist right up until Steph won the big one. Since they’d gotten to the White House he’d jumped feetfirst into being “the First Hubby,” as the press liked to call him. He could cut a ribbon with the best of them. He was as close to a dream husband as a female politician could have.