The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(41)

“A training exercise,” Alex said. “We say we’ve had the plans in place for a year, but we didn’t alert anybody because we wanted to really give it a test. That’s the story we spin if we’re overreacting.”

“Okay,” Manny said. “I don’t like it, but I can live with it.”

Billy raised his hand. Manny almost laughed. The man actually raised his hand.

“What?” Stephanie snapped.

“What if we aren’t overreacting?” he said. “Near as we can tell, this started, what, six days ago? Six days from the start to China dropping a nuke? What if we’re already moving too slowly?”

Stephanie looked at the secretary. “Put the director through,” she said, and then she turned back to Billy. “If we aren’t overreacting, then God help us all.” She picked up the phone, but then paused and pressed it to her chest. “And Manny,” she said, turning to look at him, “call your ex-wife. I’ve got some questions about spiders.”





American University,

Washington, DC


“Professor Guyer?”

Melanie snapped her head up from the desk. “I’m awake. I’m awake,” she said. Her cheek and the side of her mouth were damp, and she wiped the drool off her face. Jesus. How long had she been asleep? As she turned to look at Bark, she could feel a sharp pain in her lower back. She had a couch in her office for this very reason, so she could sleep at her lab when she wanted, and yet she’d still fallen asleep at her desk. She glanced at her watch. Nearly four in the afternoon.

“Professor Guyer?” Bark said again, her name still a question.

She looked at him and then past him, to see that neither Julie nor Patrick was drafting behind him, and then she said, “How many times, Bark?”

“I’m sorry? How many times what, Professor Guyer?”

“How many times have I had your dick in my mouth? And you’re still calling me Professor Guyer?”

Bark blushed, which, Melanie hated to admit, was kind of cute. He was really, really good in bed, though he seemed oblivious to it, always asking her if things were okay or if that was what she wanted, and that was part of his charm. Of course, that same cluelessness was what made her want to brain him with her desk lamp.

“You know it makes me uncomfortable when you speak like that,” he said. He looked over his shoulder to make sure none of his colleagues had heard Melanie’s remark, and then he shut the door behind him and came around her desk. He sat on the desk and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d been in the lab all night, as she had, but he still smelled good. A mix of soap and something a little stronger. His hand was big and heavy, and despite herself, she could feel herself starting to sink into its weight. She turned her head and, very lightly, sunk her teeth into the edge of his palm.

She released his palm. “But my saying I had your dick in my mouth doesn’t make you so uncomfortable that you’d stop me from doing it,” Melanie said. “Spare me the old-fashioned ‘delicate flower’ bullshit, okay?” She yawned and stretched. There was something seriously tight in her back, and she really wanted to just put her head back down on the desk and close her eyes again. She felt as if she could sleep for days. She’d been dreaming about spiders—she always dreamed about spiders—and there was a nest of cobwebs in her head.

“It’s time, Professor Guyer,” Bark said. “It’s happening.”

That cleared away the cobwebs. There weren’t that many eureka moments in science. Mostly it was just hard work, data collection, the slow and steady roll of progress. And she loved it. She genuinely liked spending time in the lab, in observation and notation. Back in high school she was the only kid who thought titration exercises were interesting, and then as an undergrad and a grad student, even when she was bored by the grind, she’d been able to maintain her concentration. She was brilliant, there was no disputing that, but there had been a couple of other students in her graduate program who were equally brilliant. The difference was that they didn’t carry the same level of discipline she did. She’d become famous in her field because she was able to make the logical leaps that pushed the science forward, but she knew that at the core, she’d been successful because she was a grinder. She didn’t just come up with ideas; she was able to prove her theories through methodical research.

But no matter how much she was willing to grind, no matter how disciplined she was, there was nothing, absolutely nothing that compared with the excitement of a breakthrough. And if she was being honest, it had been a while since she’d done anything exciting in the lab.

Yes, discovering the medical use of venom from the Heteropoda venatoria two years ago had been a great follow-up to the work that had made her what passes for famous in the world of entomology in the first place, but as much as she was still fond of the huntsman spider, she felt as though she’d finished that avenue of research. It was time for something new.

Despite her annoyance at her graduate students yesterday when they’d ambushed her outside the classroom and reminded her of her drunken rambling about Peru and the Nazca Lines, she’d clearly been onto something. To say what was happening with the egg sac was interesting was an understatement. This was potentially one of those scientific moments that could define a career. There was an evolutionary ecologist in Oklahoma who’d started trying to resurrect dormant eggs back in the 1990s, and he’d had early success with eggs that were decades old. By the early 2000s, however, he was hatching eggs a hundred years old, and by 2010 he managed to get eggs more than seven hundred years old to hatch. Okay, admittedly, from what she remembered about the article, he’d been working with water fleas, which were quite a bit simpler than spiders, but still. The idea wasn’t completely insane. So if it was interesting enough just to have found a calcified ten-thousand-year-old egg sac at the Nazca site, to have it hatch was at another level all together.