Kaiju Preservation Society(70)

We both shook our heads.

“We didn’t see any remains, either of us, or any of the invaders, whoever they are,” I said, pausing the video. “The soldier was right. The creatures would take anything they could get with them into the trees.”

MacDonald nodded, unhappy.

“What the hell are they doing?” Danso asked. “Why are they even there?”

“I have the answer,” I said. I closed the video file we were watching and pulled up another. “There’s a few videos in between the one we just watched and what I’m showing you,” I said. “The phone automatically chops up the videos into about five-minute chunks. It’s a memory-saving thing. This is good because it means that when the battery died we didn’t lose all the video.” I pulled up the particular video I was looking for.

“What are we looking at?” MacDonald asked as I let the video play.

I pointed to several barrel-size objects in the field of view, arrayed several meters from each other. “These things,” I said.

“What are they?”

“I don’t know. But I think they’re being used to create a perimeter around Bella and her eggs.”

“Okay, but why?” Danso asked.

“Because of this,” I said, pointing at the video.

In the video, the barrel-looking things suddenly started glowing. Then there was a flash that overwhelmed the camera sensor, and a crack like lightning had just struck.

When the sensor was clear again, Bella, her eggs, the barrels, and all the interlopers were gone.

“All right,” Niamh said, after the video had stopped. “How the fuck did they just do that?”





CHAPTER

23




My day had been long, and exhausting, and inexpressibly soul crushing. After barely tasting my dinner, I decided I needed to go to bed early and try to get some sleep. This resulted in a few hours of not sleeping, running the day’s events in my head, and staring at the potted plant gifted to me by Sylvia Braithwhite.

“This is not working,” I said to the plant. The plant, while sympathetic, I’m sure, said nothing.

The door to my room opened, and Niamh appeared in it. “Hey.”

“It’s called knocking,” I said.

“I know what it’s called, I just didn’t do it.”

“I could have been sleeping.”

“No one’s sleeping tonight.”

“Or rubbing one out.”

“Definitely no one’s doing that tonight.”

“You have a point.”

“We need you in the living room.”

“What’s up?”

“We need your help on something.”

“What is it?”

“If you get out of bed and come to the living room, you’ll find out, won’t you?” Niamh disappeared from the doorframe but left the door open, so the light from the living room was still flooding in. After one more minute of lying there just to show Niamh they were not the boss of me, I got up and went into the living room, which my cottage-mates had strewn with documents and laptops.

“Let me guess, you need me to pick up after you,” I said.

“Well, you do lift things,” Kahurangi said. “But that’s not it.”

“We need your advice,” Aparna said.

“Not so much advice as we need you to listen to us and tell us we’re not completely off our crackers,” Niamh added.

“All right,” I said, and sat at our table. “What is it?”

Aparna sat as well. “Bella has to get back over to this side of the fence. Somehow. Tonight, if possible.”

“Why?”

“Because if we don’t, I think she’s going to explode.”

“You mean, explode like an atomic bomb.”

“Yes.”

“In Canada.”

“Yes.”

“There are … challenges to getting her back over here,” I said, after a moment.

“No shit,” Niamh said, sitting down as well. “But we might have something. Sort of.”

I held up a hand. “Hold that for just a second,” I said to Niamh. I brought my attention back to Aparna. “Explain the whole ‘Bella’s going to explode’ thing to me, please. I thought she was fine.”

“She was fine,” Aparna stressed. “Over here. But she’s not over here. She’s over there. And over there, on our Earth, things are very different, environmentally. The atmosphere is not as thick or as oxygen rich. And it’s much, much colder. It’s late October in Labrador. It’s literally freezing there.”

“And that affects the kaiju.”

Kahurangi cocked his head. “It does. But it affects the parasites more.”

“It’s already killing them.” Aparna grabbed her laptop and opened up a file to show it to me, as if I were going to read the whole thing. “Specifically, the parasites that act as her cooling and airflow system. These parasites are common across a bunch of kaiju species, so we know a lot about them. What we know about them is that they’re hugely susceptible to cold. When the temperature drops below ten degrees Celsius, they start dying off.”

I looked at Aparna blankly.