Lost Worlds (6 page)

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I remember at school, we were told that the difference between insects and spiders was that insects had six legs and spiders had eight legs. But if this modified fly had eight legs
– six of them where they should be and the seventh and eighth ones sticking out of its head, doesn’t that make it a spider instead?’

‘No,’ Calum said firmly. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Why not?’

Calum’s mouth was setting into a shape that Gecko was beginning to recognize as indicating he was annoyed. ‘Just accept it. It was still a fly.’ He took a deep breath.
‘Other scientists moved genes from one animal to another. They took a gene from a jellyfish that caused it to glow, and inserted it into a mouse. The result was a glowing mouse.’

‘Easier to catch,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘They can’t hide in dark corners.

Calum’s mouth twisted into that shape again. ‘That wasn’t exactly the point.’

Gecko raised his hands in surrender. ‘OK. I understand. Scientists can move these genes around, within the same animal or between animals. So what?’

‘So, what if we could find a gene that protects its owner from some terrible disease and incorporate it into human DNA?’ Calum asked, leaning forward.

‘Would we still be human?’

Calum flicked his head, as if to brush the question away. ‘Of course we would. We’d be human, but better.’

‘
Tá bom
,’ Gecko conceded, although the thought of fiddling around with the blueprint of the human body made him uneasy. ‘But how does this connect up with your
search for these animals?’

Calum nodded. ‘Take the horseshoe crab. It’s one of the oldest creatures known. By “oldest” I mean that it’s been around in the same form, without noticeably
evolving, for millions of years. Unlike any other creature, its blood is blue, not red, because it’s based on copper-containing haemocyanin rather than iron-based haemoglobin.’ He
paused, and took a breath. He was staring ahead now, not looking at Gecko. ‘The horseshoe crab’s equivalent of the white blood cells found in human blood are incredibly efficient at
neutralizing bacteria. They have to be, because the seas where the horseshoe crab lives are like bacterial soup. Humanity is facing a crisis in controlling bacteria – most of our antibiotics
are losing efficiency as the bacteria get used to them. If we can find a way of synthesizing this factor from horseshoe-crab blood – if we could even splice it into our own DNA, or splice it
into a cow’s DNA so the antibiotic is expressed in the cow’s milk – we might never get ill or die from an infection again.’

Gecko nodded slowly. ‘My brother died from an infection,’ he said slowly. The memories were still raw. ‘He scratched his leg on a rusty nail when he was climbing over a fence.
He developed tetanus. It –’ he caught his breath, feeling his throat constrict in unexpected grief – ‘it was not a good way to die.’

‘There are a lot of bad ways to die,’ Calum pointed out. ‘If we can reduce them . . . find ways to avoid them . . . then that’s got to be a good thing.’

‘And you reckon some of these undiscovered animals might have genes that could help save people’s lives?’ Gecko nodded. ‘That is a noble way to spend your
life.’

Calum looked away. ‘Maybe not completely noble,’ he said softly.

‘What do you mean?’ Gecko noticed the way Calum’s hand clamped on his leg, and suddenly understood. ‘It’s the nerves, isn’t it? You think there might be a
gene out there, in some undiscovered creature, that could help regenerate your nerves.’

Calum shrugged awkwardly. ‘Your namesake, the yellow-headed gecko, can grow a new tail if the old one gets bitten off. Salamanders can regenerate entire legs if they lose them. Maybe,
somewhere out there, is a way for me to . . . to walk again.’

There was silence for a few moments, both boys preoccupied with their own thoughts.

‘You need any help?’ Gecko asked eventually. ‘For the sake of my brother, I want to do something.’

‘Can you organize an expedition to the Caucasus Mountains to look for a possible missing link between apes and humans?’ Calum asked.

‘No,’ Gecko said. ‘I think I can quite honestly say that I cannot do that.’ A thought struck him. ‘Hey, do we have any of these supposedly undiscovered animals in
Brazil? I never heard of any.’

Calum thought for a moment. ‘There’s something called the
mapinguary
,’ he said. ‘People say it’s a giant sloth-like creature that has a really strong
unpleasant smell. And there’s the
minhocão
, which is supposed to be a giant black worm, some twenty-five metres long, with scaly skin and two tentacles coming out of its
head.’

‘That’s just a story for children!’ Gecko protested. ‘The
minhocão
is supposed to be able to uproot trees and destroy houses, but nobody has ever seen
one!’

‘The last eyewitness reports are about a hundred and thirty years old,’ Calum conceded, ‘but they were taken seriously at the time. The trouble is that there are no photographs
and no sketches, and it’s difficult to see how an animal that large could survive in numbers big enough to keep a population going without anybody noticing.’ He paused, and shrugged.
‘Still, there’s always hope.’

Gecko was about to ask Calum how he managed to fund all this work when a soft alarm started pinging over at Calum’s computer station.

‘What’s that?’ Gecko asked. ‘Someone else on the roof?’

Calum shook his head. ‘Not that kind of alarm. Someone’s trying to hack into my website.’

‘You have a website?’ Gecko asked. ‘What kind of website?’

‘A website all about the undiscovered creatures we talked about.’ Calum pulled himself off the sofa and started to swing across to the computer desk and the multiple screens.

‘Why would someone want to hack into a site about animals that don’t even exist?’ Gecko asked, standing up and following Calum. ‘Banks, I can understand. Nobody likes
banks. Defence companies, yeah. But extinct animals?
Isto é loucura!
’

‘Good question.’ Calum slipped into the seat in front of the keyboard.

‘I have another good question.’

‘Yeah?’ Calum grunted distractedly.

‘Why do you have an
alarm
that tells you when someone’s trying to hack into a website that nobody in their right minds would want to hack into? What exactly are you trying to
protect?’

Calum turned in his seat and locked gazes with Gecko. ‘Maybe there’s other stuff on that website,’ he said. ‘Hidden stuff that I keep there.’

Gecko shrugged. ‘You should use a safe deposit box, like normal people.’

Calum turned back to his screens and keyboard. His fingers flew across the keys. Gecko watched, entranced, as the various screens in front of them all started displaying different things: maps
of the world with lines crossing back and forth, scrolling computer code, black and white images from security cameras, all kinds of things.

‘So who is it?’ he asked eventually. ‘The CIA? MI5? The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Horseshoe Crabs?’

Calum was frowning. ‘The IP address keeps bouncing around,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to track, but it seems to be coming from a wireless device just across the
river.’ He pressed a few more keys. ‘St Catherine’s College of Art, library building,’ he said. ‘Fourth floor.’ His balled fist crashed down on his leg.
‘Damn it – if I report it to the police they’ll treat it as some kind of joke, but there’s no way I can get out there and check for myself!’

‘I could go,’ Gecko said, surprising himself.

Calum turned round to stare at him. ‘You’d do that? Why?’

Gecko shrugged. ‘Like you said: fourth floor. I know that building. Once I get across the river, there is a route that will take me all the way. I can look in through the windows without
anyone noticing me.’

‘You’re not answering the question. You just told me
how
. What I want to know is:
why
?’

Gecko smiled. ‘Because it will be fun.’

Tara had downloaded all the web pages – text, pictures and hyperlinks – to her flash drive for later analysis, and for sending on to her unknown handler at Nemor
Incorporated. Sitting in the library, alone in the study booths that lined one wall, she still had no idea
why
she was doing it, though. There was nothing at all unusual about the website.
It showed a certain amount of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, as well as a good sense of design, but it was innocuous. Harmless.

Was it some kind of test, designed to see whether she would follow orders? Or was there something more to it, some hidden secret that she just hadn’t stumbled across yet?

On a whim, she checked the size of the directory on the flash drive where she had saved the files – and drew her breath in. The directory was
much
larger than it should have been,
given the number of pictures that she’d downloaded. The pictures would have taken up most of the space – text took hardly any space at all – but based on the resolution of the
images, the whole thing should have been only a couple of gigabytes. Not the
eleven
gigabytes eating up her flash drive.

There was something else there. Something hidden.

She was about to trawl through the various subdirectories one by one, looking for any file names that seemed out of place, when she realized she was being watched.

It was a tickle on the back of her neck, like a psychic breath of air on her skin. She didn’t know
how
she knew, but it was a certainty.

Without moving her head, she let her gaze roam around the deserted library area. Someone could have been hiding between the shelves of books, but that wasn’t the direction that the feeling
was coming from. It was more towards the far side of the room – where the windows were. There wasn’t anywhere to hide there – it was an open area. That meant the watcher was
somehow
outside
the window – like maybe a small remote-controlled drone or something!

Someone from Nemor Incorporated? It had to be. They were watching her, checking up on her for whatever purpose they had in mind!

A sudden flash of anger burst through her like a shock wave. What the hell did they think they were doing? She was a
student
for heaven’s sake! She had
rights
!

Part of her wanted to cross straight to the windows, fling them open and have a shouting match with whoever was out there, but another part of her – the more sensible part – had a
better idea. She stretched her arms above her head theatrically, and checked her watch in a way that would be obvious from the other side of the room. She wanted to make it look as if she was
taking a break. Leaving her tablet on the work surface in the study booth, having activated an app that would sound an alarm if anyone disturbed it, she got up and walked off towards where the
vending machines were located.

From the vending machine in the lobby she bought a packet of crisps and a can of drink. Holding them, she walked back into the library, but instead of heading for her booth she moved rapidly
down one of the aisles between the bookshelves, anger driving her to run as fast as she could. At the end she turned right and moved quickly along the ends of the shelves.

When she got to the last bookshelf, she was by the windows. Without hesitating – without even thinking – she climbed up on the windowsill. Slinging open the window, she stuck her
head out and glanced sideways, along the line of windows.

She was right. Someone was crouched on the sill outside the fourth window along – just where he could observe the seat in which Tara had been sitting. His hands were clamped on the
stonework of the building, stabilizing him. His clothes and hair were dark. He was just a silhouette against the sky.

‘Not content with spying on me electronically, you have to do it in person?’ she called. ‘You want to tell me just what you think you’re doing? What harm have I ever done
you?’

The figure turned to look at her. It was just a kid: barely older than she was! His hair was long and shiny, and his eyes were the darkest, most soulful eyes she had ever seen.

‘I think you have got things the wrong way round,’ he said. His voice held a slight accent. ‘You have been spying on someone else.’

‘I have
not
,’ she said, but a sudden flash of guilt washed some of the anger away. What if this boy didn’t have anything to do with Nemor Incorporated? What if he was
something to do with www.thelostworlds.com instead? But how could that be true? How could someone have traced her hacking and got here so fast? And why was he outside the window?

The boy looked at her hands. She realized that she was still holding the drink and the crisps.

‘Do you mind if I come in?’ he asked. ‘I could do with a bite to eat. All this running and climbing really builds up an appetite, you know?’

‘And what then? You arrest me for hacking? You report me to the college authorities?’

He shrugged: a smooth motion of his shoulders. ‘Not exactly. I think there is someone you need to meet.’

‘A friend of yours?’ she asked sarcastically.

The boy seemed to treat her question more seriously than it deserved.

‘Well,’ the boy said, ‘I think he is. I think he is going to be a friend to both of us.’

T
he two of them stood side by side in the rackety lift that linked the ground floor of the warehouse to Calum’s apartment. Gecko could feel
anger radiating from the girl standing beside him. He could have fried onions with the force of her emotion. She was furious – but there was something else, some other feeling hidden beneath
the anger. Fear?

Just looking at this girl – Tara Flynn, she had said her name was – he could tell that she wasn’t built for free-running. Her muscle development was all wrong, and she slumped
rather than stood upright. With posture like that he guessed she didn’t get much exercise. Her skin was pale as well, indicating that she didn’t get out in the sunlight very often. And
she wore glasses, which would have thrown her depth perception off completely in the unlikely event that she’d try to jump from one rooftop to another. No, judging by the skill with which
she’d been hitting her keyboard, he guessed she was one of those techno-zombies –
internautas
, as they were called in Brazil – that he kept seeing through windows of flats
or office blocks at night – faces illuminated by the ghostly glow of LCD screens. If he’d tried to lead her across the rooftops, it would have ended with her splatting into the pavement
at some speed.