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“Yikes,” I said casually, as if his words weren’t a dull knife digging at my insides.
“So... I don’t know. Stay away from him, maybe.”
“I can take care of myself, Liam,” I said.
The look he gave me was almost sad. “Sure. Just a heads-up.”
“Here we are,” Kenny declared. He’d led us to a nondescriptdoor, fitted with a keypad. “The code’s 1975,” he said, punching in the numbers.
“The year the LARC was founded,” I noted.
“You did your homework,” he said with appreciation, and ushered us in.
The room was exactly the same dimensions as Dr. Kapoor’s office, but so cramped with shelves and sets of drawers that there was almost no room to maneuver. Most of the floor space was taken up with waist-high drawer units. The back wall was floor-to-ceiling with glass cabinets, the shelves within stocked with stuffed and mounted specimens—birds, but also eggshells, drained and mounted on metal posts, feathers, feet, bones. Some of the taxidermy birds looked patchy, feathers worn away and flaking, revealing long-dead skin. And others—
On the leftmost shelf rested a bird preserved in a pose of flight, wings outstretched—but two more withered wings sprouted from its shoulders. The bones were warped, the feathers malformed so that they clumped like damp paper.
And on the next shelf, there was a chick still covered in gray down, frozen with its head tilted back, begging for food. But instead of one gaping beak, it had two, a small white one set inside the other, oddly soft-looking, like a mushroom cap.
Farther down the row, a juvenile tern perched on a driftwood branch, head cocked to the side—an eyeless head, feathers flowing seamlessly over a skull that showed no hint of even empty sockets.
“Holy crap,” Abby said eloquently. Liam appeared more amused by our stunned looks than shocked, so I assumed he’d seen the birds before.
“Let me introduce you to our mutants,” Kenny said cheerfully. “The red-throated tern has a very high rate of mutation. Mostly birds like these die in the shell or in their first few days, but a few of them, as you can see, persist.”
“What...” I cleared my throat. I was a scientist, I reminded myself. Or an aspiring one, at least. Eager and intrigued. “What causes it?”
“We don’t know. That’s part of what we’re studying,” Kenny said. “My specialty is genetics. I’m trying to figure out what predisposes this species to mutation.”
“What’s the practical application of that?” I asked. The more I focused on the questions, the further away the encroaching fear felt. I could almost breathe normally without thinking about every breath. “Do you think it could have uses for medicine or...?”
“The practical application is knowing something we didn’t know yesterday.Youshould worry about the practical application of interns and wayward teens.”
“‘Wayward.’ Good word. Better than ‘nosy,’” Abby noted.
I chuckled, the sound laying uneasily over the disquiet that still buzzed in my bones. “Okay. What are we doing?”
“This place has been a dumping ground for decades. Anything damaged or worn out should be set aside—Dr. Kapoor will decide what should be saved or repaired and what should be thrown out; you just want to collect it all in one place. Which means you need a place to collect it, so...” He waved a hand at the tops of the drawers, which were cluttered with everything from IKEA instruction booklets to a jar of pennies to a full set of moose antlers.
“Oh, boy,” I said. Liam whistled in agreement.
“Most of the drawers are labeled, but what’s in them usually doesn’t match. So, uh, I guess the goal is that you get everything where it belongs, and anything that doesn’t have a place is set aside neatly.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Good luck?”
“You know those fairy tales where a princess has to, like, sort every grain of rice and wheat by daybreak?” I asked. “This is that, but with mutant bird bones.”
“Well, I don’t have a band of forest creatures to help you, so Liam and Abby will have to do,” Kenny replied. “Now I really need to get back to, you know...”
“Actual science?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said without an ounce of shame, and waved farewell. He closed the door behind him, leaving the three of us alone in a room of malformed, long-dead terns.
“Just so we’re clear, this”—Abby gestured at the taxidermy birds—“is not a natural phenomenon. Right?”
“You’re the expert,” I replied. I peered at the cases of warped forms and suppressed a shudder.
“An expert in what, exactly?” Liam asked, his voice dangerously quiet. It was a quiet that could mutate as wildly as the birds—into panic, into revulsion, or into sheer disbelief. His face was calm, but I’d seen that calm before. Kyle Farley, ninth grade. New kid in town, didn’t know the rumors. He held my hand at the movies.
Then he saw something reflected in the window beside us as we walked, and he went still like that. Quiet, like that.
