grasping hooks and leg musculature. Do you see the strength through the claws and legs?' Diego shook his head. 'Like a gorilla.'
'That's how it climbs-its size rules out its relying on surface adhe-sion like an insect.'
'This isn't an insect,' Diego said, setting down the radio handset.
'You mean we can't just burn palo santo branches for repellent and call the exterminator?'
Diego laid his hands on the exoskeleton. 'The cuticle's tough, almost impossibly hard, even over the abdomen. My guess is it's female, as the wings don't extend past the tip of the body.'
Crouching, Cameron glanced at the wings. 'So that's how you tell, huh?'
Diego leaned over and, lifting one leathery forewing, tugged at the delicate transparent underwing beneath it. It slid out smoothly, the fire-light playing through it and casting a yellow glow. Diego had to stand up and walk backward as it continued to unfurl. 'The surface area of the wings has increased exponentially in relation to the body.'
'Can it fly?' Cameron asked.
Diego released the underwing and it slid slowly back beneath the pro-tective tegmina of its own accord. 'Even given the exponential increase in wing size, I doubt it could bear this much weight aloft.' He sat back down, rubbing the ends of his fingers with his thumbs. 'It's a different organism, almost as though something took a mantid's basic features and reshuffled them.' He looked at Rex. 'What do you think?'
Rex paced around the body. 'Three-segmented ectothermic quadro-pod, filiform antennae, mandibulate mouthparts, tegmina and hind-wings, seemingly asocial. Physically, it's distinctly terrestrial as an adult, even though the larvae are aquatic. I assume those are its larvae.'
Diego smoothed his mustache with his thumb and index finger. 'I would agree. Even if it can breathe underwater like the larvae, it's not at all suited to aquatic movement.'
Coos issuing from its body, the larva inched over to Derek. Absent-mindedly, he ran a hand over its abdomen segments. 'Listen to that,' Rex said. 'And now to this.' Placing his hands on the adult creature's back, he pressed down. A hissing filled the camp as air escaped the hockey puck-sized holes along the abdomen segments. 'The sounds from both the larva and adult come from the spiracles. They must feed an internal respiratory organ, as we discussed.'
'How the fuck?' Diego shook his head. 'How the fucking fuck?'
Rex pulled seven water-sample jars from his backpack and set them on the ground in a line before Diego. They were each neatly labeled, with the time, date, and source location. Rex reached for an elbow light and turned it on, running the lens behind the row of jars so they each lit up in turn with a blood-red glow. The others glanced over, intrigued by his theatrical presentation. Sensing Rex was about to convey something useful, Cameron signaled them over. Derek sat on the nearest log, while Tank and Savage stood.
'What appears to be different about these samples?' Rex asked.
Diego studied them, puzzled, as Rex ran the light back across them. 'Nothing.'
'Exactly. However, the three on the end aren't taken from the ocean. One is your lagoon sample, I took one from a clear puddle in the road, and this is the one from the natural basin near the lava tube.'
'I saw you,' Diego said. 'But that's impossible. They're all tinted red from dinoflagellates. But dinos are generally pelagic. How did they get from the ocean to the highlands?'
'Well,' Rex said, pleased with himself, 'dinos can go into a dormant, sporelike state, which allows them to survive extreme conditions, like dehydration and low temperatures. They're most highly concentrated in the waters off the southeastern point of the island-the water that gets shot through the blowholes. My guess is that the spores get blown around in the wind streams and settle all over the island through the garua mist. The little landlocked pools have a decent amount of salinity from the blowholes and the mists, which permits the spores to bloom again. This means the virus, contained in those dinoflagellate spores, could reach animals from the highlands to the coast. I think it found a susceptible species. Galapagia obstinatus.'
Diego shook his head, his face drained of color. 'How?' he asked.
Rex reached into his bag and pulled out the segment of the sun-damaged mantid ootheca that Frank had kept in his tent. It was pep-pered with parasite wasp holes. Holding it up, Rex closed one eye and peered through one of the holes, telescope-style. 'UV damage kept the ootheca from hardening enough to prevent parasitic wasps from drilling through the shell. The virus probably invaded the ootheca later through the wasp holes, acting on the developing mantid nymphs that weren't eaten by wasp offspring, and altering their genetic composition before they hatched.'
Diego picked up a jar, turning it in his hand. 'How do you know these dinos are infected?'
Rex pursed his lips. 'We don't. They look normal under a standard lens, but we can't definitively determine whether they're infected without running a gel, and we don't have the equipment here. But we do know that they were infected two months ago when Frank pulled the samples and had them shipped to us.'
Diego handed him back the jar. 'But we don't even know what the virus does to begin with. It could merely be a plant virus. You're com-pletely hypothesizing.'
'A new virus appears on the same island we discover a massive living aberration… I just can't help thinking they've got to be linked, either through direct or shared causation.'
Diego shook his head. 'This animal could be an ordinary mutation.'
Cameron looked at the jagged moons of the mantid's mandibles, flickering darkly in the firelight.
'I don't know about that,' Rex said.
'Why not?' Diego looked up, his eyes alight. 'Evolution doesn't progress slowly and evenly-it progresses in sudden and giant leaps. The Cambrian Explosion, the Permian and Cretaceous Extinctions-all blinks of the eye.' He paused, pulling his hair back to band his ponytail more tightly. 'Think of the reptiles dying out during the Mesozoic Period, the graptolite's rapid decline after the Ordovician Period, the sudden evolution of complex Metazoa. The fossil record has always shown punctuated equilibrium-mass extinction and abrupt origination.' He pointed to the mantid corpse. 'Speciation like this can take place in a geological instant.'
Cameron looked over at Rex, unsure of what to make of Diego's sud-den tirade. Rex cleared his throat before speaking. 'A geological instant is hundreds of thousands of years.'
Diego looked down at his pants, stained with mud and torn at one knee. 'Well, it just got shorter.'
A piece of charred wood collapsed in the fire, startling them both. Diego crouched over the dead, slumped mantid. He reached out and stroked the waxy cuticle covering the abdomen. 'Beautiful, isn't it?'
Rex nodded. 'Beautiful, yes. And fearful.'
A whistle from the darkness indicated Szabla and Justin's return. A few seconds later, Justin stepped into the light, carrying a shovel. A length of rope looped over one shoulder, Szabla appeared next. A ham-mer protruded from her back pocket.
'That's it?' Tank asked.
'The farmers took most of their shit with them when they left, espe-cially their tools,' Szabla said. 'There's no gasoline anywhere, or oil, and the machines seem to be on empty.'
'The supply ship,' Diego said. 'It stopped coming months ago.'
'Well, what do we have?' Cameron asked.
Justin cleared his throat ceremoniously. 'Four chainsaws, one with a snapped guide bar, a tiller with a burned-out motor, what looks like a broken-down ribbing plow from 1902-'
'Equipment the Norwegians left years ago,' Diego said. 'Useless.'
'— six empty gasoline cans, plenty of rope, one enormous purse seine with a three-foot tear, loose concrete blocks from the houses, four wheelbarrows, a hammer, two Phillips-head screwdrivers, a burnt frying pan, a case of fishing hooks, a flat-edged hoe snapped in half, a length of hose, a trowel, and Ramon has an ax that he wisely elected to keep.' He shook his head. 'The generator is out-appears to be totally useless.'
'Is there gas in the tiller we could siphon for the chainsaws?' Cameron asked.
'Not a drop.'
'Insecticides?' Tank asked.
Szabla snickered. 'Yeah, there was an eight-foot bottle of Raid, but we left that behind.' She looked down at the jars, still arrayed in a line. 'What's up with that?'
'Rex thinks there's some kind of virus on the island,' Cameron said. 'Maybe affected the animal life.'
'Well, I'd say we're not in great shape,' Szabla said. 'Mostly useless shit left behind. Right now, the GPS spikes are our best bet for weapons. Can't see troweling one of these motherfuckers to death.' She tilted her head,
