How could she ever think it beautiful, though? You could see the suggestion of a lizard in the shape of its face. You could see that its skin was made of tiny white scales. And it smelled like a snake, that same thick musk you got out of a den of copperheads. Mark was fast enough to catch striking snakes, something he’d done as a boy. Catch them and snap them like whips. Job done. He’d lived in Palo Alto, and out in the hills, he’d sometimes come across them. He’d done plenty in Iran, too, and in ’Stan. He didn’t like to. Killing was never trivial to him, not even a snake, not even an insect. Give him some powdered sumac, though, a little salt and a little oil, and he could transform locusts into an edible dish. Throw in some Persian horned viper, and you had a meal.

Linda might find it beautiful, but the more he looked at it, the uglier it appeared. With its narrow, tight lips, it almost seemed as if it had been designed to look ferocious.

“Take it slow, Linda. Weapons at the ready, people.”

Gina said over the satphone, “Is that a hybrid?”

“Looks like it,” Mark responded. He scanned their surroundings, seeking to catch the quick movement among the dew-bright leaves that would reveal the presence of a scout watching them with the unswerving, unnatural attention that the hybrids brought to everything they did.

Massy clicked away with one of their cameras. Knots videotaped. In a year in the field, they had only managed four images, and three of them were poor.

Linda pressed a temperature sensor against the hybrid’s forehead, then listened to the chest with her stethoscope.

“No internal sounds,” she murmured.

The temperature sensor climbed to 89.3°F and stopped.

To Mark’s great relief, she came up away from the thing.

“I don’t think it’s dead, but it’s not alive, either.”

“What’s that mean? A coma?”

She looked down at it. “I don’t know. But I can take some skin scrapings and hair samples. Fingernails. Then we need to get all of them to Plum Island.”

Mark got on the satphone. “I want a larger military presence out here, Gina. Say it’s a classified cargo that’s been dropped. Seal off the area. And get a chopper in the air, I want these things moved to Travis, pronto. From there, prepare to transport them to the USDA facility on Plum Island.” Officially, it was an animal-disease research center. In fact, it offered some of the finest genetic testing facilities in the world and was the only place, Gina had told him, where the “little tiny bit” of alien DNA in our possession was kept.

“Oh, boy,” Massy said, a tremor in his voice. Mark followed his wide-eyed stare.

The creature’s eyes had been closed. Now they were open.

“Could be an unconscious reflex,” Linda said.