In the eight months she’d been at Station 333, Kala had assessed and categorised hundreds of new discoveries, and she’d never seen anything act like that before. She looked up at Stanos, expecting him to be just as shocked as she was, but his face was neutral as he continued to watch her.

“Do—did you—” she stuttered, trying to understand what had just happened. “You saw that, too, right?”

“Yes. What do you think happened?”

“It’s—” She waved her arm at the pipka, which was lying still, looking no different from a fresh sample. “It took over the pipka. It somehow… replicated its body.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kala jogged to the crates at the back of the room, where samples from the previous day were kept. A rookie station guard had sent one in, convinced he’d discovered a new species, when in fact it was just a regular amettal that was missing its primary beak. The small, scaled, bird-like animal was common in the Meidoscycle system. Though not very intelligent, it was enough of a pest that they had to be regularly cleared from around stations. This particular specimen was destined for the euthanasia tank the next morning, but it would suit Kala’s needs perfectly.

She grabbed the squawking, kicking creature, which was only a little larger than her fist, and returned to Stanos and the desk. The amettal tried to bite her hand, but its inner beak was small and too soft to do any damage.

The bowl holding the sample—or, rather, samples, Kala thought grimly—was too small for the amettal, so she grabbed a new bowl and dropped the hopping critter into it. She then used a pair of pliers to pick the pipka off where it had stuck to the glass, and placed it in the new container.

The amettal, seeing food, hopped towards the plant and began picking at its skin. Then it made a guttural noise of surprise. A hair-thin crack appeared in the slug’s skin, and it quickly widened to let the tendrils poke out. They stretched forward, feeling towards the new addition to their environment, while the amettal hopped and squawked indignantly.

What happened next was almost too fast for Kala to see. One of the tendrils shot forward, but the amettal was too quick for it and managed to snip the tip off the stalk and swallowed it. For a second, the animal showed no signs of being affected, but then it suddenly twitched, jumped twice, began swaying, and fell onto its side.

“Jeeze,” Kala muttered, watching as the bird-like creature stilled. She pressed the button on the desk’s stopwatch and waited.

Nearly three minutes had passed, and Kala was half-convinced the bird was dead, when the amettal finally leapt upright and began strutting around the bowl. It looked and behaved exactly as it had before—the only difference was that it paid no attention to the pipka, which had also fallen still. Kala watched with a mixture of fascination and revulsion; she wasn’t prepared to cut open the bird, but she knew what she would find inside: an inky black mess filled with twitching, writhing tendrils.