Pushing her aside, I stood over the carcass of the dead creature—a young adult male—its tentacles bound, an arrow piercing its skull. The women had sliced off its eye shafts, torturing the poor beast before it had perished.

“Where’s Andria?” I growled, my body trembling.

“Follow the blood, you’ll find her. Better toughen up, Eisenbrains, this place eats schoolgirls like you for breakfast.”

Ignoring the impulse to beat the masochism out of the sadist, I hurried up the ridge, the blood trail leading me through a small grove of trees—Oscar’s desperate pan flute exhalation sending me into an all-out sprint.

My former cephaloped companion was hanging upside-down from a lower tree limb, the squid’s tentacles bound in a wire noose. Andria stood at eye level, torturing the poor creature, tracing an X in its dangling bulbous head with the sharp tip of her arrow. The third member of Oscar’s trio—another young male—was splayed by her feet, dead.

“Andria, stop!”

She turned to face me, her eyes wide and dancing as she licked the blue blood from the arrowhead. “Try some, Ike. It’s better than sex.”

Snatching the arrow from her hand, I snapped it in half over my knee. “Cut him down.”

“You’re crazy.”

My eyes traced the wire holding Oscar from the limb of the oak down around the base of the tree trunk. Locating a stick, I shoved the narrower end inside the loop, attempting to snap the wire free.

“Ike, what are you doing? Baby, these things want us dead.”

“Dream or no dream, I am not going to allow you to torture him.”

I never heard Monique, only the air whistling in my ear and the sickening craaaack as the back of my skull absorbed the impact from the oak baton.

Chapter 27

27

After almost 15 years of work and $40 million, a team of scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute says they have succeeded in creating the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome. This advance could be proof that genomes designed in a computer and assembled in a lab can function in a donor cell, eventually reproducing fully functional living creatures, that is, artificial life.

—Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 2010

When I came to, it was night and I was lying on my back. An invisible elephant sat on my chest, pinning my body to a hard, flat reverberating surface. I felt like a goldfish out of water, each breath a harsh gasp, each exhalation threatening to crush my rib cage.

We were moving. I could tell we were moving from the passing cloud formations and the wind whipping against my sweat suit.

ABE … do something!