Stone exhaled a deep breath.
If an AS-2 strain had infected the helicopter, he’d know it already. With vital engine parts disintegrating, they would have careened into the jungle and died in a crunch of metal and dirt—as had the unfortunate pilot of the F-40 Scavenger jet that had streaked over the Piedmont site after first contact. Or like the Andros V spacecraft, which had come crashing down in a fiery blaze on February 17, 1967, its tungsten-and-plastic-laminate heat shield turned to sterile dust.
Confident that his fiery demise wasn’t coming in the next few seconds, Stone turned to what lay beyond the window. Everything outside was Terra Indigena—mile after mile of government-protected land. He wondered whether the Brazilian government had even been informed of this mission.
He doubted it.
Stone caught sight of a plume of red smoke outside, rising from a clear-cut patch of jungle near a riverbank. A smallish, recently constructed maloca hut sprouted from the center of the clearing, surrounded by hacked vegetation and fallen trees.
It looked like a scar to Stone, a cigarette burn on the face of the pristine jungle.
To the pilot, however, the clearing looked like the only landing pad within five hundred miles. Flying past and gaining altitude, he wheeled the bird into a wide circle to surveil the area and alert the people below that he would be coming in for a landing.
In the audio logs, a burst of confused and frightened dialogue can be heard ricocheting between the pilot and copilot. Three seconds later, the pilot yanked the control stick and dropped the Sikorsky into a stomach-churning descent. The anomaly was barely discernible on the horizon. But for an instant, something else had been briefly visible in the treetops—still several miles away.
Stone clearly saw it, too.
“Wait!” he called over the radio. “What was that? In the trees?”
The chopper only sank faster, spiraling, rapidly losing altitude.
“Go. Now!” the pilot shouted at Stone, tapping his copilot.
The copilot climbed back into the cabin, reaching across Stone’s lap and unceremoniously yanking open the rolling side door. Shrinking back, Stone saw they were still a hundred feet up. Outside, a roaring mass of jungle canopy shuddered under the pounding rotors, and the cabin was filled with a wash of humid air.
Craning his neck, Stone was able to snatch a final, puzzling glance of the bizarre scene in the distance.
Then the Sikorsky sank below the tree line, jolting onto the ground, tires bouncing on the red mud of the clearing. As the helicopter settled, the pilot left the controls and joined his copilot in the cabin, rushing to detach Stone’s luggage where it was secured in webbed fabric. They ignored the American, shouting to one another in Portuguese, leaving the engines running and the rotors spinning.
Stone still could not quite understand what it was he had seen.
It appeared at first to be a wave of darkness washing over the tree canopy. A swarm of black shapes, thrashing like a school of salmon going upstream—a ripple of movement under the electric green foliage.
“Senhor!” shouted Stone, over the noise of the rotors. “What was that? Were they—”
Stone’s voice cut out as the pilots turned to him.
It was the naked fear on the faces of what he would later describe as “hard men” that took Stone’s breath away. And at that moment, some symmetry in the twisting shapes he had seen coalesced in his mind.
The pilot and copilot tossed out Stone’s black hard-case luggage. Stone hastily gathered his papers, snatched up his duffel bag, and got to his feet. He stood in the open doorway for a moment, a lean silhouette against the crimson sunlight outside.
Stone turned to the pilot, his voice hollow as he spoke. “Those were monkeys, weren’t they? Swinging through the upper branches in a panic. Hundreds of them. A thousand.”
The pilot said nothing, emotionless behind mirrored sunglasses. Without warning, his copilot took hold of Stone’s shoulders and roughly shoved him through the helicopter door. He tumbled out and fell to his knees on the muddy ground.
The Sikorsky had already lifted off before Stone could get to his feet.
DR. NIDHI VEDALA WAS ANGRY. AND IMPATIENT. SWATTING at a mosquito with one hand, she heard the thundering approach of the Sikorsky H-92 and her dark eyebrows knit together in a frown. The makeshift clearing around her was scattered with muddy black hard-case luggage, each containing precious equipment that needed to be checked for damage. The noise and commotion of incoming rotors sent squawking birds streaking past her and startled a young caiman on the riverbank into the water.
She ignored it all, consciously forcing herself to unclench her fists and continue inspecting the hard-cases. The jungle didn’t frighten her. Not much did.
Vedala had grown up an orphan in the Morarji Nagar slums of Mumbai, a member of the Dalit social caste—called the “untouchables,” often beaten and discriminated against. Though impoverished, she saw the world with the clear focus of a naturally keen intellect. Even as a bone-thin child under a mop of reddish-black hair, she never had a doubt that she would someday escape the narrow alleyways, fetid community toilets, and sickening miasma of the toxically polluted Mithi River.
During her first round of mandatory statewide merit testing, Nidhi had come away with the top score out of approximately fifteen million school-age Indian children. Starting from nothing, she had painstakingly earned her place among these distinguished scientists on this high-stakes mission.
The leader of the expedition and a founding member of the next generation Project Wildfire, Vedala had been dragged away from her laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by armed goons, driven an hour to Hanscom Air Force Base, and placed on board a wildly inappropriate C-130 Hercules military jet. Her mobile phone and laptop were confiscated, along with her identification. The cargo plane had been fueled up and waiting on the tarmac, but still set in an armored vehicle transport configuration, with only a few jump seats available for passengers.
None of this had startled her in the least.
Vedala was a small woman with an impish face and an efficient pixie haircut. She often scowled while concentrating, unconsciously intimidating others. She wasn’t tall, but nonetheless projected a large presence, and her military escort quickly decided to retire to the cockpit up front with the two pilots and loadmaster. For the next twelve hours Vedala sat alone in the cavernous belly of the great beast, sleeping occasionally, but mostly rereading a fat red packet of files by the stark glow of the interior floodlights.
From the first moment, she understood that only one type of threat could possibly justify this level of expenditure—it had to be a global crisis with existence-level repercussions. A true world-ending scenario.
And Vedala welcomed it.
This was, after all, exactly the situation to which she had devoted her career. A materials scientist with a nanostructure specialty, she had spent her public life rising meteorically through the ranks of academics.
Her relentless exploration of new metamaterials had exploited the quirks of quantum mechanics to miraculous effect. Among the many discoveries made in her laboratory were novel materials that could absorb electromagnetic energy to render a perfect retina-draining blackness, or allow light in the visible spectrum to slide away entirely in a blurry sort of invisibility cloak, or imbue a surface with perfect smoothness, a near-zero friction to which no viscous liquid could stick.[fn1]
But Vedala’s true