The Year of the Crocodile (5 page)

I
f you're wondering
what this means for Adam Reynolds: Yes, he's getting a story. I don't call it a book. It's a five-part behemoth that, collectively, is longer than some of the actual multi-book series that I have written.

The Year of the Crocodile
falls right smack dab in the middle of his story—about halfway through, right in the middle of part three.

If you know who Adam is writing to…well, now you know why it's taking me time to fix things. You also—maybe—might want just a hint of what is coming.

For those of you who want to know, I've created a page with a few very minor notes that some people might consider spoilers. You can find them here:

T
hank
you for reading
The Year of the Crocodile.
I hope you enjoyed it.

• Would you like to know when my next book is available? You can sign up for my new release e-mail list at
  www.courtneymilan.com
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  @courtneymilan
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  .
  
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• The Year of the Crocodile
  is a short story in the Cyclone series. The other books in the series are
  Trade Me
  ,
  Hold Me
  ,
  Find Me
  ,
  What Lies Between Me and You
  ,
  Keep Me
  ,
  and
  Show Me
  .
  An excerpt from
  Hold Me
  follows.
  

G
abriel was supposed
to be here ten minutes ago.

Instead, my brother is running late—no surprise there, as he plays the role of absent-minded scientist a little too well. He double-booked dinner tonight. He forgot that he was supposed to find me after my class. And when he sent me directions to the place where he'd agreed to meet his friend…

Go to the chemistry complex,
he said.
The lab's in the basement,
he said.

Ha.

There are multiple buildings, each with their own basement. Some have two. After a brief, maddening trip down a rabbit hole of cement walls, metal doors, and blue-green paint, I had to ascend for air—and wifi—to look up room numbers and a map.

If I didn't love my brother so much, I might be pissed.

But I'm here, a mere ten minutes late, and not even slightly miffed about the number of stairs I had to tackle in heels. After all, Gabe is not a distant Skype call at odd hours coming from half the globe away. He's in Berkeley. He's
here.

At least, he better be here.

I eye the door I've found with skepticism. A little placard to the side designates it as the Thalang group. The door itself is festooned with warnings of impending death.

DANGER, says a sign in giant red letters. VISIBLE AND/OR INVISIBLE LASER RADIATION. Another sheet of laminated paper lists every chemical in the room that could kill me.

It's a long list.

Possible fatality. Just how I like to start all my evenings.

I knock on the door, managing to bruise my knuckles, but the fireproof door makes only the slightest, most muffled thump in response. Only then do I notice the tiny piece of paper duct-taped to the door.
Ring bell for entry.

I ring.

I wait.

I'm not sure what to expect from a chemistry death lab, but my imagination has always been excellent. Radioactive bees? Radioactive nanobots? Radioactive mind-controlled soldiers? The possibilities are endless.

The door opens.

Damn. The room beyond looks painfully prosaic—desks, bookshelves, and a couch are visible from here. There are no super-soldiers equipped with prosthetic lasers, intent on world destruction. There is no case of radioactive spiders. There aren't spiders of any kind.

There's just a man standing at the door, frowning at me. He's almost exactly as tall as I am in these heels, which makes him pretty darned tall. He's almost as brown as I am, even though he can't get much sun down here.

He takes one look at me, tilts his head, and narrows his eyes. His eyebrows are thick and set in determined lines; his arms are folded in front of his chest. I'm pretty sure a super-soldier would be less intimidating. At least they might be susceptible to mind control. (I've never mind-controlled anyone yet, but then again, I've never met a super-soldier. Hope springs eternal.)

I saw a picture of Professor Aroon na Thalang, the principal investigator of this group, on the website five minutes ago when I looked up the location of his lab. In that picture, he was thumbnail sized and serious. Between the tiny image and the CV highlights listed beneath—PhD from Cambridge, an NSF CAREER grant, awards from DARPA—I had assumed he was twenty years older than me.

He's not. He looks about twenty-three. It has to be the Asian genes. He's kind of hot, in a glowering, grumpy scientist kind of way.

“You're late,” he says. He has a hint of an accent. A
British
accent, to be precise, enough to remind me of that Cambridge PhD.

“Um.” I bite my lip and curse my brother. “I'm sorry?”

“You're sorry, question mark.” His eyes narrow as he says this, like I've committed some kind of cardinal sin, and his accent seems more marked. “Either you're not sure you're sorry, in which case you shouldn't be apologizing, or you're sorry, period, and you need to work on your inflection. Which is it?”

This is going well. I try again. “I'm Maria—”

“Group meeting finished an hour ago.” He looks even more annoyed. “If you want to work in my lab—”

“I don't want to work in your lab. I'm here to meet Jay.”

He frowns. Shit. I didn't think much of the fact that I didn't see a Jay listed on the group website. It's September, the start of a new academic year. Groups change; the website is probably out of date. Now I'm wondering if Gabe gave me the wrong group name. Or the wrong department.

“So sorry.” He delivers the word with a period at the end. A sarcastic period, the kind that says that he's not sorry at all. “I don't know you, and I don't have time for…” He squints at me, and gives me another look, this one a little more pointed. “What are you selling, anyway? Lab supplies? Amway?”

Assumptions shouldn't be a big deal.

But they are. I don't know him, but he just assumed it was more likely I was selling make-up then…any of the other many possibilities in the world.

I know what I look like. I'm pretty. I should be; I work hard for it. I
like
being pretty. I like wearing skirts and heels and makeup. I'm not going to apologize for doing my hair or knowing how to contour foundation or any of the other tiny skills I've invested years in learning.

I'm going to get judged for caring about how I look, and judged for
not
caring. I might as well dress exactly how I want.

I know that rationally, I shouldn't care that a complete stranger has decided that I'm an airhead. But it still stings.

“It's not that,” I say.

“So you
are
a grad student.” He rubs his hair, making it stick up in little black spikes. “Let me make this easy: I'm looking for three-sigma students. Not people who arrive two hours late, interrupting a perfectly good work session with my post doc, and who stare at me like deer drowning in headlights. There's no point wasting each other's time.”

My pulse pounds thickly.

“I'm…sorry?” I hear that question mark again and wince, just as his eyebrow rises. “I'm not sorry,” I say, “but I really am looking for Jay.”

“Don't be sorry,” he says. “Just join another group.”

I inhale. “I think you misunderstand. Can I just talk to Jay—”

“Nope,” he says. “Sorry. I've got things to do.”

Before I can say anything else, he shuts the lab door on me. Great. I contemplate the buzzer and wonder what he would do if I rang it again. Given the degree of asshole he just displayed, and the fact that he said he was in the middle of a perfectly good work session, he'd probably just get mad at the hapless Jay, who is likely a new postdoc in his lab.

Fine.

I exhale, take out my phone, and text my brother.

Are you sure you told me the right place? The Thalang group in chemistry? Did you mean biology?

His response comes seconds later.
Yep. Almost there.

I frown dubiously at my phone.
The Aroon na Thalang Group? There's no Jay listed on the group page.

That's him,
my brother texts back.
Jay. It's a nickname. Nobody calls him Aroon.

I consider hitting my head against the cement wall in front of me.

Yay. Gabe's friend—the one who just shut the door in my face, the one I'm supposed to have dinner with—is a dick.

Yes, he jumped to conclusions. Yes, I'm sure he'll make all the right pretend apologies when Gabe clues him in. But he still looked at me and decided I was a lab supply salesperson, and didn't let me get a word in edgewise.

Great.

It doesn't help that I'm staring at a poster of his lab's work. I've noticed these in the hallways earlier as I was looking for this place. They're essentially advertisements for all the research groups that are recruiting new graduate students.

I've seen badly photoshopped versions representing various groups as X-Men or the Avengers. Here, someone has photoshopped Jay's face on the massive, genetically enhanced dinosaur that wreaked havoc on a fictional theme park. I recognize the rest of the group from the picture as velociraptors.

“Apt,” I mutter.

Strangely, though, this reminder of fictional mayhem calms me down.

Most people, when they're feeling a little upset, take deep breaths and think good thoughts.

I'm Maria Lopez.
I
take deep breaths and think about the end of the world.

Literally. These basement chemistry laboratories are an apocalyptic filmmaker's wet dream. I am not far from the room where plutonium was discovered. If there's an apocalypse waiting to happen in some scientist's lab, it could be close by. Behind that fire door there, someone may well be tinkering with some nanotechnological device that will spell the end of civilization as we know it.

So far, despite humanity's best efforts, civilization has persisted.

I know all about apocalypses that don't happen. The apocalypse is nothing more than shitty things that happen to you instead of someone else. The apocalypse has been fiction for me, and fiction it will remain.