PROLOGUE

Yariko Miyakara was a crack young physicist, but at the moment she had a very annoyed expression on her face as she stuck her head out of a small round doorway in the back wall of the lab.

“There’s another one!” she cried.

“You’re kidding.” Yariko’s graduate student, Mark Reng, was sitting at a computer in the main lab. Mark was only twenty-five, a new student for Yariko, but he was quick to learn and full of odd ideas, and he loved the lab. His unruly mop of brown curls could be seen bobbing about the rooms at all hours of the day and night as he puttered with small experiments and computer programs. Now he came over to the vault and looked in past Yariko. “The same kind?”

“Who knows. Get me another jar.” When Yariko climbed out of the vault she held the glass jar in one hand. The other hand was tugging on her long braid, a habit she had when something didn’t make sense.

Mark took the jar from her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I cleaned the vault. First thing today. There wasn’t a speck of dust. And certainly no . . . bugs.” His face showed disgust as he glared at the thing inside the glass.

A rather large, red-and-gold beetle calmly waved its antennae at him, and began an exploratory climb up the side of the jar. “How does a beetle get into a lead-lined, sealed graviton vault in the middle of a physics building?”

“Not by itself, that I know.” Yariko took the jar back. “I’ll put it on the shelf with the other two. I find this. . . .” She stared at the insect as if it might explain its own mysterious appearance in the graviton vault. “Provoking,” she finished.

Provoking indeed. Annoying, perplexing, and perhaps . . . exciting? Certainly, beetles were not created inside a sealed vault. And so, they had come from outside. They had been brought in as a by-product of the experiment. There was a word for this: translocation. But Yariko did not even say the word in her mind, not yet, not until she was sure.

Mark shook his head and turned back to the computer. “Provoking is right. Someone’s playing a bad joke on us. Do you think they bite?”

“Who knows.” Yariko turned away and unlocked a door, revealing a small chemical storeroom, where she carefully placed the jar on a high, dusty shelf. Two jars already stood there, old condiment jars with holes poked in the lids. A similar-looking beetle scurried around inside one; in the other, a small brown insect lay still. “It’s not much of a joke,” she said quietly to herself.

“I’m off,” Mark called from the outer room. “Homework session. Tensor equations today—tr y explaining that to a bunch of undergrads.”

Yariko waved in acknowledgment. “I’m off too. Faculty meeting. We’ll see what happens when we start this afternoon’s run.”

“Just don’t make any more beetles,” Mark said with a grin.

Yariko was thoughtful that morning, abstracted, hardly paying attention to the meeting’s discussion. She didn’t miss much: faculty meetings were notoriously boring, cluttered with petty gripes about bulletin board space and graduate students blasting music in the labs. It was much more interesting to think about beetles.

When she returned to the lab two hours later, she made an entry in the notebook and then checked some lines of program on the computer. She tapped her pen absently on the keyboard as equations rolled by in her mind. What should the next experimental run look like? Was it worth fiddling with the parameters?

The beetles were exasperating. Impossible. There were no beetles in the vault before the run started. There was no way they could have gotten in. In effect, her analytical thought said, they could not exist.

Yariko suddenly threw down her pen and strode to the supply room. It had automatically locked behind her, earlier; a required safety feature that annoyed her each time. She found the small key on her chain and opened the door.

The three little jars stood on their high shelf in the gloom of a badly lit corner. She lifted the newest one down.

It was empty. They were all empty.