Changeling Read Free Page A

shook her head. “Honestly, it was when you called your daughter ‘Amelia.’”
    “Ah. And that’s not something I usually do.” Norris said it more like a statement than a question. He tilted his head back as if embarrassed by the mistake. “Well, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.”
    Carrera’s forehead creased in confusion. “What do you mean?”
    Norris smiled and then moved with the speed of striking viper. Carrera did not even have time to yelp in alarm. The captain clapped his left hand over her mouth, stifling any potential cry for assistance. His right drove something into the side of her neck.
    Carrera felt a sharp twinge, like a bee sting, followed by a bloom of icy cold radiating away from the spot. She caught a glimpse of a discarded syringe falling to the carpeted floor, and then his right arm snaked around to immobilize her. She tried to struggle out of his grasp, but whatever he had injected into her neck was already having an effect. Her muscles felt leaden. Even breathing was an ordeal.
    She gasped a word, a single question that was muffled by the hand still clamped over her mouth. Why ?
    Norris however seemed to understand. As darkness closed in from the edges of her vision, Carrera thought she heard him say, “Not for you.”

PART ONE- SKULLS

ONE
     
    Peru
    “Aliens!”
    The familiar refrain echoed across the open stretch of sand, setting Jade Ihara’s teeth on edge. “I swear to God,” she muttered, “if he says that one more time, I’m going to personally start an intergalactic war.”
    Beside her, Pete “Professor” Chapman chuckled. “Careful, now. Don’t get caught on camera biting the hand that feeds.”
    “Easy for you to say,” Jade retorted. “You’re not the one watching your career slowly circling the drain. I can’t believe I ever thought this was a good idea.”
    Nevertheless, she stopped and glanced around to make sure that their conversation was not being captured on video. They were already a hundred yards away from the squat museum complex—Jade thought it looked more like a police station or a military base than a repository of ancient culture—which seemed to be the focus of attention for the camera crew, but she knew Professor’s admonition was warranted. With modern technology, it was sometimes hard to tell when the cameras were rolling. While the crew of Alien Explorers —a cable television documentary program with a penchant for making elaborate connections between ancient civilizations and little green men—did most of their work with state-of-art video and audio production equipment, she knew they also liked to sometimes fold in candid footage shot with handheld digital video cameras and even smart phones, which in the final edit, gave the finished product a sort of gritty verisimilitude.
    The arrival of the video crew still rankled her. Jade realized now that that deal with the production company had probably been in place long before she was hired and there was little doubt in her mind that her sex and physical appearance—the daughter of Japanese and Hawaiian parents, she had been called an ‘exotic’ so many times, the line made her want to throw up—had played a more important part in her selection for the archaeological crew than had her expertise. Her employer—or more accurately, an attorney from the legal department of the foundation that was sponsoring the dig—had made it clear that she was to give full cooperation and support to the cable television producers who had taken over the site.
    Camera-friendly good looks notwithstanding, after two days of watching her carefully excavate tomb shafts, the crew had mostly lost interest in her. The on-site interview with Jeremiah Stillman, publisher of the fringe magazine Alien Legends , and esteemed “extraterrestrial astronaut theorist” who had arrived late the previous evening, was much more engaging than watching Jade removing dirt by the teaspoonful. Still, a viral video