CHIMERAS (Track Presius) Read Online Free PDF

coming and going,” she explained, skipping the r’s and indulging me in the soporiferous cadence of the Oxfordshire accent.
    The hallway upstairs was dark, the walls lined with metal cabinets. The last door on the right bore Huxley’s nametag. Samantha pointed to it and then stared at me with large blue eyes begging for gossip. “Has something happened to her?”
    “No idea. When was last time you saw her, do you remember?”
    Samantha shrugged. “I wouldn’t recall… Definitely not yesterday or the day before, because I’d remember… She seems sort of quiet and always keeps to herself. Are you guys looking for her? But she wouldn’t vanish like that, would she? I mean—she seems such a nice person and all… You know, we’re all lab rats , but Jen beats us all. Never seen her outside or at the cafeteria. Just here, sitting at her desk or in the genetics lab. Sometimes I wonder if she’s got a life at all.”
    In the five minutes I spent with her, Samantha managed to ask a dozen questions for every query of mine she left unanswered. I finally dismissed her with a curt thank you—her face hung with the disappointed look of a child who’s just been denied candy—and worked my way around the office: small, crammed by two long desks, each one with a computer, a chair, a file cabinet standing by the door, and no space to move your legs around. It smelled musty, of old, molding wood. Despite the claustrophobic environment, Huxley’s workspace was just as neat and tidy as her home. Her pens and pencils were all in a jar, grouped in three different compartments; her papers were stacked in color-coded folders on one corner of the desk, and her paperclips stored away in the drawer and sorted by size. What a freak .
    I sat on the swivel chair and touched the mouse of the computer. The screen flicked to life and asked for username and password. I picked up the folder at the top of the pile on the desk, labeled “Leukemia Study,” and opened it. There were several sets of stapled papers, the first of which looked like a drafted manuscript, with penciled corrections in two different calligraphies. “Incidence of leukemia in children under twelve in LA County, a preliminary study,” the title read. A list of authors followed: Huxley was the first one, and the last one was a J.A. Cox, MD, PhD, listed as corresponding author. I attempted some educational reading while flipping through the pages, but typically got lost after the third word in each sentence. As I closed the folder and placed it back where it belonged, a bright pink sticky note fell out. Handwritten in capital letters, it read, “GN WHITE, AGE 8, CHROMO.”
    I puzzled over the note, didn’t understand it, and the fact that I couldn’t understand it made it interesting enough to copy the information on my notepad. Satisfied, I got back on my feet.
    The Watson and Crick Laboratory for Genetic Studies was located at the very end of the building’s west wing. This was where Huxley spent most of her days, according to Samantha Green. A pale light seeped through the frosted glass of two high windows and shimmered against rows of glassware of all sizes and shapes. Stacks of boxes filled the shelves between the windows, some pried open and their contents exposed: latex gloves, pipettes and pipette holders, tweezers, glass tubes, sheets of packed swabs. The air was acidic, thick with reeks of alcohol, antiseptic liquids, gels, biological solutions—all combined in one acrid odor. Pungent in an unpleasant way. A large fridge hummed at the back, a piece of paper taped to its door warning it did not contain food.
    Like the stink wasn’t enough of a warning already .
    More signs decorated the cabinets hanging all around the walls, some pleading for their contents to be returned at the end of the day, others boring me with an endless list of vials and lot numbers stored within. Beneath the cabinets, a variety of instruments cluttered the scratched Formica