Seven Wonders Read Online Free PDF

of August, the middle-aged Italian officers had been easy to slip; once they’d led her down the refurbished stairway that led into the vast, two-level hypogeum—the underground labyrinth of narrow alleys, sloped tunnels, and dead-end cubbyholes that had once run underneath the arena floor—they had been content to sit next toone another on the bottom step, sharing a pack of cigarettes. The Polizia hadn’t spoken two words to her since she’d gotten Professor Lindhom, who’d spent three years as a visiting lecturer at the prestigious University of Roma, to call in a favor with the officer in charge of their garrison, getting them to bring her to the tourist attraction four hours before its opening time. Which was a good thing, since Sloane’s Italian was more than a little rusty, to the embarrassment of her grandmother, who still spoke with such a heavy accent she might as well have just stepped off the boat at Ellis Island.
    Still, Sloane hadn’t expected to have been gone from her two irritated keepers for anywhere near this long. She gritted her teeth and took the last few steps along the ledge, then leaped back onto solid ground. She was relieved to hear the scrape of firm cobblestones against her boots. The tunnel was narrower here, the light from above even more obscured by the levels of hypogeum above. As she started forward again, carefully navigating along the cobblestones, she wished she’d packed a better flashlight along with the handful of tools she’d loaded into her backpack. She wasn’t experienced at fieldwork; she’d made her bones in the lab, analyzing botanical specimens collected by others. Of course, she’d had to accompany Professor Lindhom on a handful of expeditions during her training, but she’d always deferred the dirty work to the more eager doctoral students, the ones who seemed to get off on backpacking across the Sichuan-Hubei region of China, climbing a thirty-foot Metasequoia glyptostroboides to collect a single leaf, or scaling a three-hundred-foot cliff in Patagonia to find the seeds of a Fitzroya cupressoides .
    Sloane had never been built that way. She’d always been a bit of a geek growing up, burying herself in books and computers in her suburban bedroom not ten miles from where she now lived in Michigan, while her two older sisters shuttled from field hockey practice to ballet lessons. She’d hardly even dated in high school and college, telling herself that true scientists didn’t have time for trivial distractions like men; she’d never evenowned a television set, and she’d been to maybe three movies since she’d turned eighteen.
    Her oldest sister, Christine, had often joked that Sloane had chosen to dedicate her life to the study of plants because she was basically a plant herself. Sloane didn’t take this entirely as an insult. There was something pure and logical about plant life, especially when you broke plants down to their internal elements. Not the pistols, stems, seeds, and leaves that kids learned about in grade school; deeper down, at the cellular level. Botanical DNA had a simplicity to it that filled Sloane with a sense of comfort and purpose. After receiving her master’s, she had done her best to carve out a place in what was an obscure science: tracing the evolution of certain plant species by way of their DNA. It was painstaking, boring science involving test tubes and microscopes, but hopefully, important enough to lock down funding to keep Sloane’s academic posting for enough years to earn herself a full professorship, and down the line, when Lindhom eventually retired, maybe even tenure.
    Christine’s jibes aside, the idea that you could trace a plant back to its historical origins through its cellular chemistry spoke to the order Sloane had always looked for in the world around her. She knew that human DNA worked along the same sense of logic. In fact, during her master’s she was third author on an article outlining research that had