Hatch (The Overthrow, Band 2) - Softcover

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KENNETH OPPEL is one of the most highly regarded authors of middle-grade fiction writing today. Some of his best-known titles are Inkling,The Nest, Airborn, a 2005 Printz Honor Book, and Silverwing. Find him online at www.kennethoppel.ca and @KennethOppel.

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Chapter One 

Anaya 

This wasn’t normal rain. 

It came as a sudden deluge, pockmarking the water and misting Anaya’s view of the battered city across the harbor. It lashed down on the field of Deadman’s Island, where she stood with Mom and Dad, Petra and her parents, Seth, and Dr. Stephanie Weber. And it wasn’t right. 

Just minutes ago, all her attention had been focused on Stanley Park, where the cryptogenic grass and vines were dying. Yesterday they’d been sprayed with an experimental herbicide, and now they were wilting and cracking. Up till now, nothing had been able to kill these plants. They’d spread worldwide, crowding out crops, sending strangling vines into houses, waiting underground to trap and eat animals and people in their acid-filled sacs. But the herbicide that Dad and Dr. Weber had created--it worked. And seconds ago, Anaya had been cheering along with everyone else on the army base who’d rushed out to witness this huge triumph. 

But now came the rain. Mostly it was real rain. She could feel it, wet against her face. But among the raindrops were ones that were too big to be normal. They didn’t soak into the earth but bounced and settled on the grass like gleaming translucent beads. 

“Hail,” Mom said. 

Her mother was a pilot, and Anaya knew she’d seen all kinds of severe weather. Hail in May was weird but not impossible. And Anaya wanted it to be hail. But near her feet, one of the gleaming beads quivered, swelled, then-- 

Burst. 

She stepped back with a gasp as something swift and wet uncoiled from inside. It happened so quickly that she couldn’t tell the thing’s size or shape--except that it seemed too big to come from such a tiny space. In a second, it had burrowed into the earth and disappeared. 

“Did you see that?” she cried. 

“Eggs,” Dad said, kneeling down as more of them hatched. Their squirming cargo slithered into the grass. He lunged and caught something in his cupped hands, but it squirted between his fingers and was gone. 

“Holy crap,” said Seth. “What are they?” 

“There’s hundreds of them!” Petra gasped, stamping with her foot. 

Anaya’s shoulders jerked at the sound of a gunshot. Across the field, a soldier fired a pistol uselessly at the ground until someone yelled at him to stop. 

“They’re everywhere!” she heard another soldier shout. 

“We need specimens,” Dr. Weber was saying with remarkable calm. 

Anaya spotted several more trembling eggs nestled among the blades of grass. She snatched the coffee cup from Petra’s father and splashed out the contents. Dropping to her knees, she scooped up the eggs and snapped the plastic lid back on. 

“Good thinking,” said Dad. 

“Let’s get that to the lab,” Dr. Weber said. “Fast.” 

As quickly as it had come, the rain subsided. Anaya rushed toward the main building. She felt like she was clutching a grenade. Against the waxed paper was a sudden churning. 

“I think they’re hatching!” 

She sped up, bolting through the doors, down the corridor, and into Dr. Weber’s laboratory. 

“In here,” Dr. Weber told her, opening a large glass terrarium that contained some samples of black grass. 

Anaya lowered the coffee cup inside. Very quickly she snapped off the lid. Several tiny translucent creatures spilled out. Dr. Weber sealed the terrarium. Wriggling at the bottom, the things looked like they were trying to burrow through the glass. 

“They all want to get underground,” Seth said. 

“They’re larvae,” Dad remarked, leaning closer. “Trying to find somewhere safe to grow. And they’re not all the same.” He turned to Dr. Weber. “Stephanie, can you get that magnifying camera working?” 

With a joystick, Dr. Weber angled the small camera mounted above the terrarium. She flipped a switch, and on the monitor loomed some kind of blunt-faced worm. 

“Looks kind of like a borer worm,” Anaya said. 

Growing up with a botanist dad, she’d been shown all sorts of things--not simply weird plants but the freaky creatures that ate them. She knew it pleased Dad that she’d never been one of those kids who squealed at the sight of bugs. He’d taught her to look longer and closer. 

“Yeah,” Dad agreed. “A flat-headed borer larva.” 

“So these things are from Earth?” Seth asked hopefully. 

“They just fell from the freaking sky in raindrops!” Petra told him. 

“I just want to know for sure!” Seth retorted. 

“These definitely aren’t from Earth,” Dad said. “Borer larvae aren’t segmented like this, and they don’t have lateral fins.” He pointed at the long ridges that ran the length of the thing’s body. 

“They might be for digging,” Dr. Weber remarked. 

When the worm opened its wide mouth, Anaya took a sharp breath. 

“Oh my God,” said Petra. 

Inside were spiraling blades that looked like the turbine of a drilling machine. 

On the monitor another creature now plunged into view. This one had an oversized head, which was mostly taken up with a pair of black-dot eyes. Its narrow body was like a chain of armored blocks, each sprouting spiky hairs. Below its head was a big hump, and through the translucent flesh, Anaya made out something dark and bundled. 

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing. 

“I think those might be the beginnings of wings,” Dad remarked. “This one might be a flyer. What else have we got in there?” 

Dr. Weber panned the camera across the terrarium. There were a couple more of the bulgy-headed creatures, a few more worms, and then a grub-like thing so blobby Anaya couldn’t tell which end was which. 

“This little dude’s a puzzle,” Dad remarked as the camera zoomed in. Dad had always had a habit of calling his specimens endearing names. Rascal. Scoundrel. Smart aleck. “He’s still completely undifferentiated.” 

“Meaning?” asked Sergeant Diane Sumner. Petra’s mother worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and liked to understand things as quickly as possible. 

“Meaning it’s hard to tell what the heck it is,” replied her husband, Cal Sumner, who was a nurse practitioner at the Salt Spring hospital. 

As Anaya watched, the grub thing flopped over to a worm that was busily bashing its head against the floor. She still couldn’t tell which end was which until the grub thing unhinged its jaws and inhaled the worm whole. 

“That just really happened,” Petra said, sounding horrified. 

Bloated, the grub was motionless for a few seconds, maybe stunned it had eaten something as big as itself. Its body twitched. Then it flumped over to one of the black-eyed bugs and ate that, too. It finished off all the other larvae in the terrarium. Its swollen body bulged as if its prey were still alive and thrashing around inside. Then it became very still. 

“Did it die?” Anaya heard Mom ask. 

“What’s all that goo?” Seth said. 

A pale fluid oozed from the thing’s flesh, and at first Anaya thought it must be injured, but the fluid quickly...