Page 39 of Time for You
Henry wiped his palms on his jeans, and okay, sure, message received. Daphne redirected her energy to dancing, hoping he didn’t notice her awkwardness.
It wasn’t his fault she was being weird. She would just have to remember that.
Chapter Fifteen
Slowly, Daphne adjusted to Henry’s constant presence in their lives. He liked a challenge, and she appreciated that about him. And even though he was still frequently bewildered by modern life, he had taken to the broader range of food available very quickly. He loved Thai food, which Daphne had introduced him to on a rainy Thursday afternoon, cackling as he hopped around the kitchen searching for milk to manage the spicy burn. Once he’d gotten over that first shock, he proclaimed he loved it, and kept looking for new things to taste and cook.
There was a lack of pretention about Henry that she wouldn’t have noticed at first. He was arrogant as all hell—that much hadn’t changed from her first impression—but he embraced new ideas and experiences with a lot more equanimity than she would have ever guessed.
Henry squinted at the recipe he had displayed on Ellie’s tablet. “Keep stirring,” he instructed. “It doesn’t look right to me yet.”
“Yes, chef,” Daphne teased, standing at her station at the stove. The recipe Henry had found was incredibly complex, as it involved making curry from scratch, but their kitchen did smell amazing.
Henry moved next to her and dunked the noodles into the boiling water. Daphne knocked her shoulder into his, and he grinned to himself, shaking his head. “I still don’t understand why you think it’s so impossible, given that all the disparate elements of the technology exist,” Henry said, picking up the thread of an old, now-familiar argument.
“Henry, we can’t make dinosaurs.”
“So you say. But you can create human—what did you call them?”
“Embryos.”
“You can create human embryos in a lab. Wouldn’t a reptile be less complex?”
“It’s less that we can’t, and more that we shouldn’t,” Ellie said, emerging from her room. She’d been sleeping for most of the day, having pulled an overnight shift every night for the past week. Daphne herself was gearing up for a stretch of those and dreaded it, and not just because of the difficulty of night shifts.
“I still think maybe if they tried with an herbivore—”
“No one has a secret dinosaur island,” Daphne said.
“That you know of,” Henry argued. “And turn the heat off—that looks done.”
Daphne obligingly turned off the heat for the sauce she’d been stirring and turned to face him. “Again, did you bother to finish the book?”
“I did.”
“And you still think we should make a dinosaur island? Maybe we should show you the movies.”
“Movie. The original slaps. The rest are terrible cash grabs,” Ellie said, but Henry didn’t look at her.
He turned away from the noodles to face Daphne. “I simply think it’s not possible for you to know, definitively, if there’s a dinosaur island somewhere or not.”
“Okay, but keeping something likethata secret would be really hard. There’d be all the scientists, and research scientists might be a bunch of dorks, but they’re achattybunch of dorks. If one of them knew how to make dinosaurs, you couldn’t keep them from telling someone about it—”
“Um, guys?” Ellie interjected.
“Money can buy silence,” Henry said.
“Not when it comes to something like this. And it’s not just the scientists; there would be like, people who feed the dinosaurs, groundskeepers, janitors—”
“Guys?” Ellie tried again.
Henry’s eyes glimmered with a smile that didn’t reach his lips. “Lots of money can buy a lot of silence,” he insisted.
“Sure, but—”
“What about spy satellites? We have those, you know. Governments would know, and if it was someone from a different country, then there wouldn’t be incentive to keep it quiet.”
“Food’s burning,” Ellie said.
