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crook.
    One of the girls asked, “Can I see the sting?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Your sting.”
    “Uh. Sure.” I showed her. My forearm might as well have been the Shroud of Turin.
    And then I heard the choppers.
    Okay.
    In hindsight, I can see why we were renditioned into sterile environments. And whereas the others were manhandled and drugged, I had a pretty civilized transition. I was standing on the grass with the three rather dim students, displaying my sting, when six choppers morphed from tiny specks on the horizon into hulking brutes threatening to blow us over. They landed around us in a hexagonal formation, each about two hundred yards away. The moment they hit the ground, the blades stopped. The machine’s engineering impressed me. Chinese?
    Five figures dressed in haz-mat suits emerged from each chopper. Maybe a dozen of them had rifles—yes, rifles, in happy little New Zealand. One of them turned out to be Louise, a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, head of the New Zealand Project Mellifera Response Team and author of such articles as “Developmental parameters and voltinism of the Rufus pineapple flea, Hystrichopsylla mannerixi in suburban Dunedin, New Zealand” and “Five new species and a new tritypic genus Haliplus associated with 2009 Norfolk Pine collapse on Christmas Island.” Louise’s face was framed behind a Plexi-faced haz-mat window. She said, “Young lady, I truly hope this is real. I was hosting a wedding shower when the call came in, and I was actually enjoying myself for once.”
    I said, “It’s a real bee.”
    “Where is it now?”
    I pointed to the aloe and she bent down to look at it. She was silent for a minute or so, and then I noticed that she was crying and seemed embarrassed to be caught in the act. “Curse these damn suits,” she said. “The one thing you can’t do in them is dry your eyes.”
    “It’s bigger than I remember,” I said.
    “It is, isn’t it?” She tried to pull her breathing together. “Lord, I feel like I’ve just seen the ivory-billed woodpecker come back from the dead.”
    In the meantime, I saw that the grad students were being manhandled into a van. Louise got out some gear and gently tweezed the bee into a glass box, then stood up. She looked at me: “We have to go now, Samantha. Come along.”
    Shit.
    She knew my name without having asked me. I had a hunch that Louise knew what I ate for breakfast on this date fifteen years ago, and I wasn’t wrong. “You’ll be flying with me in that helicopter there, and I’m going to ask you to put on this suit. It doesn’t breathe well, so you might sweat. I have to supervise some sample gathering, but we’ll be lifting off in a few minutes.”
    “My car . . . my stuff . . .” I pointed to my car in the distance. Three workers were vacuuming it, the tubes emptying into yellow drums. The midday sun was hot.
    “Your car will be taken care of. Don’t worry. But do put on your suit. Now.”
    Shortly after we lifted off and the noise had subsided, she said, “We’re headed to Auckland. It’ll be a half-hour.”
    “Will we be there long?”
    “No.”
    There was a silence, and I knew it was pregnant: “So where are we going?”
    “Atlanta.”
    Jesus. “ What? ”
    “To the Centers for Disease Control. We don’t have the right facilities down here.”
    “For what?”
    “Studies.”
    “Studying what? Maybe I don’t want to—”
    Louise looked at me. “Samantha, dear, I have the authority to ask any one of these fine gentlemen around us to gas you and put you on a plastic sled and fix you there with nylon belt restraints. As you can see, I’ve chosen not to do that since you strike me as the sensible type. For now, just answer my questions. Some of them are direct—rude, even—but today is not a day for niceties.”
    “Okay.”
    The thought of flying to the United States in my crap gym sweats with my third-favourite pair of runners wasn’t pleasant, but dammit, this was