Prologue

Twelve years ago, airline pilots had to recalibrate their compasses.  This was because the exact location of the magnetic poles had drifted, and it was a first in aviation history.  Six years ago the poles had drifted even further, causing the need to again reset the compasses.  They recalibrated again three years ago, then two, then one, and are currently realigning every three months. 
            Approximately 200 million years ago map north was magnetic south.  But ten million years later, the poles switched places.  They’ve traded again approximately every sixty million years, the last of which was sixty-five million years ago.
            It is theorized that the dinosaurs achieved such great size due to the slightly larger magnetic field of their time.  Today some living things - like homing pigeons and honeybees - are highly dependent on the earth’s field.  Even those creatures that don’t seem to notice it are in jeopardy if it changes, since we don’t know how they use their internal magnetics, only that they have them. 
            Like us.

And the earth we are sitting on is five million years overdue  .  .  .

God, what was it that made her feel like such a fool?  All that school, all that ‘prestige’, and yet she stood there like a moron.  Eyes wide, ‘yes’ ‘yes’ monosyllabic answers to each question.  The horrible, lost feeling of being in an unfamiliar institution.
            “So you two are the new peons.”
            Jillian nodded.  “Yes.”  There it was again.  The idiocy.
            The guy beside her - Jared? Jeff? Jacob? - was cool and only raised his eyebrows to the question.
            Dr. Landerly was hunched over his desk and had whitish hair that stuck out in about fifty different directions and looked as though it hadn’t made friends with a brush in a lifetime or so.  He had male pattern balding and probably arthritis, judging by the way he held his pen.  Whether he didn’t look at them because of pain or out of sheer rudeness was anybody’s guess.  “You two turned in all your documentation and fingerprinting crap down in HR?”
            Jake ? flicked the new badges hanging from their pristine white jackets, “Yup, hence the ten a.m. arrival.”
            “Ready for the tour?”
            At the sound of yet another one word answer, he finally looked up at them.  For a moment he simply looked them both up and down, taking their measure.  Jillian did the first proactive deed of her day and sized him up too.  Landerly’s face reminded her of a grandfather, not her own, but that old man look, crossed with a little mad scientist.  With his focus turned on them, she felt the same intensity that the papers he was marking on must have felt just minutes before.  She was surprised the pages hadn’t burst into flame before she and what’s-his-name walked in and pulled a little of the good doctor’s attention from them.
            “Well, you must be Jillian Brookwood, and you must be Jordan Abellard.” 
            Jordan!  That was it.
            Landerly tapped his forehead, “Deductive reasoning.”  And despite the insanely poor joke, she began to like him.
            He simply turned and began walking down the hallway, talking as he went and expecting them to keep pace behind them.  He never checked.  “This is your office.”  He pointed to his left into an open door and what could only be called a large cubby.  He was already walking away.  Jillian had to nearly run to catch up with him, already midsentence.
            “- that whole half of the building is I.D.  That part you’ll only go in on an ‘as needed’ basis.  Which basically means never.  Unless you get promoted, or we decide we don’t need you or don’t like you but can’t think of a better way to get rid of you.”
            For the first time Jordan turned to her, his eyebrows raised until she shrugged in return.  Dr. Landerly’s voice trailed off as her focus slipped to the signs on the wall.  Every etched plate had the tiny inscription on the top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  But Landerly was old-school and still referred to it as the CDC. 
            Not ten minutes later Jillian realized that they had walked a short circle, and Jordan wasn’t missing that fact either.  “That’s it?”
            “Sure.”  Landerly fixed them with another stare.  “If you want to see the Infectious Disease side, you can go get your own tour.  I told you, you’re peons.”
             “I’m a-” Jordan stopped himself.  “We’re physicians.”
            “Yes, and you’re underlings.  And you’re at the CDC.  On my team you’ll be spending a lot of time drawing blood and writing reports.”
            Which, Jillian admitted, had been exactly the job description.  So she wasn’t sure where Jordan got off being upset.  In truth, it had been just that part of the work that had made her apply.  She had spent all that time and money on medical school, only to find out that she hated the endless churn of minor complaints that flowed through a doctor’s office.  This job had been her proof that she hadn’t chosen the wrong profession.
            Landerly had disappeared back into his office, and by craning her neck she could see him scrubbing through the most disorganized desk ever.  But he held out two identical key chains and spoke again.  “Keys to your office and your lab next door.  Go check it out then get cracking, you’ve already got three cases sitting on your desk.”
            There was no other dismissal, no wish of good luck or welcome, just the turn of his shoulder and the intensity of his focus directed elsewhere.  The two of them no longer existed to him.
            Turning, they silently followed Landerly’s instruction walking two doors down to the plaque that read G-1763 Lab 13, Landerly. 
            “Hi.”  Jordan’s voice filled the empty space around a young man with inky hair who stood at the basic black lab island dialing the micropipette to a new measure. 
            “Oh, Hi.  You two must be the new docs.  I’m your tech.”  For a brief moment he held out a gloved hand before realizing what he was doing and withdrawing the offer.  “I’m Mark.  I’m prepping slides for Landerly right now, but let me know what you need.  My desk is in the back.”  He pointed to the corner, to a table piled with skewed stacks of loose papers and file folders of various colors. 
            “Nice to meet you.”  Jordan pulled back out of the doorway and wound up leading her back to their office, where they spent four minutes choosing which side of the large desk they each wanted, then another hour exploring the file cabinet they shared, and finding out what the previous occupants had left for them.  Which turned out to be an odd mix of pens, pencils, microtesttubes and pipette tips, and one stick of mint chewing gum. 
            After a half-hour of hardly speaking she finished up organizing her drawers and labeling her hanging files, only to look up and find Jordan watching her from across the desk.  “It’s two-thirty, are you hungry?”
            She nodded.  But he spoke again before she could get in a word edgewise.  “You find the cafeteria and I’ll treat.”
            She would have rather paid, but she held her tongue.  She could do this, right?  On the ‘tour’ Landerly had pointed down one corridor and mentioned food and vending machines.  With a deep breath she marched off in the general direction they had started, and faked it to the best of her ability.  
            Two corridors later she could smell that she had found the right one.  Then, after they ordered, she completely disoriented them on the way back.  After they got situated and endured a few minutes of silent chewing, Jordan leaned forward.  “Since we get to stare at each other until one of us goes insane or gets promoted, why don’t we get started with the usual stupid questions?”
            She almost smiled.  Almost.  “The usual ones?”
            “Like ‘Where are you from?’”  He leaned back and Jillian barely covered her gasp at realizing the vast majority of his lunch had already been reduced to empty wrappers.  “I’m from Lake James, North Dakota.  Where it’s colder than a w-. . . well just about anything, and there’s really a lot more bible thumping and militia than you might guess.  College and med school at UCLA.  Your turn.”
            “Emory Med, but I grew up in Chattanooga.  Same town through undergrad.”  She smiled from behind her limp cheeseburger.  “Favorite fast food?  Mine is Chick-Fil-A nuggets.”
            “What’s Chick Fillay?”
            “Ahhh, I’ll take you tomorrow.”
            Jordan shrugged.   “Favorite burger is Jack in the Box Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger.”
            “Jack in the Box?”  She supposed that’s what happened when you met someone from the opposite end of the country. 
            “Ahhh, good, cheap food.  College student fare.  Too bad I can’t return the Chick Fillay favor.  Jack-in-the-Box is only out west.”
            Satisfied that she had the basics, Jillian figured it was time to start earning her keep.  “We should get to work on these cases.”
            “Can I just guess now?  Botulism, gas leak, and Salmonella.”
            “Really?”  She put her hand to her hip.  “I would have had you pegged for a ‘secret government weapons being tested on our own people’ type.”
            “Nah, I’m a realist.”  He picked up the folder and started through it, while she made a thinking noise.  He laughed.  “Do you realize that you even ‘hmmm’ with a southern accent?”
            She nodded.  “Can’t be helped.”

Excerpted from Resonance © Copyright 2012 by A. J. Scudiere. Reprinted with permission by Griffyn Ink. All rights reserved.