Curtis Bell, the transfer manager, was checking a manifest when she entered the receiving area. He had known Aaron in high school and still called Kora by her first name with the careful friendliness of a man who had seen her at a funeral. When she pointed toward the eggs and asked why they were being destroyed, Curtis told her the hatchery had marked them nonviable and requested disposal. The load was listed as eight hundred eggs, excluding the few already broken.
"Has anybody checked them apart from the scanner?" she asked.
"Not here," Curtis said. "We don't inspect poultry stock. We're paid to take waste."
"How long have they been in that truck?"
He consulted the delivery record. "Picked up this morning, according to the driver. Why?"
Kora stepped toward a tray resting on the edge of the bin. The shell was cool, but not icy, and the packing material suggested the eggs had been protected from direct impact through most of the journey. Several carried a stamped code beginning V-17. On the torn edge of a label she read COPPER CREST HERITAGE TRIAL, and that name meant nothing certain to her except that somebody had treated the batch as a research line rather than ordinary commercial stock.
"What if they're not dead?" she asked.
One of the workers laughed. "Then congratulations. You're smarter than a million-dollar hatchery."
Curtis did not laugh. He looked at the eggs, then at the truck she had parked outside. "Kora, what exactly are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking I'd like to find out."
He warned her about disease risks, ownership questions, and the possibility that the eggs had been discarded for reasons he could not verify. Kora said she would not move anything without a signed transfer and would keep the stock isolated from her existing birds. She asked for the disposal manifest, the vehicle number, and a written statement making clear that the company had surrendered the lot to the facility as discarded material and that Curtis was releasing the intact eggs to her under the station's reclaimed-material policy. Curtis read the policy again before signing, and Kora photographed the documents beside his desk clock.
The workers stopped laughing when she began carrying crates. Eight hundred eggs occupied more space than Kora had remembered from the old days, especially when she insisted on using clean dividers and padding rather than piling trays against each other. Curtis helped find unused cartons in the station storeroom, and the driver, perhaps embarrassed by the crushed shells under his boot, helped load the last stacks. Kora placed the carbon copy of her transfer receipt in a plastic sleeve behind the passenger sun visor, where she would not lose it among her shopping papers.
Before she left, Curtis leaned into the window. "You really think there's something alive in there?"
"I think nobody has shown me enough to say there isn't."
He shook his head. "You sound like Walter."
"He'd probably tell me to stop wasting daylight," she said.