Brooke pressed her thumb against the glass slide, watching the microscope's view swim into focus. Beside her, her twin brother Felix dumped another vial of amber-colored liquid into their centrifuge.

"This is never going to work," Felix muttered, flipping switches on the makeshift cloning apparatus they'd cobbled together from salvaged lab equipment. Their garage looked like a mad scientist's workshop—exactly what Mrs. Chen would expect for the Regional Science Fair grand prize.

Brooke adjusted the temperature controls. "The DNA sequence is complete. We just need—"

The incubator hummed. Then it chirped.

Both twins froze.

Inside the temperature-controlled chamber, something moved. Something small, feathered, and completely impossible.

"Felix." Brooke's voice came out strangled. "That is not a chicken embryo."

The creature tilted its head, revealing a tiny hooked beak and enormous eyes. Iridescent feathers caught the overhead light, shimmering blue-green like oil on water. It opened its mouth, revealing a bright yellow interior, and chirped again—a sound that hadn't been heard on Earth for over a century.

"That's a passenger pigeon," Felix whispered. "An actual passenger pigeon."

Brooke's hands trembled as she checked their DNA source log. They had used samples from the natural history museum—supposedly from a preserved domestic chicken specimen intended for baseline testing. Someone had mislabeled the archive. Catastrophically.

"We have to call Dr. Patel," Brooke said, reaching for her phone.

Felix grabbed her wrist. "Wait. Think about this. Do you know what we've done? We've brought back an extinct species. This is bigger than the science fair. This is... this is *everything*."

The pigeon—Brooke couldn't think of it as anything else now—wobbled on stick-thin legs. It looked fragile, vulnerable, and impossibly alive.

"We present in 48 hours," Felix continued, his eyes wide. "If we call the adults now, they'll take over.