Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this episode:

37 – Wetchie-Ghuy

“There he is. Hey, guess what?” Katrina comes upon Alonso in the morning on the beach. He is standing bare-chested at the edge of the water, looking out, idly running his fingers through his chest hair in a vulnerable moment of introspection.

He only slowly breaks his reverie and turns back to her. His eyes are still cloudy with thought and his smile is distracted.

“I said, ‘guess what?’ Alonso.”

“Eh, yes? Time for a guessing game?”

“The dam has broke! The secrets are out! All the mysteries have been revealed! Well. Not all of them, but… I’ve been talking with Jidadaa all night and this morning and boy do I have a lot of news. Just endless revelations. But the single most fascinating thing she told me? The island doesn’t have music, it’s true. It’s because the two sisters who founded the island didn’t like music. They came from, well, it must have been one of the old Eyat villages on the Alaska coast. And when they got here they just never passed music down. No songs, no melodies. In all this time Jidadaa is the only one. She had music introduced to her by whatever soldier was with her mother at the time. She sings. They were a shipwreck, like over two hundred years ago. They’ve had fourteen generations, maybe fifteen, depending on if any of her peers have had kids, which she doesn’t know because she’s been in hiding her entire life. Sorry. Babbling now. There was a lot! She is utterly fascinating. I’ve never met someone whose brain works like hers. She got her own… I mean, she says Kula told her when she was little that she would have to teach herself about the world. So Jidadaa built her own way of handling reality from the ground up. I mean, she has whole different ways to access memory and reason and… and everything! This is when the team really needs to have a trained psychiatrist or neurologist on board because wow. This girl is… sui generis.”

“Two hundred years… without music…” Alonso shakes his head, doleful. “Now that is my idea of hell. No. Purgatory. This would be a cold gray purgatory for me if I could not live with my music.”

“Absolutely. Could you imagine? My whole life has a soundtrack. I don’t know who I’d be without it.”

“Forgive me, Katrina, but I have been swimming naked and I was just about to take these things off. So I hope you are aware of European bathing traditions down in Australia.”

“Yeh, get your knickers off. I don’t care. But can you even tell how excited I am? I haven’t slept all night. Jidadaa is a treasure.”

“Yes, Katrina. You’re very excited.” Alonso strips his sweatpants off and steps out of them. His skin is pale beneath, with dark black hairs curling against the backs of his thighs. A single long purple stripe of scar tissue runs down his left hamstring. Several dark indentations on his calves look like puncture wounds. He shivers, then shuffles into the sea. As soon as he can he pushes off and breast strokes out past the tiny waves. He elongates his gasp of cold shock into the opening lines of Carmina Burana. “Ooooo Fortuna, velut Luna…!”

Katrina pulls her tights up to her knees and wades out. “So we should have like a full team session here sometime today because I’ve got a lot of answers for our questions. And some really trippy, creepy stuff too. Things they shouldn’t know about us but they already do. Like, somehow she could tell that Flavia was marked by Wetchie-ghuy for slavery. Said Pradeep was too, which I don’t understand at all. Says Wetchie-ghuy is locked in a mortal duel with the other like big shaman on the island. The rest of us are just pawns in their big game, according to her. And Kula has kept herself alive playing one off against the other since she’s been outcast. I mean, there’s just a ton of stuff here.”

Alonso paddles a slow circle before her. The cold is more than bracing. Miriam was right. But if he can just get his old heart going maybe he can warm up and stay out here longer this time. Because the release of pain in his feet and legs and hips and back is better than any drug, better than any sex or meal or even Mozart opera. It is bliss hanging suspended here. Pure bliss.

“She says we’re totally right about the Katóok village. They really are out to kill us if we trespass on their land. But they’re only in a couple big valleys in the center of the island and we should be able to avoid them. But yeh, there’s a third village we haven’t seen. She says she’s never seen it either. But it’s over, well, her guess is it’s on the west side of the island and she doesn’t really know anything about them. Because none of them talk to each other. There’s no trade or intermarrying or anything. No contact if they can all help it. Part of the duel between the shamans, and how they manipulate the villagers, but also she said it’s because of Jidadaa.”

“It is because of her?”

“That’s what I thought she meant at first too. But no. Jidadaa isn’t a name. It’s a word that means some horrible end is going to come for you because you violated the ancient customs and pissed off the ancestors. And it can take whole generations to play out. So somebody broke some old law like a hundred years ago and it was so bad nobody’s spoken to each other since.”

“Hold on. I am going to try to put my head underwater. But I don’t want to miss what you are saying. That is crazy. The woman named her daughter The Apocalypse.”

“Basically.” But Alonso has disappeared from view. Katrina should have brought him her snorkel and mask. Although it probably wouldn’t fit. His head is so freaking wide. And she is still just a little girl. Like Jidadaa. When they asked her how old she was she didn’t know. Jay guesses she’s like twenty. Katrina thinks she’s younger and that life has just been hard.

Alonso emerges with a gasp. He had stayed down in that emerald kingdom beneath the waves as long as he could. Expecting silence, the slap of waves against nearby rocks and the click and buzz of the creatures in the kelp and on the reefs surprised him. Why, it is as common as birdsong up here above. Life is truly everywhere. A familiar conviction fills him: Plexity is a necessity!

Once he surfaces, Katrina continues. “I figure we should try to get Kula out of there. She’s like hemmed in, it sounds like. Maybe we can get Esquibel to do a wellness check or something. I don’t know. I feel so bad for them. It’s amazing how sweet Jidadaa is after the childhood she had.”

“Ask her if she knows how to swim. This is… life-altering.”

“Isn’t it? It is so amazing in there. Although I haven’t been back in since I speared that barracuda. You, eh, heard about that, yeah? The fur seal and everything?”

“Ha. If something bites me in here I will bite right back. Oh, my dear! You have no idea what it is like to have the pain vanish. I can think again! I can… I can allow myself to feel things! It is not all doom and gloom and suffering! For just a brief moment I am the Alonso of old!”

He laughs and throws a brilliant smile at her and she is struck by the force of his charisma. Ye gods. Is this the star she’s hooked her wagon to? Just with that one glance he is easily one of the most handsome men she has ever seen. Like some Italian movie star.

But he can’t maintain it and his face collapses back into careworn age. He rolls onto his back with a sigh and floats easily with all this fat on him. Alonso stares at the clouded sky, at peace.

Ξ

Triquet wakes, their eyes snapping open. In their cell they sit up, filled with clear purpose. They haven’t been this eager to get to work since they discovered the sub.

Vera Kim. If they were going to bring anyone to Lisica to study the island and its inhabitants, Triquet would call on their old friend Vera. Or Vera’s patron at Trinity College, Doctor Amina Nousrat. Pound for pound, they could bring the most insight and expertise of anyone in the world to this project. Vera has published on Polynesian language evolution, she’s lived in like Tierra del Fuego with the Selk’nam and presented their artifacts at archaeological conferences. And on top of that she’s a crackerjack ethno-botanist. If anyone could figure out how the Lisicans have evolved to integrate into their environment, it would be her.

Instead, the team brought only-partially-trained Triquet. Nearly none of their real strengths are being used here. Now, if Lisica was a 1950’s roller rink that had been abandoned in the 70’s in like Aurora, Illinois, Triquet would shine so bright. But here, without the internet or most research resources, it’s all guesswork and bad theories and needles in haystacks.

Until now. Jidadaa is the best needle they could ever hope for. And she even speaks English! Triquet tries to order their thoughts, then remembers that last night they took assiduous notes. They even gave themself a to-do list for this morning. There. All the thinking has already been done. Today it’s nothing but a ton of investigative footwork.

They start with a mug of tea, provided kindly by Amy. Then it’s out to their tent where most of their clothes still are. Kind of cold today. Maybe the thicker skirt with tights beneath. Clogs. Ooo yes! A kind of hausfrau look. An orange bandana, folded into a triangle and covering their head, completes it. Now if they just had a pilly old green rayon cardigan and some horn-rimmed cat-eyes they could vanish into anonymity in 1982 Stuttgart.

After completing their toilet it’s off to the sub. Down… down… Only in the last couple days have they been able to get back into the real swing of things. They’d begun a pass on the personal papers of Master Sergeant Chester Ernest Radick. Now that they’d integrated all the relevant quartermaster reports and tallies into a timeline, Triquet would be able to match up Radick’s notes and diary entries to specific events from 1954 to 1957 that marked a change on the island, such as ship arrivals and deliveries.

But they ain’t gonna work on such dry material this morning! No no no. They set aside that project and turn once more to the diaries of Colonel Ingles. All his texts have been properly analyzed and they’d thought any more effort put into them here would be a slow slog. These pages have already been pretty finely combed.

But then Jidadaa showed up and blew the doors off everyone’s expectations. Too bad she is only an oral resource. Triquet needs things! And it sounds like most of the interesting artifacts are still being held by the Katóoks, which is a damn shame because that meant the researchers will almost certainly never see them. Oh, but what data Triquet could extract from a few old blankets and bracelets…! Ah, well.

The one thing they want to locate again is a passing mention Ingles made soon after he arrived here. Tuzhit. A word they’ve now heard in a variety of contexts. Last night, sitting in a little cross-legged circle with Amy and Katrina and Jidadaa, they heard it again. It’s a name. Perhaps the central name of all Lisican culture. It was Tuzhit and the two sisters who first landed here, a long time ago when the island was truly empty. They brought their Lisica arctic fox with them. He is the great father figure of the island. And that ceremony they had last week was in honor of him. Ingles even mentioned him somewhere! Triquet is sure of it. But where?

Their pale hand hovers over the chronologically-ordered spines of blue hardcover diaries, stained yellow and black. 1956 was the year the Americans seemed to have the greatest contact with the islanders. Not that they wrote anywhere about their impressions of the people they found. No, these colonizers were far too racist to see the Lisicans as anything other than background noise. But they did mention a few native names when discussing how they solved certain problems.

Triquet opens Colonel Ingles’ diary from 1956. His spidery, formal script recorded brief passages as dry as dust. Triquet shakes their head in despair of ever truly knowing this man. Can you imagine? This is how he was even in his own personal papers. These were the private reflections he shared with himself. And all of them were some variation on, “Cold tonight. Hanging nets to kill birds so we don’t waste any more rifle ammo. Prayed for N. and C.”

A little convulsive shiver shoots through Triquet. Lord, these people were so repressed. Generational repression, going all the way back to the shriveled bosom of Queen Victoria and the goddamn Puritans. Where’s your hopes and dreams, Phil? Your secret longings? You probably told everyone you didn’t have any. Triquet recalls their own grandfather, a man who proudly said his whole life he never dreamed at night. Not one dream ever. And he also thought the pinnacle of American comedy was The Three Stooges. Ugh. Things back then were just so… basic.

Although it comforts Triquet to immerse themself in these long lost days, they can really only do it through the meta-ironic kaleidoscopic lens of their modern life. Good grief, if Triquet had been born, as Phil Ingles had, in 1922, there’s simply no way they would have made it to adulthood. Barring a one-way ticket to Berlin or Paris they would have thrown themself under the blade of a combine harvester or whatever when they were like sixteen.

No… Not in this diary. Perhaps 1957? Well, wait. There’s only a bit about the island starting in 1955. So begin at the beginning and work your way through, Triq. “I know I saw Tuzhit somewhere!”

Their voice rings hollowly in the silent sub. Ooo, creepy. Maybe they can summon Tuzhit’s spirit. That would solve some mysteries for sure. Leafing through the brittle pages, they call out the same words again, “I… saw… Tuzhit! Somewhere!” They listen….

No… No spirit dwelling down here. No ghosts. Ha. Maybe that is how Triq would have made their way a hundred years ago. They would be Madame Doucette, spiritualist and palm reader. Lots of black lace and a collection of veils. Conducting seances and eating mummy body parts. They would have been a huge hit.

No, no mention of Tuzhit in 1955… This might be a very long day. Wait. There it is. Right at the end. December 22, 1955. “By signs I attempted to ask the men if their Tuzhit had celebrated Christmas but the primitives had no idea of the custom.”

Triquet goes to their laptop and opens the file of notes they’d created for this diary. And there, the question ‘Tuhzit? A god?’ stares back at them, the h and z transposed, defeating all attempts to locate it with command F. Triquet makes the minor correction, their OCD eventually simmering down.

Now, to the actual significance of the statement… Why would Tuzhit celebrate Christmas? If he set sail from the Alaskan coast in like 1750 how would he have any exposure to European customs? Is this just Ingles being obtuse? Probably.

But something that has bothered Triquet and Katrina both is that there seems to be no linguistic connection between the word Tuzhit and any Eyat forms. Katrina said it might have like Bosnian roots. And then there’s all those other Slavic words that have made their way into their patois. But how?

It’s equally preposterous that Eyat-speakers of the eighteenth century spoke a Slavic tongue, so the researchers had assumed that it was probably a modern exposure to Soviet and Russian military people over the decades. Yet they’d also had exposure to all these Americans but they could find no evidence the Lisicans allowed any but a few proper names into their lexicon.

“Tuzhit! Who are you?” Triquet scans the piles and stacks of organized materials. Nowhere else can they recollect a mention of the name. But also, they weren’t really looking… They were more focused on the murder mystery of Maureen Dowerd. And now that they know the two are connected, Maureen’s death and her native lover, it makes things even more compelling to find the answers to these age-old questions.

A brief wind riffles the papers of the stack in front of Triquet and they drop fingers onto it to still them. What an uncanny gust. It ran over the hairs on the back of their neck like harp strings. That wind. It did not smell right. With a deep instinctive conviction, Triquet just knows that it brought something. Someone. If they merely turn, they will see a dark figure in the hatch leading down to the tunnels.

They try to turn but find themself frozen solid, whether from panic or distress or… whatever. Fabulous. A bit of sleep paralysis to begin the morning. And I’m not even asleep! They try to find a self-deprecating giggle but terror seems to be gripping their throat tight. And yet, their center remains calm. Detached. The fear that coils in their bowels is an object of great fascination, like some sharp glittering blue crystal tearing at their flesh as it rotates deep within. Amazing. All this from a little breeze.

Breath. I still have my own breath. Breath is everything. Triquet inhales deeply, purging their limbs of whatever shackles them. They visualize their feet moving and, with effort, they finally do.

Triquet turns.

The hatch is empty and dark, which makes it even more spooky. They should retreat through the other hatch behind them and go back up to the bunker now. Get some lunch and share their findings. Freak Flavia out with ghost stories. But for some reason… they don’t.

Following every grim impulse they’ve ever had, Triquet smiles wolfishly and stoops through the dark hatch leading down.

Ξ

Esquibel and Mandy work at the outdoor kitchen tables together. Here, their roles are reversed. The Doctor, who swore never to be a cook, couldn’t say no when Mandy asked her to help feed the crew today. Especially since Mandy is so down.

It is clear why. Her golden dreamgirl Katrina has totally turned away from Mandy. It’s all Jidadaa now. Jidadaa this and Jidadaa that. She is so special and unique and wonderful in all these ways that Mandy could never be. Well. She’d just have to console herself with dusty old Esquibel, that is, if her own pride would let her.

So they work in silence. Esquibel doesn’t know if Mandy even realizes how she feels, or if she cares. Resentment presses against the inside of Esquibel’s ribs and, instead of stooping down for a pot, she sighs and stops, hand on hip. “No, I do not want to be like my parents. I want to talk about our problems.”

Mandy, sauteeing freeze-dried vegetables, looks at Esquibel with a hurt expression. “What? What problems?”

Esquibel sighs again. She swoops down and snares the pot, graceful as a ballerina, and sets it down with a clatter on the burner. “I just want to know if it is the blonde hair that makes her so desirable. Because that is something that you should perhaps look at in your own self as a… I mean, we certainly all have our own preferences, but…” And that is all she can get out. Esquibel shakes her head, choked into silence with bitterness.

“Oh, no!” Mandy squeezes Esquibel’s arm with her free hand. “No! You think I’m upset because I’m, what? Jealous of… of who?”

“We’ve both seen the way Katrina looks at Jidadaa. You lost your chance with her, didn’t you?”

“Oh, Skeebee.” Mandy puts her spatula down and turns to her lover. She wraps her arms around Esquibel’s stiff body, nestling her head in the hollow of her jaw and clavicle. “No. No no no. I mean, yeah, Katrina’s hot and I’ve had all kinds of dirty thoughts about her, but never without you. Always with my Skeebee.”

The words are a balm to Esquibel but she still finds she can’t relax. “But then why are you so unhappy this morning?”

“Because I have to go right back up through the fucking tunnels to the fucking weather station tomorrow morning! Every other day! Oh, Skeeb. I don’t know what I got myself into this time. I don’t like it in there. It’s creepy. And I don’t mean the tunnels. I mean inside the island. I thought, I don’t know, they’re islanders! On Hawai’i there’s this huge native movement and some of them have this super strong belief that if they could just get back in charge or get all the haolies off the island that they’d have bliss. But it isn’t like that! There’d be all kinds of turf wars and like, well, whatever they’re doing to themselves here. Everyone’s so cagey and on guard. I thought we could all be friends.”

“You’re burning.”

“Ah!” Mandy turns back to the pan and pours in a dollop of Alonso’s wine. “Just saved it. Thanks. Could you hand me that salt? And I think there’s a bit of lemon juice still left.”

Esquibel finally releases her ire. Mandy is definitely upset about this, not Katrina at all. She had been, all the day before, filling Esquibel’s ears with long lists of complaint regarding the mud, the dark, the unfriendly villagers, the cliffs, on and on. But then they had all sat around the campfire all night and Esquibel had been alone too long with her jealousy. She hands Mandy the salt and kisses her hand. “I love you, Mands.”

“I love you, too, Skeebee. Don’t lets ever fight.”

They bump hips.

“There has to be a way…” Esquibel thinks aloud, “to make it easier for you to get to that weather station.”

“Yeah. It’s called the elevator shaft. But a certain mean-spirited doctor won’t let me use it.”

“It’s not that I won’t let you use it. It’s just… All your ideas so far are so preposterous. They don’t work at all. Fire? And water? I’m glad you aren’t like an engineer. Mandy the architect would get people killed.”

They both giggle, the joke taking the sting from Esquibel’s words.

“It’s a safety issue, mostly. Falling from a great height.”

“That’s what the water was going to prevent.”

“Flooding the shaft was a stupid idea and you know it.”

“Well. You don’t have to be mean about it. But, yeah. I mean, Amy was going crazy trying to figure out how to get Jay back.”

“And you are just crazy.”

“Well, how would you do it?”

“I don’t know. I am not an engineer either. How wide is it?”

“Like three or four meters. Pretty huge.”

“All the way up?”

“Yep. Straight up.”

“What if… maybe if you had a very wide platform in the center, maybe wide enough that you could lift it and there would be no gaps on the sides for anyone to fall through?”

“Sounds heavy.”

“Yes, but maybe not too heavy to…”

Mandy shakes her head, dumping steaming rice into her vegetables and mixing them. “And how do we lift it? We’d need some kind of like rotary engine, right?”

“Maybe Triquet has something in storage down in the sub.”

“Well unless they have about a kilometer of cable or chain in there then we won’t have enough line to hang it and make it go up and down.”

“Maybe they do. Let’s ask them at lunch.”

“It would certainly solve all our problems.”

“Triquet to the rescue.”

Ξ

“Tessteh…” The warm throaty voice, nearly a whisper, echoes in Maahjabeen’s ear. Then comfort words in Arabic. She sits in her mother’s lap, the air full of spices and laughing relatives. Someone plays old music.

Ama’s fingers play with the curls behind Maahjabeen’s ear as she laughs with cousins from out of town and accepts a lit cigarette. The words flow over the little girl like water. And then the baby nickname again, some private joke Ama made about an old family dog, and a peck on her cheek. “Tessteh, Yala. I need to get up.”

She slips from Ama’s lap and lands with a heavy jolt on the floor. The shock quivers through her heelbones, up her legs…

The room goes quiet. She feels all their eyes on her, but all she sees is color and light. Red and yellow patches in the smoky haze, with dark figures hunched over tables. Maahjabeen tries to focus on her family members but they all fade into shadow.

By the wooden reluctance of her brain to register their faces, she is convinced this is a dream. It is a dream and they are all gone. Yussuf and Auntie B. Mahmoud. Dahlia. A whole generation lost to lung cancer. And then Ama in the wreckage of her car…

With a clatter, the walls of her childhood home fall away like a set in a music video, leaving her little girl’s form alone with the shadows, alone and far from shore…

Yes, she is in the water now. But it is somehow no longer the seat of her power. Or this water doesn’t belong to her. Or perhaps it isn’t water at all… She lifts a hand but the liquid is all dark in the darkness, just another shade of black.

Is she far from shore? Yes. A bruised sky shows a dark line of horizon in the distance. And her limbs are already so fatigued. There is no way she can make it. Just treading water is proving to be too much. She shouldn’t be wearing so much clothing. Maybe she can take a layer off…

Maahjabeen ducks her head under the water to remove the gown hanging heavy around her neck. But it gets twisted and she can’t free her head. A ropy line of fabric crosses her face at a diagonal and she can’t unwind it.

Growing more desperate, she claws at her face. But the fabric will not budge. Her breath is about to burst in her. Light fills her vision. She is dying…

A silhouette appears before her. It is that little golem of a shaman who isn’t Wetchie-ghuy. With a nauseous rush, she finally recalls the last time she saw them, during her nightmare on the beach when Pradeep grew ill. They looked down on her then from the cliff above, drawing their powers from the sky, invoking a fog that leeches life away. That’s how they almost got her that time. And now, invading her through the doorway of grief that is her mother’s death, they have returned.

No longer in the water, but a dark cave. “La! La!” Maahjabeen tries to push the encroaching figure away. But their advance is inexorable. The waddling body looms over her, blocking all sight of anything else. A rank stench emanates from them. Her fingers get tangled in their ratty old figurines and twisted-vine fetishes that hang from braided necklaces. Their face is a goblin’s seamed caricature of humanity. Little skulls, threaded by sinew and separated by teeth, rattle on a bracelet…

Maahjabeen is smothered by the force of their advance. Ah! No! Nooo…! This is how it feels to drown…

A stinging smack knocks her head sideways. Her body is lifted. She lands heavily, cracking the back of her head on the frame of the cot. With supreme effort she pulls her eyelids open.

Pradeep hovers above. He has slapped her. His face is filled with desperate concern but she doesn’t recognize the light in his eye. It is someone else in there… and not the shaman tormenting her…

He comes back to himself and shouts in a language she doesn’t know, his voice cracking with grief, and slaps her once more.

A plug deep inside her is pulled. The shaman finally recedes. She can breathe again. Huge shuddering lungfuls of air fills her and Pradeep cries out. He wraps her in his arms and covers her scalp with kisses. “Oh, lovely… Don’t do that. Don’t ever do it again…”

Maahjabeen sobs, sucking in the sweet draughts. Ahhh. She needs air so much. What happened? How could she nearly kill herself lying here in this cot? No, it wasn’t her. It was that devilish shaman. And this time she won’t forget them like she did the last time the wicked creature messed with her.

“What is it?” Esquibel appears in the doorway of their cell with a flashlight in the dark. She is nearly naked, a white triangle of knickers the only thing dividing the dark skin of her legs from the darker night. Maahjabeen covers her own body with her hands, ashamed for Esquibel despite herself.

But the Doctor has no such modesty. With a growl of displeasure she sits at the edge of the cot and shines her light in Maahjabeen’s face. Esquibel doesn’t like the look of the young woman trembling in Pradeep’s embrace. She grabs a wrist and finds her pulse. It is hammering. Her patient shivers from a deep place.

Cursing under her breath, Esquibel forces Maahjabeen to roll over onto her belly. She pulls up the shirt covering Maahjabeen’s back and shines her light on it.

There it is, a series of raised welts at the base of her spine, all in the silhouette of a fox’s face.

Ξ

Flavia drags her face through the mud, squeezing through the narrowest choke point of the tunnel. She hasn’t been down here since first pursuing that crying child all those weeks ago, when Wetchie-ghuy stole her away. She’s had zero interest in ever coming back.

Yet here she is.

Mandy and Katrina scramble ahead, their lithe girlish forms slipping easily through. As with everything, Flavia has more of a struggle. She fits one shoulder through, then the other, and kicks her way forward until she gets to her hips, where she has to repeat the procedure. There. Now she is through that fucking pipe and she can finally stand up.

“That’s the way to the shaft. Look, Flavia. I’ll show you where we’re going, even though we can’t get there from down here…”

“No, thank you very much, but I do not need any side trips. Just take me to your cliff and bring me back and let’s keep everything very simple. Very linear. That would be best.”

Mandy has another point to make but one look at Flavia’s face silences her. Arguing with the Italian woman turned out to be very weird, and not really what she’d expected. But Mandy realizes Flavia is not a normal Italian woman. She’s like half computer.

In a sense, it was as if Mandy and Katrina only had to put in a single input, that comment at breakfast about feeling safe and free here as women. Then Flavia had reflected on that aloud, bitterly, describing her own experience here as a type of prison. And then before they could protest or amend a thing, she had moved on to the next step, like she was writing a program. “But what does that make me? A prisoner, yes, but one who is basing all her daily choices on fear, the fear that I will see him again, the fear that he will try to make a slave of me again. But I have not seen him in weeks. And yet that fear rules me every day. No. That is an intolerable risk profile strategy. So inefficient. Grazie, Mandy. You make me confront this. Yes, I will come with you today. And if I see Wetchie-ghuy, then,” she shrugs, “I will kick him in the balls.”

“You will…?” Mandy is amazed. “I mean, you’ll come? Oh, I’m so glad. Thanks, Flavia. You’re the sweetest.”

And now here the three of them are at the base of the last tunnel section before confronting once again the island’s interior. They pause, catching their breaths, scouting the way forward.

Katrina laughs a bit to herself. “I’ve got a little pet hypothesis going here. Call me an optimist, but I think there’s a chance they’ll talk to us again. Remember this climb, Flavia? Watch your step.”

The fallen tree that they scramble up like stairs finally leads to the flattened mouth of the cave. Flavia gasps for breath as she reaches the end, the adrenaline thrilling through her and keeping her alert. She expects hands to reach out from the darkness and grab her. Yet they do not and she notes this absence of horror as a significant benefit of a happy hike, in an understated idle voice in her head.

Ahead, Morska Vidra waits for them, silhouetted by silver light.

They put on their masks and gloves. Katrina continues. “My thought is that they didn’t talk to us last time because Jidadaa was here. Like she was passing through and they caught a whiff of her, or maybe she was already following us, or… I don’t know.”

Morska Vidra approaches Katrina and chucks her under the chin. “Bontiik.”

“Bontiik.” Katrina can hardly contain her delight. He is talking to them again, which means her hypothesis might perhaps be true. “Hey, where’s your fox, Morska Vidra? Uh, Gde tvoya lisica?”

“Lisica?” He turns and looks. “Lisica?” Then he shoots a glance back at the researchers with a playful smile.

“My, aren’t you in a good mood. I wish I could learn more about Bontiik. You know? Where it comes from. What the whole gesture means. There isn’t a single word like it in Eyat or the Slavic family, not that I know of. A search only gets me that a bontiik is a bonito fish in Frisian. Did you guys just like make it up?”

Morska Vidra isn’t listening. He has started his own sing song discourse with Mandy and Flavia, pointing at each of them with his thumbtip and then outside.

“Uh, a little help here, Katrina?” Languages have never been a strong suit for Mandy. Learning a new one is so frustrating and takes so long. She hates floundering around in confusion. So she just stands there and gives the little old man a polite smile. “Maybe ask him about Wetchie-ghuy.”

“Wetchie-ghuy?” Morska Vidra repeats, scowling. Then he mutters a whole paragraph of sing song and falls silent. He turns to the light, leading them out.

“Cannot believe you have no music.” Katrina follows, with Flavia and Mandy close behind. “May be the first known case in world history. Didn’t anybody like show up later and teach you? I mean, that’s eventually what happened with Jidadaa—”

Morska Vidra freezes at the mouth of the tunnel. His head slowly swivels back to regard Katrina, who falls silent under the weight of that gaze. He only stares at her, unmoving, for perhaps a dozen seconds. Then, point made, he proceeds.

Katrina releases the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She curses herself for a bloody fool and lets Mandy take the lead.

And just right there, after all these weeks, sits the old woman with white and blonde curls who taught them that good-bye means betrayal. Katrina stops, knowing Triquet would never forgive her if she didn’t make some attempt to get some answers. The woman might just be the last living connection to Maureen Dowerd.

The old woman’s hands are skeletal but arthritis doesn’t prevent her from dying reed fibers with a black ink. Her fingertips are stained with it. She looks up and regards Katrina with a level gaze.

“Hello. Uh, Bontiik, uh…” Katrina sidles over to her, as deferential as possible, and lightly taps the woman’s chin.

“Bontiik.” The woman lifts her fist and Katrina lowers her chin onto it. Then she steps back. “Nice… Nice work… Uh…” She quickly consults a list she’s prepared on her phone. “At daké? Work? Good. Uh… Aad’é.” Katrina looks up to see that the Mayor, that somber middle-aged woman with the cares of the village in the lines of her face, watches her from a hut’s door. “Aad’é.” Katrina offers her most charming smile.

The Mayor pulls back into the hut.

“Well, I’ll take that as a good sign. So, hello. I’m Katrina.”

The old woman looks up at her, as if considering whether engaging with this ghostly creature from across the ocean will break her heart again. Finally, she says, “Yesiniy.”

“Yesiniy? That’s your name? It’s a lovely name.” Katrina’s breath hovers in her breast. Her mind is blank. She knows she has to establish some sort of connection before diving right into this woman’s tragic past but she has no idea what comes next. She looks at Mandy and Flavia, who are regarding her from where she left them near the tunnel mouth. “Don’t wait up for me. Sorry. Been waiting forever for this chance.” Katrina turns back to Yesiniy with a sweet smile. “Mind if I sit?”

“Don’t wait? Well.” Mandy makes a face at Flavia. “Gee. Guess it’s just you and me now. Um. You might want like a walking stick. This climb is pretty gnarly. But you got strong legs, right?”

“Strong? What do you mean? Eh. We are going to climb that?”

“I know, right?” Mandy gestures at the steep slope before them with hostility. “It’s the only way up and over. Maybe we didn’t fully describe like the whole route…”

“No, you were very clear. But still.” Flavia shakes her head in distaste. “I thought it would be much more little than that.”

“I’ve got to put up like a rope ladder. Yeah. Last time I did this with like twenty kilos on my back. Thought I was gonna die. Okay. Just follow my footsteps and you’ll be fine. There’s kind of steps cut into the side if you start looking for them. There you go.”

Flavia hasn’t climbed anything this steep since her teenage trips to Cogne and Val D’Aosta. And she was in skiing shape back then. Now, she isn’t in any kind of shape at all. Within twenty steps her thighs are shaking and a cold sweat is running down her back. But she can’t let that colt Mandy get too far ahead. She grits her teeth and squeezes the perspiration out of her eyes. “Dai, Flavia!” She has committed to this course and she must see it through. There is no other path for her. Literally.

Trailwork like this is exactly like data science. The unformed, uncategorized world is out there. And these are the literal step-by-step processes humans have used to bring order and meaning to the world around them. We started with tiny footholds like this, then paths and trails. Then roads and rails and now superhighways and jet airliners and satellites. Same with programming. Just a few generations ago we had punchcards. Now the programs are writing themselves, with massive throughput.

With idle thoughts like these she pulls her way to the top. Mandy is there, panting, hands on knees in the midst of some unpleasant bushes that scratch and pluck at Flavia.

At the crest an erratic wind whips them, dry and warm from the southeast. “Ew. Look.” Mandy points to a long orange band on that horizon. “I bet that’s like dust from the Gobi Desert. Can you smell it?” Mandy faces the dirty smear headed their way. “And all the pollution from factories in China. You know, they find signatures of Chinese coal mining all over North America now. All of it raining down on the whole world. Totally distorting mid-Pacific weather patterns. You know, so we can have fast fashion.”

“Yes, I was in a conference in Beijing once when they had the sandstorms. The whole city turned orange and we could not breathe outside without masks.” Flavia shakes her head. “It was very bad. Ahh… Just when I think I am alone and disconnected from the whole world out here in the middle of nowhere…”

“Chinese pollution cheers you right up! Come on. Believe it or not this is the way down.”

Mandy leads Flavia to the edge of the cliff and a narrow chute that looks like the opening of a slide at a waterpark, except this cliff is six hundred meters high. “Ehh… Are you sure?”

“I know, right? I went after Katrina last time and all she did was follow the footsteps. It’s like the climb before, but, you know, this time down, with your heels. Just lean back.”

“I am sorry but I cannot do that.”

“Okay we can give it a few minutes. It’s not too cold—”

“No, Mandy. It is not a matter of acclimating to the heights. That is insanity. I will not be doing that. Ever.”

“Okay…”

“So you should not waste your time. Go and get your data. Change the batteries. I will go back to the other side back there out of the wind. And I will wait.”

“Esquibel said I shouldn’t really do this alone…”

“I am sorry but what do you want me to do?” The shrill panic in Flavia’s voice cuts through the wind. They are perched on the edge of the cliff like gnats on the edge of a wine glass. The merest puff of air could send them spinning out into oblivion. No. Basta. Enough.

With a pained expression, Mandy turns back to the descent. Without another word, she slowly disappears from view.

Flavia is furious with herself. She should have known this would have been too much for her. Everything is, here. Flavia does not belong on Lisica. And now she has put Mandy in danger.

Well. She might as well get out of the wind.

But someone is blocking her way back up there, hunched on the path like a fallen log.

Wetchie-ghuy.