Chapter 57 – A Straight Demon
January 27, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:
57 – A Straight Demon
“I have been thinking lately about time. How the present moment is a collision between the path stretching behind us and the future racing ahead. A perfect fusion.” Pradeep sits on the edge of the bunk, Maahjabeen at his side. “This is your realm more than mine, Triquet. Although in your case, maybe less about the future. But I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.”
“Yeah… It’s weird.” Triquet sits further down the ward room on a bunk with Miriam and Alonso. But now they stand, pacing up and down the narrow aisle, weaving between the outflung arms and legs. Since Maahjabeen and Pradeep returned from the sea cave none of them have moved. They’ve all been in this ward room for hours, processing the events of the past few days. Now, after the most urgent subjects have been properly covered, their thoughts are turning more philosophical. “All these destiny and prophecy themes. Think about how all the Lisicans consider time and chronology. They have a hard date for the beginning of their world and evidently an equally hard date for its end. That’s got to change how you approach each day.”
“And the sky is a ceiling that contains only you and the ocean,” Pradeep adds. “Yes. We are in a place with different geometry. At home we think of the generations growing and developing, often in contrast or rebellion to the generation before. And this is a limitless line of progress stretching to a vanishing point ahead. But here? What would be the point to build or develop anything if your world will end in 72 days with a cataclysmic Jidadaa of doom?”
“Or, in this case,” Katrina chimes in, “72 hours.”
Pradeep nods. “Quite so. Why be curious about the outside world if it is invisible and impossible to reach? The arrival of outsiders must really mess with this cosmology.”
“Except,” Amy says, “that they themselves were once outsiders and I’m not sure there’s been like a real break in immigration since they first arrived. There’s always someone new here. Maybe the Lisicans are just ethnocentric and don’t think the rest of us are worth their time. And why would you, if you lived in paradise?”
“Eh, as far as islands go, I prefer Sardegna.” Flavia doesn’t even look up from her laptop.
“Yeah, it’s like…” Jay searches for the words. “I just went up top to get baked and I was thinking about that. Here I am in a bunker built in 1961 smoking a plant that was illegal when the soldiers were here. Imagine how much I could have blown their minds! You said they were all unhappy here, Triquet. Well, here comes Doctor Jay from the future with a jay.”
“Layers of time,” Triquet nods. “We make our own fleeting little depositions here in the sub and then in a few days we’ll pass on just like the sailors did. And someday someone else will sit in this bunk and wonder why it smells faintly of marijuana smoke.” The room fills with laughter. “Oh, I need this. Some unstructured thoughts. How about it? Breakout session, everyone. Let’s hear everyone’s most out-of-the-box ideas about these last few weeks. Nothing’s too wild. Come on. Miriam? How about you? What do you got?”
“Well…” Miriam smiles at Esquibel’s aggrieved glance to Flavia. “Nothing too crazy, ladies, I promise. But yes, I have been waiting to tell my own tale. Just a few things I found up in that canyon with a lake.” She pulls her backpack from its storage beneath the bunk and unzips it. From a hardshell container she removes a handful of white chip fragments and shows them to everyone.
“Fossils,” Triquet says. “Far older than what I usually handle.”
“Oh, far.” Miriam takes out another, a rounded lump with a series of short curved lines along its side. “This is a Trigonia clam. Unmistakable little ridges there, that look like eyelashes, aye?”
“Aye.” Katrina peers at the fossil. “It’s cute. How’s it taste?”
“Nobody knows.” Miriam holds it up. “The entire Trigonia genus has been extinct since the Paleocene, 56 million years ago. This lad solves my chronology riddle. So here’s my Plexity datum, right here, thank you very much. The limestone layers that make up so much of this island’s geology are at least 56 million years old. Certainly older, but that’s the nearest in time it can be. And I was able to get some pretty solid geomagnetic readings out there too. The bedrock below is rare stuff. It shows fragmentary clues of the theorized plate that existed here before the Pacific plate subducted it around 48 million years ago. Which means there was an eight million year window where the ancient plate and the limestone crust atop it still had exposure to the surface. So this is our time range. Now near the end of that window was the transition to a new geological epoch. I imagine the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum must have been a real pivotal time here, when ocean temperatures spiked and there was a mass die-off, leaving all these fossils. But that subducted plate… I’ve never really studied North Pacific plate formations before. You know what it’s name is?”
“Uh… Jerry?” Jay guesses.
“It is the Kula Plate, an ancient remnant that hasn’t been seen on the surface in 48 million years.”
“Kula!” Jay exclaims. “No way. What are the odds? All buried and covered up for sure.”
“And it turns out Kula is a Tlingit word,” Miriam continues, “a word that actually means ‘all gone.’”
“So is that her name or is that just what the villagers decided to call her when she got buried in the tunnels?”
“Subducted.” Katrina says the word with distaste.
“Poor Kula. What a life. Imagine being named ‘all gone.’ Yeah, you’re going to name your daughter ‘doom.’ This shit sounds like a Johnny Cash song.” Jay snorts. “Hey, Miriam, if you’re all finished can I go next?”
Miriam nods. “Aye. I’m done.”
“Right on. Now. Prophecy poems.” Jay nods slowly. “These are wild. So I started like researching them. And I came across the songlines of the Australian aborigines. Anyone heard of these?”
“Oh, yes. I had a seminar on them a few years ago.” Triquet still can’t sit still. They climb onto an empty top bunk and start doing exercises. “Love love love their dreaming tracks. But Lisica hardly compares. This place has only been inhabited for three hundred years. The aboriginal culture stretches back over sixty thousand years in Australia. Their dreamworld is unimaginably deep.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Jay agrees. “But I think it’s got some of the same like features. Rhythm. The aborigines would walk in these long rhythms for days, and the songs are sung in that rhythm. The chants here are something like that. And the Lisicans have woven all their plants and rocks and mountains into their chants, kind of in the same way.”
“I do not know,” Alonso tells them, “about these songlines. What makes them so significant in Australia?”
“Well,” Triquet answers, “say you live in your village in Australia and for various cultural or religious reasons you’ve got to travel like a thousand kilometers on a special journey. Off you go. You don’t ask anyone directions. You already know the way. It’s in the songs you’ve been taught since you were born. And this way-song is like literally a list of directions as well as a kind of literary description of the first ancestors who walked this way and created the land as they walked it. Created all the plants and animals with each step and word. And now you’re just re-tracing their steps while you sing their song. But that’s just the barest description of it. Their whole culture is based around these songs that are like baked in to the actual landscape. A mountain is a story is a dream is a journey.”
“I don’t understand,” Alonso confesses.
Triquet nods in agreement. “Oh, for sure. Nobody who isn’t aboriginal really does. I mean, it’s like the Eyat, where it just forces you to stand on your head and look at the world in a fundamentally different way. Time is different to them. Life and death. Same with the Lisicans, I’m sure. Totally unique beliefs.”
“I would guess,” Flavia contributes, still not looking up from her laptop screen, “that our Tuzhit founding father fellow mustn’t have been a very pious Christian, or we’d have Orthodox iconography all over the place. And these people would be a lot more tortured.”
Maahjabeen waves the insult away. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? Flavia, you think more about religion than I do.”
“So…” Jay interposes, in an attempt to head off the argument, “I decided I’d make my own prophet poem, about this island, and being lidass and all that. I mean, I know plants and animals. I can rap about like cliffs and forests all day. And I can’t just let all these others decide my destiny. I can’t just be a cameo guest appearance on someone else’s track. Time to get my own voice out there.”
“MC Jay on the mic!” Katrina crows.
“So what is the song?” Miriam asks. “Have you finished it?”
“Uh, still a work in progress, but…” Jay shrugs. “Takes a rhyme to beat a rhyme. You said you wanted wacky. Here’s wacky. The wackiest shit on this whole wack island.”
“It certainly is,” Esquibel sourly agrees.
“Well, what about you then?” Jay asks with a frown. “You’re pretty good, Doc, at telling everyone where they’re wrong. But what about you? What’s the craziest most far-out weirdness you’ve seen here? Huh?”
Esquibel has to think about that. It is true that this island is a strange place, but she learned growing up on the outskirts of Nairobi that her future lay with the modern world, not with the ignorance and superstitions of her neighbors messing about in the bush. And she saw how many times their forecasts and warnings were wrong, and how easy it was for them to explain those misses away. But science and medicine do not make those same mistakes. They work or they do not, at least if properly applied. The clear problem here is that science is no longer being properly applied. They are falling into unreason and a kind of new age voodoo that she absolutely despises. “Weirdness… I only have concerns about what this place is doing to our objectivity. I think, if we had just been able to keep a solid internet connection, that most of this madness wouldn’t have affected us so strongly.”
“Oh now you would give my satellite phone back?” Flavia cries. “I cannot believe you.”
“Seriously?” Miriam laughs at Esquibel. “After all that has been done to us here, you’re still saying there’s really nothing out of the ordinary with Lisica? Are you blind?”
“I am saying there is no magic. No prophecy or omen or curse here that has any power in the least.” Mandy lies sleeping behind Esquibel on the bunk. The doctor turns and places a comforting hand over Mandy’s gunshot wound, indicating with her action what is really important here. “There are only imperfect humans with our imperfect senses.”
But Maahjabeen isn’t buying it. “So you have no faith.”
Esquibel sneers. “I never did. If I did I would be married and trapped in some man’s house giving him children and free labor.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “Oh, like me? I understand the challenges you faced and I am not saying it is easy. But you don’t have to run so far in the other direction that you would deny that a world exists outside science—” She speaks louder to override both Esquibel and Flavia’s objections. “And yes I understand that it cannot be properly measured or replicated or characterized by our brains. But you are crazy, willfully blind, if you insist that it doesn’t exist and we only live in your, ehhh, deterministic clockwork.”
“Says the average 16th century woman,” Flavia retorts, “on the subject of unsolvable mysteries such as gravity and medicine. Just because we don’t understand the phenomena yet, doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, we’ve solved the science of gravity now?” Miriam mock wonders. “That’s grand.”
“And medicine? Ha.” Maahjabeen grips Pradeep’s arm. “When we were poisoned Doctor Daine had no clue what was happening to us. No offense, you did the best you could to the limits of your abilities, but you weren’t the reason we were healed. It was those shamans and their spells. No, medicine is as much an art as a science and you know it.”
“So what you are saying, Flavia,” Alonso rumbles, “is that these things that some of us are interpreting as mystical events are actually real-world phenomena that can be characterized by physics and mathematics. We just don’t know how yet.”
“Exactly. My grandparents didn’t know about chaos theory. And now, without it, the whole modern world could not exist. Quantum mechanics is used in my laser pointer when I lecture. I have a whole bit about it with my phone, how we hold so much exotic computation so easily in our hands. There are even higher-order outputs, as systems get more and more complex and interact at more refined levels. These things might manifest to us as emotions and dreams and ideas like faith and destiny. But it is only because there are an innumerable amount of particles and interactions collapsing onto this moment in spacetime all at once that we have to abstract and simplify them just so we can see them. But our sight is imperfect, eh? And in the end we are all still drooling monkeys with monkey brains. So we hold on tight to these ideas rooted deep in our biological brains. Family. Sex. Fear of death. Belief in higher powers. I mean, until a few centuries ago, Maahjabeen, you would have told me lightning was your god being angry with me.”
“Sometimes it is.”
“Then you say things like that and I despair for our future…” Flavia holds up a hand, surrendering after that cheap shot. “No. I am done. The world is full of all kinds of people, that is for sure the truth. Some looking forward and some looking back. And some,” she leans to the side and rests her head on Jay’s broad shoulder, “who are happily here in the present.”
“Facts.” Jay nods judiciously, deciding it’s a compliment.
“Okay. I think what Flavia is describing,” Alonso ventures, “is ultimately a positive vision, an idea of progress where our greater understanding of crazy things like what is happening to us here can eventually fall under the domain of formal things like public policy and therapy, instead of shamans and curses and doom.”
“Yeh, that’s where I am,” Katrina agrees. “Except I like a bit more ghost in my machine. It ain’t mechanistic what Flavia and I do, Maahjabeen. That’s the thing. It’s both science and religion all at once. We’re all saying the same thing here, just with different terms. Remember, there wouldn’t even be any higher maths today without the great Arab thinkers like Al-Khwarizmi and Omar Khayyam. And they invented their mathematical concepts as a sacred language in glory to Allah, yeh?”
“Yes, I love maths,” Maahjabeen agrees. “I do. And I appreciate your understanding of the history—”
“All I’m saying is that the sacred language of maths just keeps getting closer and closer to god. We develop it like you develop your own sacred works, with more pronouncements coming out from your faith leaders on a regular basis, yeh? They’re trying to understand the world and the divine that much better. We’re on the same path, everyone. None of us here are trying to hide from the world, like nearly everyone I know back home. We’re the weird ones. That’s what I love about my big Cuban family here. We’re all looking for the truth, with our hearts and minds and everything at our disposal. We’re just hungry, you know?”
The sweetness pouring from Katrina mollifies them all. After a brief silence, Pradeep is the first to continue. “I really appreciate what you said, Katrina. But I want to circle back to something else Flavia mentioned before we change topics. Emergent phenomena. Yes, Amy is nodding her head. She knows what I mean. This is how emergence feels, what we are experiencing here. There is, like I said about time being a collision between the past and future, it’s like all of Plexity’s factors and metrics are colliding upon us all at once, and it is… breathtaking. Too much for my mind to track all at the same time. Never have I felt so…”
“Much like a horse wearing blinders,” Amy finishes for him. “Oh my god that’s exactly how it was in there with the vixen. After the first couple days I felt the rhythm. Remember how we were talking a few weeks ago about plants chirping like reef ecosystems? I could feel it. Not hear it. These old ears can’t hear much. But…”
“Yes,” Pradeep jumps back in, excited. “And that is what I was trying to show you last month, Alonso, with those mycorrhizal networks, the way they were speaking to each other, the grand networks that exist everywhere…”
“Yes…! Yes!” Alonso does remember. Pradeep’s insights had sparked visions that lasted his entire trip. “Networks everywhere! The flow of information! It can be unbearable at times!”
“And then I asked if you could hack the language of the trees so we could change the tune?” Katrina adds with a laugh. “What ever happened to that idea?”
“Yes…” Pradeep frowns, his enthusiastic charge halted by the audacity of the concept. “But I couldn’t imagine it would help then and I still can’t see how it would help now.”
“Oh my god.” The epiphany rises in Amy like a sleeper wave, flooding her with a holistic overview of the entire island. “When they say the foxes rule the island, this is what they mean. Keystone species. Gentle nudges of the ecosystems. Harmonics. Remember, Alonso? Way back at the beginning. We were talking about all the harmonics that Plexity can measure. The microfluidic channels of the Dyson readers being more analog than digital. Remember those arguments, Pradeep? Flavia?”
Alonso laughs, a deep sound filled with pleasure. “Ha ha ha. She has got you there, does she not, Flavia? Your harmonics were too mystical for this old data scientist, remember? We are all at the edge of our respective disciplines, and sometimes we step off. But this is what Katrina was just talking about, isn’t it? We are all striving toward the same goal with different languages?”
“Harmonics is a very well understood mathematical concept.” Flavia shrugs, defensive. “But if you want to make it like a Harry Potter spell or whatever, with like a long string of nonsense rhymes and wiggling fingers, then be my guest.”
“Wait.” Pradeep reaches across the aisle and grabs Katrina’s hand. She inhales sharply at the same instant, her eyes scanning the ceiling.
Then she sees it too. Katrina cries out, “Oh my god.”
Flavia holds up a hand, seeing what they see. “Oh, no no no.”
Pradeep tries to infect her with the beauty of his vision. “No, it’s everything, Flavia. It’s everything that we’ve just talked about. It’s not just… hacking the forest. It’s—”
“Wait.” Alonso scowls. “What is going on here with you three? You can actually do that?”
“Well,” Pradeep stops his runaway train of thought once more to address this. “I mean, it’s just communication. And the most direct means to speak with a forest, for example, would be with fire, yes? Trees react quite dramatically to the presence of—”
“No, you can’t!” Amy protests. “What are you thinking?”
“Or water,” Pradeep allows. “I’m not a monster. I’m just saying these are basic elements we can use. Sunlight. Cold. Parasites. But what I am really saying is that we all need to think much bigger here. Think like Jay.”
“Like Jay?” For Esquibel, this is too much. “You are joking.”
“What I am saying is that he’s writing a prophecy poem and the rest of us are providing him the language. But the audience for his poem isn’t the Lisican villagers. It is the flora and fauna of the island. The winds and the rain and the stars.”
“You are…” Esquibel bites her tongue, trying to find a gentle way to say it. She likes Pradeep and admires his intellect. “A romantic.”
But this is the final piece of the puzzle for Jay. His head rocks back. “Whoa…” He nods, his destiny locking in. “Ohh, this is what they meant by the whole lidass thing. Oh, man. Me myself and I. I’m the man of words and the man of action. Right place at the right time and all that. Dude. Fuck. Got to choose the right words, though. I can really get into some trouble out here, can’t I…?”
“What the hell are you all talking about?” Esquibel demands. “Talking to the trees? What? Singing to them? Changing their song? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I will begin with an analysis of some of these networks we’ve identified in Plexity,” Flavia tells Pradeep. “And tell you where the most likely entry points into the wider systems might be.”
He nods and points at Amy. “Ring the whole island like a bell. And Amy can help me identify what means we have to introduce permutations to the ecosystems. There are a few pheromones we can isolate and I think we can perhaps also trigger some reactions with compounds we currently have with us.”
“You are going to change the ecosystem of Lisica?” Alonso echoes, his heart dropping. “Isn’t that the one thing we said we would never do?”
“Well.” Pradeep takes a deep breath. It seems like every choice he’s ever had to make in his life is a devil’s bargain. “This is like climate change, Alonso. It is already happening, whether we do anything or not. This island will change in just a couple days, is already changing to hear Jidadaa tell it. The Russians are here, the Chinese are here. Wetchie-ghuy is enslaving people and trying to steal foxes. Everyone is already trying to change it. And this is the means we have to short circuit all their efforts.”
“But to what end?” Esquibel wonders. “Each mission must have a goal. This cannot just be an exercise for its own sake. Just to stop what others are trying to do? Is that why we’re here?”
“Yes, listen to this. Esquibel makes a very good point. What do we say the goal of such a project should be?” Alonso surveys the room. They are for the most part excited by this topic. Good. He loves that they are all once more working together.
“I don’t want to choose sides,” Flavia asserts, “between all the geopolitical monsters. China, America… I don’t care.”
Amy nods. “And I won’t do anything that contributes to the destruction of the habitats here. Not a single thing.”
“Perhaps,” Miriam offers, “our mission goal here is just that old medical guideline: do no harm. Eh, Esquibel?”
“Can’t it be more proactive than that?” Pradeep asks. “More like ‘we are here to de-escalate conflicts,’ or something like that. Like what the blue helmets do for the UN. ‘Send your wounded to us.’ I just want to be a force for actual harm reduction, not just avoidance.”
“I think,” Jay says in the silence, “that if this is like the songlines, what we’re supposed to do is dream up the most beautiful world we can, the world we really want to see, everybody all shiny and healthy and happy, and that’s what we sing into the trees. Show them the best possible world and have them yearn for it. Love not war, yo. It’s not just words or a concept. It’s a… vision. Now it’s up to us to speak it into existence.”
Ξ
Perhaps an hour later, the sub has fallen silent. Some work at their screens, others drowse. Katrina hums as she plays a game on her phone. Then she stops. “Hear that?”
“Hear what…?” Jay lifts his head, blinking away his runaway thoughts. “Oh.” The faintest knock comes from belowdecks. It repeats. “Shit. The spy found us?”
“Doubt he’d knock.” Miriam sits up. “He didn’t seem the polite type. More of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of chap.”
“Then who is it?” Jay rises, frowning at the hatch leading further into the sub. “And what do they want?”
He takes a step but Esquibel grabs his leg. “Wait. He is armed. We can’t take any risks.”
“And what’s he knocking on?” Katrina wonders. “You didn’t barricade the way in down there again, did you, Esquibel?”
“I couldn’t. You people stole all my materials.”
Jay makes a decision. “Well, I’m going to see who it is. We can’t just hide in here for three days.”
“Why not?” Flavia demands. “That is exactly what we should do. We shouldn’t even go back into the island’s interior now that we have an honest-to-god spy after us.”
Jay appeals to authority. “Come on, Esquibel. Let me go check it out. Somebody might need us.”
Esquibel sighs, looking up at Jay with a total lack of confidence. She turns and regards Mandy for a moment. She has her eyes open and she watches Esquibel in turn. “Don’t worry, Mands. I won’t let anyone harm you.”
“See who it is,” Mandy tells her weakly. “We can’t just hide.”
Esquibel frowns, then stands. “Okay. But stay behind me, Jay.” She grabs her black satchel and steps toward the hatch.
She leads him down the narrow hall, past the door leading to the warrant officer’s cabin. Then as they pass the locked door of the radio room the knock is repeated, so close it startles them both and they fall against the far wall.
“It’s from in there.” Esquibel removes her pistol and points it at her feet, the safety still on.
“No way. How did somebody even get in there?” Jay is spooked. “I thought it was coming from below. Had to be. You know…”
“Like someone from the village, yes.” Esquibel’s eyes are wide. She is having trouble controlling her breathing. “But this…”
The knock repeats. It is a tentative sound, with a halting forlorn rhythm. Jay inspects the door. The steel panel is set into the frame with no gaps. He tries the knob. It doesn’t turn.
But his efforts have been noticed on the far side. The knock comes again, more urgent, and Miriam ducks through the hatch behind them. “Who is it?”
“Uh, the radioman, if we’re making guesses…” But Jay doesn’t like his own joke. He steps back. “Somebody trapped in there. We should like get them out.”
The knock sounds again.
The three of them share glances. “You could like shoot the lock off,” Jay suggests.
Esquibel looks at him as if he’s deranged. “Does the word ricochet mean anything to you? Anything at all?”
Jay ducks his head into the Captain’s cabin, looking for tools. “Just like need a crowbar or…” He searches the desk drawers, only finding a paper clip hidden in a corner. “Hold up. This might work. Did some larceny as a kid. Let’s see if I still got it.”
Jay pulls out his phone and kneels before the radio room door. He shines his light into the old-fashioned lock and starts poking at it with the paper clip. “Naah. Shit is frozen. Need some lubricant more than anything. See if Triquet can—”
And then a giant bang shakes the door and the door knob falls off. The seal cracks for the first time in decades, a sharp sound of rust flakes breaking off.
Jay pushes on the door. It swings inward with a billow of dust. Inside the cramped room stands Jidadaa holding a metal strut. She is panting, smeared in mud, eyes wild.
“What?” Jay is disappointed. “Aw, it’s just you. How the fuck did you get stuck in there?”
Jidadaa steps aside to show him the hole in the wall behind her and the tunnel leading down into darkness. “Jay lidass. I have been to Ussiaxan. Let me out.”
Jay turns away from the door in disgust. “Fuck. It’s just Jidadaa. Stirring up shit. I’ll be in my bunk.” He pushes past Esquibel and Miriam to return to the ward room.
Jidadaa hurries after him, smearing her mud on both women. “Wait, Jay. The Chinese man. I can tell.” She ducks through the hatch, Esquibel and Miriam following, to address the entire crew. “I can tell you all. He is in a cage.”
“It’s Jidadaa!” Katrina cries, scrambling to her feet and reaching for her, then pulling her hands back. “Who’s in a cage?”
“The Daadaxáats shaman argue with Chinese man. Ussiaxan decide Chinese man is wrong. They put him in cage. He is stuck in it. You are free to go.”
“Put him in a cage…?” Alonso asks. “They imprisoned him? They put the spy in jail? In Ussiaxan jail?”
“Yes.” Jidadaa is relieved to hear the right words. “Chinese spy in jail. No more sneak at night.”
“Ha! Seriously?” Katrina cackles. “Ha! Tried to get them to come after us and they were like, nah, mate. We’re looking for foxes now. Chill out.”
“Yes!” Jidadaa claps her hands. She steps forward and leans over Mandy. “No more spy. No more blood.” With her thumbtip she points at the gunshot wound, leaning close. Then she pulls back abruptly and addresses the room. “You are safe. Now I must go.”
Ξ
“We are here,” Katrina informs the Mayor, her words slow and deliberate, “to find Jidadaa. We think she stole Mandy’s phone.”
The Mayor’s expression does not change. She stares at Katrina and Jay with a flat expression of disbelief, or perhaps distaste.
“Uhh… Where is everybody?” Katrina peers past the Mayor to the village beyond, at least what she can see from the cave mouth. She can only see Yesiniy and the non-binary youth, who plucks the feathers from a dead bird the size of a partridge. She holds her own phone up. “Looks like this but with a pink case. Chinese model. Has all her stuff on it. Uh…” Katrina edges past the Mayor and slips into the village. “That Jidadaa’s sure got sticky fingers.” She nods at Yesiniy, who gapes irate at her. “Ma’am. Don’t mind us. Just passing through.”
Yesiniy’s response is a hoarse warble that reminds Katrina how close to the end the old woman is. She must be like seventy or more, which has got to be old here, without any modern medicine. Perhaps Katrina can find a time to persuade Yesiniy to record a few long interviews before they go. She can translate them when she gets back home. Her perspective would just be so invaluable to preserve. Then Katrina looks away, guilty at the appraising look she measured the crone with, as if she was already dead. Instead, she should focus on what Yesiniy’s saying. Her condemning tone. Okay. She is obviously telling Katrina that things are going wrong. And that she and her friends won’t win. The fox always wins.
Katrina emphatically nods back and uses all the Lisican, Eyat, and Slavic constructions she knows to signal her agreement. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t win at all. Totally. That’s why we’re leaving in a couple days. Just need that phone first.”
Yesiniy’s response is even more heated and she tries to get to her feet, but that is difficult now without help. The youth hurries over and gives her their hands. But as they pull her up their own voice rises in contrast to whatever point the old woman is making. The two Lisicans argue face to face, in an embrace, shaking each other. Finally Yesiniy falls silent and looks away in surrender. All Katrina can tell the fight was about was some mention of Yesiniy’s sacred tree and, somehow, the allocation of water to each hut. Strange. Must be a list of random grievances getting worked out.
The youth turns their smooth brown face to the two trespassers and looks blandly at them. They have a stronger jaw than most of their kin, and a body trending toward stoutness in a few years. They also have the longest hair in the village, black ringlets intermixed with gold, braided loosely around their face to keep it out of their eyes. Their shift is a style that only the women wear. And their easy manner reminds Katrina of a brash middle-aged Filipina bar owner in Lidcombe she knows and loves. She decides she likes the youth, and nods, giving them her most brilliant smile. “Cheers.” She places a hand against her chest. “Katrina.”
After a long moment of consideration, the youth decides to share their own name. “Xeik’w.”
Xeik’w turns away and deposits Yesiniy back on her mat in front of her hut. Jay notices the streaks of drying bird blood that remain on Yesiniy’s upper arms from where Xeik’w grasped her. Wicked. “Man, now I get why you cats all decided Jidadaa wasn’t welcome in the village. Fucking thief. Mandy needs her phone back pronto. Mui importante.”
“They don’t speak Spanish, Jay. That’s been well-established.”
“They get what I mean.” But the three villagers have all returned to their tasks and are no longer paying attention. “But seriously. Where’d everyone else go? Pine camp?”
Following this assumption, they withdraw from the village and head down the path toward the creek. But as they go, they hear the mewling cry of a child echo around them, urgent and lost…
Katrina and Jay stop at the trailhead and look back up the slope of the hill behind the huts. Is that someone moving in the dense undergrowth? “Xaanach?” Jay calls out. “That you?” He turns toward the sound and moves toward it. “What’s wrong, kid?”
But the Mayor and Xeik’w hurry to intercept Jay. There is real fear in Xeik’w’s face. The Mayor has the blackest gaze Jay’s ever seen. “What is it? Is she okay? I just wanted to check on her.” Then Jay remembers that Xaanach doesn’t belong to the village. She’s an outcast like Jidadaa. Oh, is this like the pariah treatment they gave Amy? Man, these people sure do like kicking folks out.
“Uh… where is she?” Katrina asks, slowly returning to the village square, trying to puzzle out the Mayor’s response.
“I only saw the bushes moving up there.” Jay points at a spot, but as he does so he hears the cry come from a further spot, downslope at a diagonal, at a surprising distance. It is an uncanny sound. Even though it is filled with a child’s heartbreak, something about it makes Jay’s hackles rise. “Nah, dude. Stop. They’re right. Come back to me. Uhh. So creepy. That ain’t a child.”
“What do you mean it isn’t a…?” Katrina tries to reconcile his words with the cry for help that tugs at her heartstrings, and in the pause that it takes her to process, Wetchie-ghuy scuttles onto the trail between her and the village, cutting her off from the others.
“Aw, shit. Hey.” Jay strains in the surprisingly strong grip of both the Mayor and Xeik’w. “Hey, you leave her alone. Katrina. Stay back. Don’t get near him.”
Katrina puts her hands up, her breath suddenly fluttering in her breast like a trapped bird. He has divided her from the others like a sheep dog with his flock. But Wetchie-ghuy isn’t facing her. He confronts the others, hunched over, smelling ripe and evil. She steps further back, nearer the trailhead, to get out of his range.
Wetchie-ghuy mewls like a lost child one last time, then cackles and says something derogatory about Jay and Katrina, with a careless gesture behind him to include her.
“No, fuck you. You can just—” But Jay’s heated words are cut off by the Mayor’s even hotter response. She quivers in fury, spitting her words at the shaman, cursing his filthy bare feet. And Wetchie-ghuy just crouches there and takes it, face split into a malevolent grin. No, there’s no joy in that face. It’s a grimace of pain. He bares his teeth at the Mayor in challenge.
“Isn’t she his sister, yeh?” Katrina calls out.
“Oh, fuck. You’re right. Totally spaced that. Yeah, look at them. That’s how siblings and only siblings can—”
Wetchie-ghuy suddenly storms forward, holding up a talisman of bone and sinew. The Mayor meets his charge and tries to slap it out of his hand but he is too fast. They both are. In an eyeblink they have wrestled themselves into a deadlock, standing hip to hip holding each other by the wrists down by their ankles, trying to pull each other off balance.
Wetchie-ghuy springs free. The talisman has lost one of its sinew straps. He hisses in fury and backs away, chanting.
The Mayor marches after him, in the rhythm of her own chant. These must be their prophet poems, at war. “Oh, hell yeah. Full on rap battle.” Jay cheers. “Get him, sister. Chop him up.”
Xeik’w holds Jay back, calling out a chant in care of the Mayor. Yesiniy lends her own screeching cadence from her door. These rhymers don’t even take turns. It is pure cacophony.
But then Wetchie-ghuy steps past his sister and reaches for Jay, his rhyme ending in an unmistakable—lidass!
“Oh, you coming for me now? My turn?” Jay throws his arms wide, fronting, blood rushing to his brain. This dude wants a battle with him? Jay is up for it like he’s never been up for anything. But the noise is too much, all the fools yelling so nobody can’t hear nothing. Jay bellows, “You coming for me?” and the white-hot fury in his voice finally silences them.
His favorite MF Doom song springs unbidden to his lips. He quotes Megalon at the opening: “Who you think I am?”
The existentialist cry fills the air. Before Wetchie-ghuy or the Mayor or anyone else can respond, Jay drops into the rhymes.
“…Loved not for who you think I am,
but who you want me to be
A true thuggin emcee, true thugs, with no strings attached
I wanna give you my slugs and don’t wanna take em.”
Katrina screams in pleasure. She had no idea Jay could be so hot on the mic. She falls behind his bouncing figure, his hype girl, shouting out echoes and refrains of each line’s end. Opening an app on her phone as she bounces, she makes quick adjustments, and instrumental beats fill the square in time to Jay’s rhymes.
Wetchie-ghuy is dumbfounded. The Mayor falls back, amazed. The look on Xeik’w’s face is a mixture of amazement and horror. MF Doom is obviously unlike anything they have ever heard.
But the heat keeps rising in Jay. This motherfucker has been after them since they got here. No more. Jay drops the memorized lyrics and switches to a snarling freestyle, getting personal with his bars:
“You want Doom? I’m your doomsday killer.
Rap battle? Ain’t no MC sounds iller.
Cold clock? You been sneak up by my bed
Reach for me, homie, gonna wish you was dead.
The birds in the trees and the bees all know
That motherfucking Wetchie-ghuy is the one who’s got to go.
Lee-dass? Lid-ass? You want a piece of this?
When you coming for the chosen one you best not miss.”
The wall of hostility is too much for the shaman. He steps back with a scowl, his words just fragments, trying to find a way to force his way back in but Jay is too much.
“Got fools scared cause you call yourself the shaman,
but you’re the wicked one who should be feeling all the shaming,
so lame how you frame the facts to rig the game
accusing all others when you’re the one to blame.”
A strong hand pulls Jay back. It is the Mayor. She cautions him from following Wetchie-ghuy too deeply in his retreat. Now it finally dawns on him and his flow falters. Oh, shit. Jay isn’t defending the Mayor. Wetchie-ghuy didn’t come here to confront his sister, he came here for the lidass. And if Jay takes another couple steps out of her protection, the bastard might actually get him. Jay’s not anyone’s white knight coming to the rescue here. He’s the precious one they’re trying to keep alive. Crazy.
Now Wetchie-ghuy’s face collapses into an even more black scowl. All his attempts to confront or kidnap the lidass have been confounded. With a last curse and shake of his talisman he vanishes into the underbrush. But they can hear him for a long time as he departs, refusing to give up, shouting his prophecy poem in a shaking voice that sounds of nothing but futility.
With a wild cackle, Katrina opens a keyboard app and plays a final few chords, just to put a fine point of resolution onto the conflict. Then in the ensuing silence her laughter is the only sound. She squeezes Jay tight. “Aw, lad! Where’d you learn to spit like that? You’re a straight demon!”
Chapter 56 – Amy’s Foxes Ever Did
January 20, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:
56 – Amy’s Foxes Ever Did
Flash.
Cleaving the darkness of Alonso’s sleep, a white corona of light pops in an upper corner of his closed eyelids, shattering his slumber. He drags himself awake as voices rise. Someone starts screaming. Another. Familiar voices.
A gunshot.
Somehow Alonso is now racing barefoot across the slope. Where even is he? Pine needles beneath his feet. Others run beside him, shouting. He had been so deeply asleep. Not even dreaming. And now he’s charging out from under the edge of the trees, his legs stabbing him with nerve pain but still carrying him out into the dark meadow. Ah, yes. They had all returned to pine camp at the end of the night once Katrina told them their presence in the village made old Yesiniy irate.
A huddle of women stand in the field in fierce dispute. He can’t even make sense of their words. Oh. Esquibel kneels and tends to Mandy in Katrina’s arms, Flavia holding a light. What is going on?
“He shot her!” Katrina yells, outraged, to those who approach. “The fucking spy shot Mandy!”
“Superficial!” Esquibel assures them. “She will be fine.”
Alonso and Miriam pull up short as Pradeep and Maahjabeen and Jay emerge from the darkness behind them, their phones flaring with light.
“Where is he?” Jay scouts the perimeter. “Why’d he shoot her?”
“We surprised him.” Flavia holds her light on Mandy’s stained shoulder as all the others flare around her. “With the flash.”
“Of all the stupid bloody things you’ve done…” Esquibel seethes. But she needs to focus on stabilizing Mandy first. Wounded in precisely the way that Esquibel is trained as a specialist. She will have the very best care. This will not harm her. Not Mandy.
“The Chinese spy?” Alonso is slow to grasp all the elements of the scene. “He is here?”
Katrina nods at a line of darkness. “Dived into those bushes. Headed toward the creek. Upstream. Who knows. He might still be right there, lining us up. Esquibel, did we not have a deal that we were not going to do any more of this shit in private?”
“This.” Now Esquibel has to be as precise with her words as she is with the few surgical implements she carries. “This is exactly why I had to… I am sorry. Does someone have a blanket?”
Jay instantly tears off his jacket and places it under Mandy. Maahjabeen does too, rolling hers into a pillow and kneeling at Mandy’s head, soothing her with caresses at her temples.
Mandy clutches her shoulder, silent and grim. Fuck this. Fuck everything about this. It feels like a really angry giant punched her. Really hard. And she can’t have anyone fussing at it, even Skeebee. Especially Skeebee. Mandy grunts at a sudden sharp pain, a shot at the base of her neck. Her whole right side starts to tingle then goes numb. She eases a bit down onto the jackets and looks up at Esquibel with suspicion. “Now what are you going to do?”
“Just cleaning it up, Mandy G.” Esquibel’s voice is quiet and infinitely tender. “The bullet passed through. Hit nothing major. Good entry and exit points. Right now I’m just going to remove any fragments, okay? Just make it spotless for you…”
Mandy feels a distant tugging. The faces of nearly everyone from the camp loom over her. But it’s too much. She closes her eyes in distress and turns away, blocking it all out. What a horrible mess.
Pradeep appears with a pair of groundcloths and blankets and pillows. He builds a nest beside Mandy and prepares for her transfer. “Ready whenever you are, Doctor.”
“Thank you, but…” Esquibel focuses on her task, pulling the fibers of Mandy’s punctured jacket and shirt out of the entry wound, washing it with a bulb of sterilized water. “I don’t want to move her at the moment. Can you fetch my two big kits for me? Back at the tent. It is all I brought from my clean room in the cave. Thank you. And someone start boiling water.” She hears Pradeep rise and hurry away through the grass.
“Anything else we can do?” Miriam appears, laying her fingertips on Mandy’s other shoulder with the lightest touch.
“I have Flavia and Pradeep.” Esquibel is taking refuge in her professional training. “The rest of you, honestly, are in the way. Please go back to bed. We can discuss everything in the morning.”
“Ehh…” Alonso groans. “I don’t think any of us will be able to go to sleep for a long time. Not while poor little Mandy is out here in the field with a bullet in her neck.”
Mandy makes a frightened face at Esquibel, who smiles comfort back to her. “Shoulder,” she corrects Alonso. “Just muscle. Small caliber. Nothing major. And the bullet is gone. Now I am just doing some pre-op care so when I do stitch her up she won’t have much of a scar at all. Good thing you’re not left-handed, darling. We’ll need you in a sling for the next week or two.”
Despite her order, the others arrange the pillows and blankets Pradeep brought and lie down in the field beside her as she works. Esquibel frowns and shakes her head. “Your big Cuban family is very strange, Alonso.”
“Yes, aren’t we?” He has his head in Triquet’s lap. “I am sorry, Doctor Daine, if we are continuing to bother you. But my heart, it is still hammering.” Others murmur in assent. “There was a shooting. An actual person we know and love getting shot. The adrenaline is too much. We can’t just go back to bed.” Esquibel continues to work in silence, now pushing Mandy onto her side so she can tend to the ruptured skin of the exit wound. Alonso tries again. “So what happened? How did this…?”
Jay, who has been patrolling the bushes since Katrina pointed at them, now hushes them. “Shh. Shhh…” He listens, straining in the darkness. They all do. There. The faint crack of a footstep, then another, moving away. “There he is. So what should I do, team? Follow him? Let him go?”
“He has a gun, Jay.” Miriam may not be able to go back to sleep but she sure is weary. “He just used it. Please don’t give him—”
“Yes, come back, Jay.” Alonso’s mind is starting to clear. What a disaster. He wishes he knew what to do but nothing is clear. “We need to hear what happened first. Katrina?”
“Yeh. Well.” Katrina is at the edge of the groundcloth, sitting on her heels hugging her knees facing Esquibel and Mandy. “We just knew she wasn’t going to tell us so we had to keep an eye on her. Last night, nothing. But tonight, Flavia wakes me like an hour ago and whispers, ‘she’s on the move.’ So we hopped up and crept like cats through the bushes and sat shivering in the dark for like ever while Esquibel stood out in the middle of the field like a fucking scarecrow. Just standing there.”
“Oh, Esquibel, what were you thinking?” Alonso appeals to her, trying to include a modicum of respect along with his exasperation. “Please, uh, illuminate us on the subject.”
“Shortly. If you will only give me ten minutes…” Esquibel wishes Mandy hadn’t fallen back into the dirt when she’d been shot. Too much grit in the exit wound. Now she must be thorough. “I will be glad to answer all your questions when…”
“I believe it would have been fine if Mandy had not found us.” Flavia holds the light steady, on its highest setting. It is the least she can do. But she does not look at the blood. That is too much. “But, eh, she did not know the plan.”
They all give an expectant moment for Mandy to tell her side of the story but she remains silent while Esquibel picks at her.
Katrina takes up the tale again. “So, I mean, Mandy sort of got rightly irate about the situation when she realized what was going on. We had trouble keeping her quiet. And when the spy heard her I guess he thought Esquibel had double-crossed him so the gun came out and that’s when—”
Flavia finishes, “I had the brilliant idea to do like Jay and flash my camera at him. But that only made him want to shoot me. And I am so sorry. He hit Mandy instead. Poor sweet child.”
Jay is the only one who doesn’t settle. He gathers firewood, piling it at the edge of the groundcloths, and after a few manic minutes he builds a fire. With all this activity he doesn’t hear what Esquibel says to the others to fend them off. He doesn’t need to. There’s other smarter people here for that.
“No no no, Esquibel. That is demonstrably false. You know,” Flavia responds, growing irate, “I wouldn’t have had to make such a decision if you had only trusted us for once! And told us what you would be doing!”
Esquibel bears it in silence. She is now stitching both wounds closed, having determined that there is no more reason for delay. She has to focus on keeping her hands steady, something that is normally not a problem. But nothing about this is normal.
“I have a question…” Alonso holds up his hand like the professor he hasn’t been for five years. “What does any of this mean about the likelihood of being picked up at our appointed hour?”
The camp silences. They’ve all been thinking it. Miriam is the first to brave the topic. “Well, Zo, I mean, really, this mission is still too big for just one man. He can’t decide it all, can he? It’s not like he was going to pilot the ship himself. There’s what, like at least a few dozen personnel involved.”
“But he would give the orders.” Triquet frowns into the darkness. This reminds them of their worst nights in Guatemala, the jungle alive with rebel gunfire. At least this time they aren’t suffering the shits. They’ve had nothing to add until now, but this kind of big-picture analysis is where they can chime in. “It’s like a command structure thing, yes? I mean, Baitgie could just delay the pickup for another eight weeks and make up his own reasons to his boss, right? And this is some black budget nonsense so there might not be almost any oversight at all. They’ve forgotten about Lisica before. He could keep us out here for years.”
“Now… now talk like that is making me insane.” For the first time the light in Flavia’s hands shake. “If we get trapped here I will kill myself. I swear.”
“Flavia, please. Paranoia doesn’t help…” Esquibel has heard enough raw emotion. Now she needs them to calm down.
“Paranoia! You say that? She is lying right there! The woman you love! Shot by a Chinese spy!”
“Stop shouting that!” Esquibel hisses. “If he can hear us, he will know we know! I hadn’t let go of the facade he is Japanese!”
“Flavia. My dear. We will get you home,” Alonso promises. “I understand. Everything feels very dire right now. For all of us. But we will figure this out.” He waits for Esquibel to finish wrapping Mandy in gauze and covering her with an extra blanket before continuing. “Now. Doctor Daine. Please tell us the contents of your conversation with the spy.”
Esquibel sighs. She has run out of other things to do. “He held out his hand. I said I didn’t have it. He never spoke. He took a step toward me. I said that I had done my best but there was no storage anywhere that I could steal. I told him I was really upset with myself and to give me another couple days. He reached for me. But that’s when we heard Mandy behind us and he pulled me to the ground and took out his pistol. I shouted. I told them no. But then the flash went off and he fired. Then he ran. That is it.”
“All the way back to Ussiaxan.” Jay still patrols the far side of his fire, peering at the dark line of undergrowth where he disappeared.
“And how do you believe this will be handled by Baitgie? Do you think this will prevent him from having us picked up?”
“Well, no.” Flavia immediately tries to interrupt but Esquibel holds up a hand. “Wait. There are several possible scenarios and in each of them I can’t see how it would help. Like, let us say he really wants that data. His real bosses have decided it is valuable enough to mount this operation all the way out here. But all the moving pieces are too complicated and it fails. The plane crashed. The handoff with the crooked doctor doesn’t go as planned. Now will they just give up? No. They will still pick us up on time and just wait to find an easier way to steal the data, perhaps after we submit it to Baitgie. For some reason, they didn’t want to wait that long. Now they must. Or…”
“Or maybe they just send like a whole Chinese strike team or whatever to Lisica,” Triquet adds, “who take it from us by force.”
“Or why doesn’t this American colonel just keep us out here so the spies can keep trying?” Maahjabeen’s cynicism about the great powers has never been so validated. “We are just puppets to him. Numbers on a sheet of paper.”
“There is an actual global satellite agreement coming into force next week. He didn’t make that up.” Alonso tries to recall anything about his interactions with Baitgie that could be useful now. “The whole situation will change. He said once that when it happens he’ll be required to publish an inventory of all his secret hideouts. People will start looking. He will only have a small window here…”
“If I am not home by the 20th of May my department chair will call the Italian Polizia, I swear. Interpol. All of them.”
Alonso frowns. “I doubt that. Maybe after a week has passed.”
“This is just not how militaries operate!” Esquibel needs all this ill-informed nattering to end. “I was in endless meetings leading up to this mission. Support teams. Resources. Extra training. So many people know we are here and are working to bring us home in, what three more days? Multiple branches and even nationalities working together in international waters. It isn’t just a shady figure in an office all alone pushing buttons. He would have to, possibly, falsify the facts on the ground here to get the operation to change its timelines. And he would never do that. It would lead to a whole list of questions he couldn’t answer.”
“So what do you think it is, then?” Miriam asks. She sits behind Katrina, the girl leaning back against Miriam’s bent legs.
“I doubt that the point of this whole operation is about the data.” With a steadying breath, Esquibel centers herself and focuses on this last scenario. Saying it out loud will help fill in the gaps that have been torturing her for the last few nights. “It isn’t about Plexity. It’s about me. This is just how they are grooming me to join Baitgie’s little band of traitors. After I committed to this whole charade, they had me. See, the way it will go is I will go home. And some anonymous contact will send me footage and proof of me betraying this team. The spy, he wears a camera. He films me each time. It’s already happened. I am already compromised. They can ruin my life unless I join their efforts. Labor in secrecy my whole career. I’m probably not even supposed to know that Baitgie has also been turned. But this is how they will get me. And I am useless to them if I remain out here. So they will come get me.”
“And maybe it’s just a little bit of column A…” Triquet holds up one hand, then the other, “…and a bit of column B. The Plexity data will be useful to whatever their own mad scientists are cooking up, and you’d also be a valuable asset for them.”
Now Mandy rolls back, putting a hand to her shoulder, and looks at Esquibel. “Valuable.” The word holds no weight. Mandy’s eyes are unreadable. “What are you going to do now, Skeebee?”
Esquibel shrugs at Mandy, sad. “I knew that espionage was going to ruin my life, but I didn’t realize how quickly or… fully. I swear to you all I had no idea at the… depths of this. I am sorry, Mandy. I hoped we could somehow continue this wonderful love affair that we have here, but… I am so sorry you got shot. I am so so sorry. You deserve better. Better than me. You deserve safety.”
“I guess I appreciate the apology. Or something.” Mandy hates this. The intruding bullet, dividing them from each other. In her heart she can’t blame Esquibel. The intense woman has always been larger than life. She operates under a whole different set of rules. Things like this always happen to her. Of course the Americans and Chinese are fighting over her. But still. This is a hell of a way to get dumped.
In the silence, Pradeep quietly asks, “Flavia. That flash. Was it just a light or did you actually take a picture?”
“Oh. Ehhh…” Flavia frowns, instantly upset with herself for not thinking of this. “Yes. Here. But they are too far away.”
“Is there anything,” Pradeep continues, “that might identify the spy as belonging to one country or another?”
Flavia zooms in on the two figures. Esquibel is on the ground. The spy crouches over her, legs spread, pistol out. His black suit is featureless, nearly undetectable against the darkness behind him. “No. No… You can’t even see his face. No details…” She searches in vain and then finally shrugs, giving up. “It is a useless picture.”
“Well. In a sense.” Pradeep rises, joining Flavia beside Mandy. “We know that this image can’t identify him. But does he know it?”
“And more importantly,” Triquet adds, “do his bosses know it?”
“Exactly.” Pradeep takes Flavia’s phone and examines the image himself. “Esquibel. You fell awkwardly. Maybe twisted your ankle? It looks quite bad.”
“It is fine.”
“Yes, so our spy has retreated to his base, where he must contact his superiors and tell them… what?”
Maahjabeen answers. “That we all know about him now and one of us took a picture.”
“Which will put him in very bad trouble,” Pradeep continues. “What kind of reaction do you think his commanding officer might have to that news, Esquibel?”
“Oh, fury. I am quite certain.” Esquibel considers the issue. “The Chinese are all about saving face, even in the PLA. It’s kind of… known. Different military cultures. They will almost always double down and try to save the mission before his commander has to report the failure to his own superiors. Yes, Pradeep. You are right. Our spy may come back with a vengeance. Take everything we have at gunpoint. The hard drives, everything.”
“No!” This stirs Alonso and he heaves himself up to address them all. “He cannot have it. I would die to defend it.”
“You might just. He might get orders to secure Flavia’s phone and kill the witnesses, yeh?” Katrina asks, miserable.
Esquibel scowls. “He… might. I just wish I knew why they are doing what they are doing. Then we would be able to make a plan. But we will never know.” She shivers, thinking of how easily the Chinese spy put slips of paper beneath her shirt as she slept. Twice. Esquibel won’t sleep well these last few nights, maybe ever again. “I think it would be best to retreat to the sub, someplace that only has single doors that can be defended.”
“Exactly,” Flavia agrees. “Doors and walls and furniture.”
“You’re talking about right now, aren’t you?” Katrina groans.
Esquibel tries to calculate it. “Well, if his base is in Ussiaxan, then we know he can’t get there in under an hour, and that’s during the day. It took us at least that long. So it will be at minimum two hours before he can return here. Add time for him to relay how he failed and to receive new orders… It’s currently 3:19 am…” Her frowning face is illuminated by her phone’s screen as she consults the time. “I think we will be safe until dawn. But we must expect him after that.”
“What if he has friends?”Flavia asks. “More spies?”
“What if he brings the whole Ussiaxan village?” Jay adds.
“No,” Esquibel and Katrina say at the same time. Then Esquibel continues. “They are looking for the fox, remember? According to the Russian we met, nothing is more important to them.”
“Yes…” Alonso now recalls that Esquibel, Katrina, and Mandy had returned in the dark after a long absence with Jidadaa and Xaanach. “I never heard the details of this. We were too busy moving back here. And you were gone all day and into the night. In a field, you met a Russian… what, soldier?”
“No,” Katrina answers with a sigh. “He was a scientist like us. He mentioned some technical university when he was raving. I didn’t recognize it. I think it was in the east, like Vladivostok area.”
“He… was?” Alonso asks.
Esquibel nods once, curt. “He did not survive. Sepsis. But I was able to take away the pain at least.”
“Who killed him?” Pradeep wonders.
Esquibel shakes her head. “We couldn’t tell. The original injury was… well, an autopsy could shed some light but I couldn’t tell. His ribs had splintered and punctured a lung. But we don’t know if…”
“It could have been a boar,” Katrina lists, “or a bad fall in the woods or maybe the Thunderbirds just got sick of him. Maybe he asked the wrong questions. Their like representative there didn’t seem too upset when the bloke died. He just took back a necklace they’d given him and vanished.”
“What kind of scientist?” Flavia asks.
“His name was Viktor. He didn’t say. But I got the impression…” Katrina consults Esquibel with a glance, “something in the medical field. Not a doctor or a nurse but…”
Esquibel shakes her head no in agreement. “No, but maybe a technician. If he had been a real medical professional he would have done more to combat his infection. But he just… laid there. As far as we could tell he had only been in his sleeping bag smoking cigarettes for a week or more.”
“Waiting for his friends to find him.” Katrina shakes her head at the sad memory. “I bet those Russians who scared us off the beach were sent to find him. But they couldn’t find the way in.”
“Yes,” Maahjabeen agrees, “the Russians must enter where the Japanese did, up the west cliffs somehow. Maybe that message was for him, written in the sand.”
“He wasn’t waiting for his friends. He was waiting for the end.” Mandy’s voice is a spidery rasp. It makes them all fall silent. “He told us all about the foxes, Alonso. He said it’s all about the babies and where they go. He was like fixated.”
“Yes, Jidadaa has already told us this.” Alonso is sad to hear about the man’s loss. “What a waste. He gave his life for them.”
“But he told us…” Mandy sits up with effort, accepting help from both Katrina and Esquibel. “The Russians have figured out that to control Lisica you need to control the foxes. It’s their religion. It’s their whole culture. Lisica. The island isn’t just named after foxes.”
Mandy looks at both Katrina and Esquibel, who scowls. But it is the doctor who eventually continues. “He said, no he raved, that the foxes are actually in charge here. That they rule Lisica.”
“He wasn’t raving,” Katrina corrects her quietly.
“He was raving the entire time. Just because he had moments of lucidity,” Esquibel retorts, “doesn’t mean what he said was true. It is classic paranoid fever dream material. Animals don’t govern islands, especially ones with hundreds of people on them.”
“The foxes… are in charge.” Miriam knows the statement is preposterous but it still resonates within her. “Don’t know why, love, but that actually answers a whole host of—”
“Are you totally insane?” The amount of scorn dripping from Flavia’s words is insulting. “When did scientists start to believe such fairy tales?”
“I didn’t say I believed anything,” Miriam snaps at her. “I’m just talking in terms of models. We’ve had incomplete data about this subject for eight bloody weeks. But if you plug in these possible factors then all of a sudden our inscrutable villagers might start to make a lot more sense. Remember when you were arguing with the Mayor, Esquibel, about the placement of pine camp? It was Morska Vidra’s fox that chose our spot. Once he sniffed it out they were suddenly all fine with it. It was his fox who originally gave his blessing to us in the mouth of the cave, which let the villagers first talk to us. It was his fox…”
Flavia stands, waving her arms to interrupt Miriam. “Okay, fine. Fine. The people have put their pets in charge. So what? What does any of that have to do with us?”
In the silence, Jay suddenly perks his ears. “Yo yo yo. Someone coming. Oh, shit. We waited too long and now…” He searches helplessly for a weapon, for cover in the open meadow.
They all stand. Esquibel reaches for her satchel as the figure steps stiffly from the darkness into the light.
“Amy!” Alonso’s shout of joy is ragged with shock.
She stands at the edge of the firelight, blinking at them. Amy is gaunt, her eyes hollow. She is covered with dirt and bits of moss, as if she’s been buried beneath the forest floor these last five days.
They surround her, embracing her, murmuring and kissing her, picking debris from her hair.
“Careful. Careful.” Amy shields herself from those who want to squeeze her tight. She spins out of Pradeep’s embrace and clutches at her breastbone. Turning back, she reveals the fox kit the vixen had prematurely birthed then rejected. It has grown in the last couple days, nearly doubling in size, but it’s still sightless, an elongated worm with just the barest wisp of white hairs starting to sprout. It wriggles weakly in Amy’s cupped hands. “My little premie baby. This one was just the first. But it’s done now. Eleven in all. It’s finally over. They all survived. And mama is resting.”
Ξ
“The name of the man Maureen Dowerd fell in love with is not kept here. The soldiers showed little interest in learning any of the local languages or customs. They only called him Shanno. So it will only be among the Lisicans that his full story is known.” Triquet lectures all the others, crammed together on the bunks in the upper deck ward room of the sub. “But, well, if you’ll pardon the artistic license, I think this tale needs to be told from the heart. I’ll keep my assumptions and leaps of logic to a minimum here, but here’s what we now know…” Triquet takes a deep breath to place themself back in time, among the crisp collars and nicotine stains and upright posture of 1959. “This boat’s name is the USS Sunfish, an IXSS unclassified Tench-class sub built for intelligence gathering missions in the Pacific after the war. Its existence isn’t recorded anywhere. What we have finally uncovered is a crime of passion.”
“I mean… haven’t we known that already for a long while?” Flavia addresses the room, frowning.
Triquet nods. “That the colonel killed her, yes. Or had her killed. And he hunted Shanno and the child but never seemed to find them. It was Shanno’s own people who eventually killed him, right, Katrina? That’s what you said the head of the Thunderbirds told you. That it was the Ussiaxan. The people without a fox. And that they ‘caused Maureen to be killed.’ Which is pretty much the last puzzle that needed to be solved. That’s the part that took forever. But the collected records of Staff Sergeant Boren really bring the whole thing to life. It was the night of December 12th, 1959. He wrote it in a letter to his brother that he never sent. He says the Colonel ‘cracked like a bad egg. And the diesel shovel ran all day. The men were not happy.’”
Flavia shakes her head, displeased. “What does that mean? Ingles dug his fiancee’s grave? With a diesel shovel? Isn’t that just basically like a bulldozer? Why would it take him all day?”
“He wasn’t burying a body…” Pradeep realizes.
“He was burying a sub. Boren’s schedule for the day shows all standard activities were canceled or moved, even meals. And the next day things had shifted again. To finish the job. Or recovery. Seems like it was a real mad dash. A reckless decision.”
“To plug the hole.” Maahjabeen looks at Esquibel. “Common military instinct, apparently. That was the tunnel to the interior, right there at the top of the beach.”
“Exactly, exactly…” Triquet croons. They fall into character, the tormented jilted lover. “Ingles loses his mind. ‘If I can’t have her, no one can. These damn natives cause more trouble than they’re worth!’ And in his wild fury he orders his crew to put the cork in the bottle, leaving Maureen in the interior with her new man.”
“Too bad they didn’t know about all the other tunnels,” Jay chuckles. “That must have messed with his head when she popped right back out after all his work.”
“No, there were no other tunnels in those days. I don’t think…” Triquet shrugs. “This is where we would have to guess. But I figure all those other tunnels we get lost in underground here were dug in reaction to the sub taking away the villagers’ path to the beach. They tried a million different directions and only a few actually made it all the way through the cliffs.”
Maahjabeen waves at the ground beneath them. “But what about the channel underneath and all the concrete leading to the sea cave? The… the… what is the word?”
“The culvert,” Miriam offers.
“Yes, was that already there?”
Triquet shrugs. “I think it wasn’t. I think the culvert and sea cave were probably developed later. But I might be wrong. There are layers here. I think the sub got dug in and then they just kind of built all these things around it. Then they cut the conning tower off and fully buried it when it was time to change leadership, so they wouldn’t have to answer any tough questions, I expect. They built the bunker over it in 1961, the year Ingles left.”
Alonso chuckles. “We wracked our brains so hard trying to figure out why the Americans would bury a sub down here. We thought of so many like tactical and geopolitical reasons. But in the end it was all because of a broken heart.”
“And racism,” Triquet agrees. “And isolationism. All the normal human impulses. But I keep coming back to the phrase ‘they caused Maureen to be killed,’ instead of the Ussiaxan killing her. And what I’m pretty sure that means is that they were the ones who revealed Maureen’s infidelity to the colonel. It was a blow to the back of the head that ended her life. Behind the ear. She didn’t see it coming. She may not have known it was coming.”
“You’re saying,” Esquibel asks, “that he caught them while they were having sex?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe leaning over a crib. The baby’s been born. The baby who grew up to be Yesiniy, the old woman who now lives next to the Mayor. She’s obviously not his, not with that hair. It’s when Ingles discovers Maureen’s secret that he kills her. Hides her body in that grave in the woods. Leaves without saying a single goddamn word about it to anybody. Total monster if you ask me.”
“He never understood…” It’s the first time Amy’s spoken since they’ve set up in the sub. Her focus has been almost entirely on her infant fox, coaxing it to drink some of the powdered milk she has reconstituted. Now she shakes her head in sorrow at the tragic myopia the soldiers and sailors had. They never explored the interior of the island. They never saw its astounding life, never understood the secrets hidden in its green heart. “Poor man. Such a sad way to exist. Just so rigid. Sometimes I wonder how my ancestors were able to make it through a day.”
“I mean…” Flavia shrugs, “people still kill people for cheating today. It is not very different.”
“It’s not that. It’s…” Amy shakes her head, no words for what she now knows. “Postwar culture was just so monolithic. You know what I mean. We can hardly even watch their movies any more. Listen to their music. It’s not that it was just simple, it was… inert. Like everything they did was about enforcing some unnatural social norm or another. They were so busy doing all that they couldn’t hear the trees singing.”
“And you do?” Esquibel has given Amy a wellness check, which she satisfactorily passed, but that only indicates the health of her body. What her mind must have endured for the past five days has obviously left some indelible mark on her. It reminds Esquibel of the hallucinatory psychosis surrounding some new mothers’ births. What is it about the process of delivering infants that tears the fabric of reality for so many people?
Amy shrugs. “I got deep in the forest’s rhythms, I can tell you that much. And that vixen, she was just such a… vixen. Now I know why the word has the connotations it does.”
“What connotations?” Miriam asks, mock offended. “You’re the one who first started calling me Vixen back in the 90s.”
“Yeah, when you were being naughty,” Amy laughs. “I never thought an animal could be so controlling. It’s all somehow in their ears. The way they tilt and move them is so expressive. Like a lady with her fan. The idea that they run the island makes all the sense in the world to me now. She’s just got so many demands.”
“So, Triquet,” Alonso asks, “are you finished? Are these your final findings on this subject?”
“Final? Well, no. But it’s where I’m at now and I think most of the major questions have been answered. I’ll hand over my research to the authorities when we get back and see if they want to make anything of it.”
Esquibel nods. “They should. If only that an unregistered woman somehow got on their top secret island for a couple years and they never knew.” She frowns, watching Triquet duck through the hatch leading deeper into the sub. They return by the time she ends her sentence, arms full of bottles. “Now what? What is that?”
Triquet smiles wolfishly. “The last thing I have to share this morning. Who wants a shot of Bushmills in their oatmeal?”
Ξ
“Take my hand.” Pradeep holds his out at the threshold of the sea cave’s door. Maahjabeen giggles and grabs it. He pulls on her and she gives out a little yelp, then collapses into his arms. He swings her up and carries her through like a bride. “Welcome home, my love.” He kisses her, or at least tries to. But they are both laughing too hard and their teeth clack on contact.
He stumbles when he enters the cave and his grunt is met by a series of heavy splashes in the water. They both gasp and whip their heads around, to spy the last of the sea lions dropping from their perches on the shelves of the cave.
Only a few remain, watching the intruders with shining black orbs. Other heads surface, their curiosity getting the better of them. Pradeep and Maahjabeen remain still and quiet, frozen in an awkward fall, hands braced against the stone floor, bodies twisted. Finally one of the closer sea lion mothers barks at them, an urgent plaintive bellow that echoes from the walls and water. The call is taken up by a few others and soon more heads have emerged to join the chorus. It is a deafening sound, hurting Maahjabeen’s ears. She finally shifts, rolling onto her side so that she can plug her ears with her fingers. An urgent glance to the back wall shows that Firewater and Aziz are still safely stacked there.
The sea lions subside, mollified, and hump their way back onto the shelves. Pradeep frowns at their behavior. “They are awful quick to accept us. I was afraid that we’d scared them off entirely. But they’re already back out of the water…”
“Because something in the water scares them even more.”
“Your orcas.”
Maahjabeen smiles fiercely in agreement.
“Fantastic. Remember the carcass we found here the first time?”
“You are so romantic.” She cups his face, only half-joking. There are so many sea lions in here she can smell them. Probably sixty or more, and all crowding her favorite spots in the cave. She rolls to her feet and one of the distant sea lions takes up the alarm again, but this time none of them join her. She subsides after one of the larger males croaks, a decision having been made. “Yes, papa. I would risk the two skinny little humans instead of the pod of orcas as well. Wise choice.”
Pradeep is a bit spooked by the lustful growl in Maahjabeen’s voice. He notes the gleam in her heavy-lidded eyes. Her stance. “What has gotten into you? You look like a predator too.”
“Oh?” Maahjabeen would reflexively deny it but she sees no reason to. The pulsing heat racing through her limbs proves it. Yes, how fine it must be to live as a black and white torpedo with fangs. To have these endless oceans as a playground, through which you can rocket faster than anyone. To snare a wriggling bit of meat, plucking it right from the water and tearing it open… She grabs for the next best thing, hauling Pradeep close and kissing him wetly, pressing herself against him.
“This is weird…” is all Pradeep manages to say before she is atop him, smothering all further protests.
After she collapses, shuddering above him, they hold each other tight. Maahjabeen opens her eyes, the fireworks having passed and the odd refractory post-coital thoughts drifting through her. She is shocked to find a juvenile male sea lion on the stone floor of their own side of the cave, not more than two meters away. He bobs his tapered head, nose alive to their rich scents. She laughs at him.
Pradeep lifts his head. “What are you…? Ah. Yes. Weird. How long has he been there?”
“Long enough to learn things, eh, Mahboub?” She settles once more, head on Pradeep’s shoulder. The young sea lion still keeps his distance, and his head keeps bobbing. “So cute.” She loves the glistening intelligence in this creature’s eyes. “What a shame they taste so good. It is like hunting the deer, eh?”
“Okay now you are identifying with the orcas to a disturbing degree. I have worked with sea lions for years but I don’t think I have ever once wondered how they taste.”
“Hot. And juicy.” She kisses him and rolls away, sitting up. “I want to see if my clan are out there.” She stands wearing only a sports bra and shoes. Relishing the sea air on her naked skin she picks her way along the left wall of the cavern toward the next open grottoes where they built and then demolished their concrete buildings. Maahjabeen feels luxurious, a kind of fullness she has never before experienced. For perhaps the first time in her life she wants to walk around naked, in the most private place in the whole world, with nobody’s eyes on her except her own true love. And dozens of these furry, fatty snacks.
“Careful.” Pradeep scrambles to his feet, his shorts around his ankles. He pulls them up and holds out a useless cautionary hand. Maahjabeen steps toward a cluster of the resting pinnipeds. Can they tell how much she is on the side of their hunters? “Don’t get between them and the water.”
“But I just want to see…” Maahjabeen cranes her neck past their bodies. She edges forward and one of the nursing mothers lifts her head. “Oh, look, Pradeep! The baby is so precious!”
“Do you think you could get some of that milk for Amy’s fox?”
“Ehh…” Maahjabeen and the sea lion stare at each other. “As Salaam Alaikum.” She bows a bit and tries a close-lipped smile.
The sea lions all start barking again. But it isn’t because of her. She can see a tall dorsal fin racing in, a bow wave building before it. Then the orca rises from the water, mouth gaping, and snaps at the edge of the platform across from Maahjabeen. She cries out in pleasure, making eye contact with the magnificent fellow before he pulls back into the water, having missed his catch.
The sea lions at her feet surge against the back wall, caterwauling their terror, as the orca slowly swims the circuit of the cave. On the platforms in the center of the water, one sea lion is pushed to the edge. She falls in and the killer whale surges toward the spot.
Neither come up. A long minute passes. The orca is gone.
Maahjabeen finally drops her eyes from the last spot she saw the sinking fin. On the stone floor before her is a white splash, a mess of milk where the infant was nursing. She takes off her shoe and sock and soaks the fabric in the puddle. “Look, Pradeep! I got some milk after all!”
“Ha. What a fox this will be.” He shakes his head in wonder at the foreign DNA they are feeding Amy’s kit. “First boar milk, then powdered cow milk, now sea lion milk. It sounds like a superhero origin story. The fox who became a legend.”
Maahjabeen draws a sharp breath, a deep insight lancing her. “The orcas. The foxes. The foxes rule the land here and all the people on it. But my orcas, Mahboub. They are the rulers in the same way of the sea. Remember how much trouble everyone had about how the orcas led us to the old shaman? They are shaping what happens here as much as Amy’s foxes ever did.”
Chapter 55 – Something Important First
January 13, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:
55 – Something Important First
From atop the cliff, the sea shines chrome, in a band that emerges from the eastern horizon where the dawning sun rises. Maahjabeen watches the sea fill with light, thinking of God and destiny and the immutable design of His creation.
“Oh my god,” Flavia’s gasping voice behind her breaks her reverie, “they said you spent the night up here and I couldn’t believe it. This is about as far as my friend Maahjabeen can get from her beloved ocean.”
“Yes, but I can see it from here. I can see so much.”
Flavia stands on the far side of the mouth of the shaft that drops four hundred meters to the tunnels within the cliff. She carefully skirts it and joins Maahjabeen on the lip of the cliff on the far side, among the wreckage of the observation platform where Mandy lost her weather station during the bombogenesis. There is a little hollow beside the splintered timbers that have been neatly stacked as a windbreak, in which Maahjabeen’s sleeping pad and bag fit quite nicely last night. Yet she hadn’t barely slept. She can’t shed a sense of approaching doom. Only the staggering breadth of the ocean can forestall it and calm her mind.
“Where is your boyfriend?” Flavia stands beside Maahjabeen behind the stack of broken planks, looking where she looks but not seeing what she sees. The southern horizon is the very concept of infinity made manifest in the world. But Flavia’s taste for the abstract finds this real-world dividing line, where one shade of gray is finely divided from another shade of gray, far less comforting than the perfect representations of such mechanics that wheel and elegantly unfold in her mind. Ultimately, what she is looking at here is just a messy transition between two states of matter, from the liquid of the ocean to the gas of the atmosphere. But they are still mostly made of the same constituent parts. It is all just a matter of the density of moisture in each cubic meter and how the surface tension of the water is the bound between the two states.
After a long moment, during which Maahjabeen is filled once more with the peaceful silence of the open sea, she recollects Flavia’s question and replies, “Ehh, he has some notion to find a pond or inland lake before we leave. Collect more samples for Plexity. Good for his studies but not for mine. And I knew Alonso would argue with me if I tried to go to the sea cave, so this seemed the next best option.”
Standing beside her, Flavia takes Maahjabeen’s hand and rests her head on her shoulder. “Too cold. And I have already filled my lifetime quota of this ocean wind. When you are ready, we can go back down and I have espresso for you, mia cara. Do not be long.”
“What will you do…?” Maahjabeen asks, “when you get back?”
Flavia groans in pleasure. This has been her favorite thing to think about for weeks now. “Well, first I will feed my dog. And then I will take a bath for about six days. Then I will… let me see…” Flavia squeezes Maahjabeen’s hand and searches within herself for her deepest craving. But it has been too long. All of her favorites, that she tormented herself with missing during the first five or six weeks on this godforsaken island, now seem far too elaborate and decadent and… artificial in some depressing way. Even like the simple Carbonara they make on the corner for her. All those rich ingredients stacked together seems an oily mess, a nauseating indulgence. Tiramisu from L’osteria down the road is the same. She’s had it for her birthday every year for a decade but now the thought of all that sweet cream and sugar turns her stomach. “Oh, no. What is happening to me?” Flavia clutches her belly, finding it shrunken and uncharacteristically complaisant.
Maahjabeen turns to her with concern. She is nowhere near ready to leave this view but the tone in Flavia’s voice concerns her. “What is it?”
“My body… My taste… You do it. Think of your favorite meal or dessert. The thing that makes you the happiest. What is that dish?”
Maahjabeen shrugs, far from the concerns of the flesh. “Maybe a good Lebanese baklava, with walnuts not pistachios, and just a tiny hint of rosewater. That is my favorite.”
“Yes but now think of it. Would you eat it now, if I magically had it in my pocket and I take it out and here.” Flavia mimes handing Maahjabeen her baklava. “Buon appetito. Would you eat it?”
“Uh… thank you.” Maahjabeen giggles and mimes taking a bite.
“No, no.” Flavia waves away the idea of it. “I mean, could you really eat all that honey and sugar and dough right now, after we have been surviving on plain rice and like bugs and ashes for all these months? I can’t imagine eating my favorite foods any more and it is making me very sad. What if I never adjust back? What if my taste for the finer things in life is forever gone.”
“These are the finer things in life.” Maahjabeen sweeps her hand across the glittering surface of the sea.
“You know what I mean. I think of pizza and my stomach turns. That is so much cheese and oil and garlic! Even a nice salad. It is too much indulgence. These carefully picked leaves of cultivated lettuces and vegetables. And the aged balsamic. I do not think I can do it. Ai. The modern world has left me behind.”
Maahjabeen laughs at Flavia. “Yes, it is true. I would not eat the baklava. Even a little nibble would be too sweet. But this is not the first time I have left civilization and returned, you know. The hard part, I find, is how big and loud and scary the automobiles are. For the next couple weeks, you will be astounded that people just drive these giant blocks of metal around at terrifying speeds. You will see one from the corner of your eye and you will jump. And that will last maybe a couple weeks.”
“Oh, I can’t wait. On that last day maybe we sit up here and wait for the ship to appear on the horizon. Just you and me. We can make plans to visit each other and everything. I can’t wait for the cars to scare me.”
Maahjabeen nods, drawing Flavia close. “Pradeep too.”
“Oh, certainly. Your handsome boyfriend is always welcome. So what will you do when you get back? Will you still see each other?”
Maahjabeen laughs at the question, helpless. “We are obsessed with each other. I think we must. I don’t know how either of us will get any work done when we get home.”
“Home is where? I thought you didn’t have one?”
“Well, he’s been working with Amy and Jay in California. I have never been to America but if he is there then maybe it is time to try. He says their university is next to the ocean and that should be good enough for me.”
Flavia shakes her head, unconvinced. “I am not sure America is right for you, Maahjabeen. You are too pure. That is a place for… for hustlers. For salesmen and lawyers. I think you have avoided it all these years for a reason. Maybe you can find a better place for both of you. Does Pradeep ever want to go back to India?”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “He never says so. He thinks of visiting his family of course, but he has gotten more excited talking about going to Tanzania. He says he has a friend in Dar es Salaam we could stay with. He could work at the university and the Indian Ocean is right there for me.”
“Well there you go. Zanzibar for you.”
“Yes, but he has another eighteen months in this doctorate program first. So I am thinking just a bit of California. He says there are wide open places there. It is not all cities and highways. If I can find those open places, especially on the water, I will be fine.”
“Oh, yes. The states are huge. California itself is like the size of Algeria. It is good advice. Just stay out of the cities.”
“And what lessons will you bring back home?” Maahjabeen studies Flavia’s open face. “What have you learned here?”
“To never come back. Now let’s go. I will make you a breakfast of instant oats and dried berries that will knock your socks off.”
But still Maahjabeen doesn’t move. She looks at the horizon instead, but her smile fades into worry. “Wait. We have a problem. We can’t… Oh, no.”
“We can’t what? What is it?”
“Think about it. The ship will arrive on the morning of 19th May. We will hide up here, watching. Maybe Esquibel will have to be with us to make sure it is the Americans and not the Russians.”
“Oh. Right. Yes, that is a good plan. And if it is the Russians we can just wait up here until they leave. Smart thinking.”
“No, but that isn’t the problem Flavia. I mean, that is certainly one problem, but what happens when the Americans arrive?”
“We… go home?”
“Do we? Who is in charge of this mission?”
“Alonso. I mean, Esquibel, if you want to be more…”
“No no no. It is that Colonel Baitgie. The one who is working for the Chinese. In the end, this is his mission. What if he is the one on that ship when it arrives? Will he even let us back aboard?”
“Ehh, he should. I don’t know what his game is.” Flavia frowns at the implausibility of Maahjabeen’s scenario. “But he is engaging in espionage. He is not like some action hero standing on the deck with a big gun. He will be more secretive than that, won’t he?”
The two women stare at each other, their minds racing. “I think,” Maahjabeen finally says, “that we might be the only ones who have thought of this so far and we might need to share our thoughts with Alonso.”
“And Esquibel.”
“Yes. At once.” Now Maahjabeen follows Flavia from the cliff through the tall grasses wet with morning dew to the climb down and the village below.
She is hardly aware of the descent as she does it. Her mind is too full of concerns. Maahjabeen spots Esquibel at the mouth of the cave from far above and drops down to her, running down the last of the steep slope with abbreviated steps. Flavia is right behind her.
“Doctor Daine.” Maahjabeen strides through the village, its occupants busy on all sides. She only has eyes for Esquibel though. Flavia is right with her. “We have been thinking about our last day. And we have a problem.”
“Our last day?” Esquibel had worked to narrow the cave mouth with bundles of firewood and unused planks of redwood bark last night. Now she steps out of her fortification, sipping a mug. “What do you mean?”
“You have to talk to that Chinese fellow before they come.” Flavia has advanced several tactical steps in her mind and realizes she has gone too far to make sense. “I mean, listen, what if Colonel Baitgie is aboard that ship when it arrives?”
“Colonel Baitgie?” Esquibel makes a face. “I doubt it. For one thing he’s Air Force. He’d just get the Navy to do it for him. That’s how we all came out here. The smallest taskforce possible.”
“But what if he has heard that you have not handed off the…”
“Ohh… Yes.” Esquibel nods, weary. “The blasted USB stick that has ruined my life. I have been thinking about this. How to save my military career.”
“Your military career?” Maahjabeen exclaims. “How about the lives and security of all the people on this island?”
Esquibel is surprised to hear Maahjabeen be such an alarmist. “I can’t imagine that Baitgie would jeopardize his position with such a bold move. He must be worth quite a lot to the Chinese. They will keep him hidden in the background. Do not worry.”
“Well, then, what if he has helpers? All we are saying is that if the Chinese have told him that they never received the data they were promised, why would he let us off the island until we have satisfied their demands?” Maahjabeen’s hands flutter with worry. “Maybe he gives the Navy a false order, that we are supposed to be left here, or maybe that we should be taken into custody. Maybe the whole Chinese thing is a lie, just an elaborate plan to frame you, Doctor. If you did give them the data then he can blackmail you for the rest of your…”
“You think I haven’t worried about that?” Esquibel hisses, making the closest villagers flinch in reaction. “That is what I am spending all my sleepless nights here doing, trying to decide what I will tell him. I have to play stupid. I have to present my side of the situation as being hapless and unhelpful. If I am incompetent then that is better than being in opposition to him, no? Oh, I had no idea there were show tunes on that USB stick. I downloaded all the Plexity data. I have it right here for you. I must have mixed the sticks up.” Esquibel shrugs. “See? To protect the rest of you, he cannot know that you all know. So we must all agree. You must all be very trustworthy and discreet and asking that of people like Jay and Katrina is…” Esquibel presses her head from both sides as if she is keeping it from exploding. “But I have no choice. I cannot expose any of you to this danger. It is mine alone.”
“And what if the Russians arrive first?” Flavia asks. “We will watch from the cliff above but we don’t know what a Russian or American ship looks like. Will you join us up there?”
“Yes. Good plan.” Esquibel can see the wisdom in it. “And they won’t be able to see us, unless they are very lucky. And even if they did, there is no indication that they know how to access the inland from the beach.”
“They do, the Russians have their own way in,” Maahjabeen says. “That’s what that other bunker in the west is all about. And the leader of the Thunderbirds speaking Russian. Right?”
“Ah. Yes. True. But still. We can wait them out. If they arrive first, I am sure the Americans will chase them away and then we can depart in safety. We just need to be careful these last few days. It is getting very dangerous.”
Flavia shivers. “Ugh, I hate this so much. Who would ever put a poor research mathematician in such a place?”
Esquibel gives her a lopsided smile. “Well, a traitor would. I will play stupid as long as I need. But when I get back to the mainland, I will go to the CIA headquarters in Virginia myself this time.”
“Dear God, this is a scary game you are playing.” Maahjabeen resolves to include Esquibel’s well-being in her daily prayers. “I wish we could be more help. But we will do whatever you need of us so we can all put this place behind us when it’s over.”
“Thank you, Maahjabeen. Thank you, Flavia.”
The two of them hug Esquibel in turn and depart. She withdraws back into the cave, where she’s built her clean room in the small alcove where they rode out the storm and the flooding in here.
Esquibel’s mind is blank. Her pulse is quick and shallow. She stops and tries to take a deep breath but the adrenaline coursing through her veins won’t let her calm herself.
Once she is sure she is alone in here she removes the latest slip of rice paper from within her bra and reads it one last time. It had been against her skin when she’d awakened, just like the last one. The block letters spell out in tiny letters:
NO DATA. WRONG FILES. TONIGHT AGAIN.
Ξ
Pradeep leads Miriam and Jay up the slope he climbed the day before. But once the undergrowth clears on the steepening slopes he traverses off to the right at a tricky angle, using crusted knobs of dirt to save himself from sliding down on loose soil.
“Definitely…” Pradeep struggles, grasping at vines and only belatedly realizing they have thorns. Palms bloody, he slides down into the bracken once he releases his hold. “Ah. Definitely not an actual path this way. May not be a path at all…”
“Land of the lost, dude. Let’s go find some dinosaurs and shit.”
“How are you lads at bouldering?” Miriam has stopped to clean her sunglasses and survey the slope. They’re about to enter a canyon, the raw banded rock of the far cliffs obscured by trees. This is the geological wonderland she’s been seeking. And she can spot a rockfall ahead and far down that promises a path forward.
“There?” Jay points at the target. “Yeah, if you’re good with like a dirt glissade to get all the way down there. Ha. We could use shovels instead of ice axes.”
Miriam nods and takes off her pack. She removes three tools with foldable handles: a spade, a pick, and a hoe. “Grand. Which would you prefer?”
“Oh, you’re being serious?” Jay guffaws. “Right on. Uh…” He takes a closer look at the slope before them. “I don’t know, dude. My leave no trace principles are really screaming about this one. We could start like an actual landslide and we don’t know enough about what lies below, know what I’m saying? We might really wreck some shit, totally unaware.”
“Yes, and then what? How will we get back up?” Pradeep makes a face, his anxiety pricking at him for one of the first times ever in the deep wilderness. He points at the slide. “That’s a one-way road, that is, and I’d prefer not to trap ourselves on this hike. I think if we just get a bit further here along my route there may be a more solid path down. Ah! Yes. We’ve got a better chance over here. But don’t put your tools away quite yet, Miriam. Things will still be very tricky. And I’ll, uh, take the hoe.”
She passes it forward and tries to peer over his shoulder. “What do you see?”
“Solid footing. A maze of rock and ceanothus.”
“Ooo! What kind of rock?” Miriam eagerly follows Pradeep with Jay at her heels. “Looking very ultramafic down here. This deposit might just be a type of intrusive troctolite, assuming these bits here are a calcic plagioclase.”
They weave their way down, forcing a path through the brittle clawing branches and broken sandstone steps, using their tools as makeshift handholds on the drops. The last twenty meters is a true face-to-the-wall descent, and Pradeep once again objects to obstacles that will only let them travel one way.
But they can see much more of the canyon now. It winds inland to the northwest, toward the heart of the island. A stream exits its narrow mouth, bordered by redwoods and willows. “Where does all that water go?” he wonders. “Sorry. Think I’ve gone about this all wrong. Thought I could find a middle path but… You’re both going to hate me but I’m pretty sure we should retrace our steps all the way back to pine camp and then come at this canyon from wherever this stream joins the main creek instead.”
“Uh, we could do that,” Jay frowns, “but how would we know we’d choose the right stream and make sure were going up the right canyon? Remember on our three day ordeal how spun we got trying to get back?”
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a proper surveyor,” Miriam sighs. “I haven’t worked on a site without ArcGIS data for ages. Aha! No, Pradeep. We don’t have to go quite so far. Look, from here we can drop and switchback down to the stream with a bit of luck.” She pushes aside a flowering bush and reveals a narrow gully dropping down at their feet.
“Ah, you’re right. Thank god.” Pradeep sighs, the hours-long detour avoided. “I am so glad you agreed to come along, Miriam.”
“Me too, love. You’ve gotten me quite excited. I think we finally might see the geological heart of this island after all.”
After another dozen minutes of fighting their way downslope, Pradeep leads them through the last of the vegetation, forcing his way through a stand of dogwood. “Ah! Eek.” He pulls up at the edge of the water, balancing on clods of dirt that slowly crumble beneath his feet. Trapped after all, with no way back up. With a muttered curse he drops into the stream from the overhanging bank onto a sandbar submerged nearly a meter. He yelps as his legs are swallowed by the cold water. Then he wades toward the shallows as Miriam and Jay drop in beside him. Pradeep frowns at the fern-clad overhang off which they jumped. “Hard to get back that way. We’ll have to find another way downstream.”
“Blimey, look!” Miriam gazes into the canyon, which is lit by a rare slanting ray of golden sun. The trees glow green, beckoning. The cliff face beyond is striated with quartz and silicates, yellow and brown. “Mercy me. I’ve never wanted to work a site so much. Come on, lads. Now it’s just a bit of wading.”
“Lead on, Doc.” Jay moves to a collection of deadfall at the edge of the stream and pulls a crooked staff-length limb free. He snaps off the secondary branches and hands it to Miriam. “Just watch your footing.”
Entering the canyon is like stepping inside a cathedral. Miriam’s Catholic upbringing would have her genuflect and cross herself. The towering shafts of the ancient trees and the precipitous cliffs place her deep in the bedrock without being underground.
The canyon’s neck is narrow, leading them through high granite and sandstone bulwarks on either side that force the water through in a rushing flow. They can’t be climbed. But Pradeep finds stones that can be used as stairs, right in the middle of the stream. Finally it opens into a wider passage, the floor of the canyon as broad as twenty meters in places. Here they find more sandbanks in curving oxbows, including one above the waterline. Finally they can rest. Taking off their packs, they drink and eat as Jay rolls a joint.
“Ah. Look. This is quite a nice spot.” Pradeep pushes aside some broadleaf vine maple and white alder to reveal a higher washout behind them that is now level and clear with a floor of sand.
“Yeah, if you don’t mind flash floods,” Jay says.
“I can’t imagine the kind of storm that would lead to a flood at this upper level. See? It hasn’t reached this high at all this year, even after the storms we’ve seen. And the rainy season will taper soon as summer begins. This is better than pine camp, I’d say.”
“It’d be brilliant to stay here the last few days.” Miriam picks up a river rock at her feet, gray sandstone with black inclusions. “I could finally get so much done. But not all of us would agree, I’m sure. I can’t see Alonso hiking even a single percent of that route.”
Jay passes the joint to Miriam. “Ah, but what if we could get him to follow the stream from the beginning? At least, that’s the hope. We could even float him most of the way.”
“Well if we’re floating then I bet I could get Maahjabeen to do it.” Pradeep laughs, then looks to the top of the opposite cliff. “Look. It’s right up there. That one unmistakable big rock way at the top. Uh, what’s the proper term, Miriam? That big rock there.”
“You mean that truncated spur with the tower of red granite?”
“Yes. The top of that short tower is where Xaanach led me. Cut my hand.” He holds up his bandaged finger. “What is that, like two hundred meters? Three hundred? Straight up.”
Miriam laughs at the guess. “I think we’ve already established that we’re quite shit at estimating cliff heights. But what a beauty! This whole cliff. Look at all the lovely stratigraphy! Pradeep, you’ve done it. You’ve finally found the heart of this place.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Pradeep studies the canyon even further upstream. “I mean, now that I’ve paddled all the way around the whole bloody island, it’s at least six or seven kilometers in length, maybe more. And right now we aren’t even a kilometer north of the southern coast, are we? We’re barely in the interior here. No, there’s a lot more in there that we will never see.”
Jay shakes his head, jealous, peering upstream into the shadowy green density. “Man, that’s where Amy is. Somewhere way back in this maze. Dreaming the green dream.”
“Yes, I envy her too.” Pradeep thinks of how deeply she must have sunk into this extraordinary web of life. The secrets she must be learning of this island will remain forever beyond him.
“You… envy her?” Miriam shakes her head in distaste. “You know, she’s been gone nearly five days. Two big storms. We don’t even know if she’s eaten or slept that whole time.”
Pradeep shrugs. “Well, at least we know that nobody is holding her hostage. She could come and go at any time. Morska Vidra didn’t say she seemed unwell.”
“I just hope,” Jay adds quietly, “she comes back soon. Getting mad worried for her. And I just—just really miss her. She’s like my mom and my best friend and my boss all rolled into one.”
“Aw, Amy would love hearing that.” Miriam watches Jay climb the deadfall upstream. “Careful, now. That’s probably never held a human weight.”
“Yeah, tons of wreckage here…” Jay scrambles along the logs lying crosswise at angles. They were deposited so long ago they have grown moss and ferns from their blackened trunks.
“Keep climbing, Jay. I saw a pond or lake from above—”
Jay sways over a sudden pit. “Whoa! Okay. When you follow, do not under any circumstances go this way. There’s like a net of vines over a full drop into rushing water. Like ten meters down. You fall in there you ain’t never coming back.”
Pradeep and Miriam pause in their own climbs until he can find a better path upward. He finally does so, peeking over the ledge. “Yeaaah boi! Here’s your lake up here, Prad! Oh, it’s so awesome! Come check it out!” And he scrambles up out of view.
Pradeep laughs, pleased that all this effort is paying off, and heaves himself up the remaining logs to behold the dammed canyon above. The water is a dark shining band, like a fat snake winding its way through the cliffs. But it has pockets of sandbars and narrow shorelines where willows and bay trees drink.
Brown pelicans and seagulls float on its surface. A trio of Canada Geese browse the edges. “Look at that, Jay! The geese are the only Anatidae here. Even here. No freshwater ducks or swans.”
“Trippy. Weird to see a wild lake without ducks. Didn’t Amy say she’d spotted some buffleheads in the lagoon?”
“Well that would be the only ones then. Both they and the geese are migratory so that’s how they must have got here. How we get here is another matter entirely…” With tentative steps, Pradeep makes his way off the dam of fallen logs to a narrow band of muddy shore on his left, the striated cliff at his back. From here he is able to survey the lake more clearly. Around the bend upstream it seems to balloon in size. That would be fantastic. The waters might even branch into untrammeled side canyons and unique ecosystems. But he won’t be able to see any of that from here. Without one of Maahjabeen’s boats he may never get to see the upper lake around the bend at all. He sighs, gathering his resolve, and kicks off his shoes.
“What are you doing, Pradeep?” Miriam gains the muddy ledge on which he stands. She asks absently, her attention absorbed by the staggering wealth of minerals on display before her.
He peels off his clothes and stands wearing only his boxer briefs, his lean brown body all skeletal right angles. Pradeep takes a hesitant step into the water. “Eh… Just going for a quick swim.”
Ξ
“Is there anyone…?” For the first time in hours Alonso looks up from his laptop screen. His mouth is dry as paper. “Ach. Where is Amy with her tea?”
He looks helplessly around. None of his team are nearby. Well, Katrina is interviewing that old woman across the village square but he would have to bellow to be heard. And it is just a cup of tea. Or a bottle of water. Anything would be fine…
A trio of children are playing nearby with a fragment of woven reeds, tugging on the frayed corners and interrupting each other with competing rhymes. One sees Alonso watching them and calls out to him, incorporating the bloated pale giant into his chant. The others turn and watch him too. He smiles and they laugh at him, a cruel sound to his ears. His smile fades with a sigh.
“No, if anyone is getting water it is me.” Alonso stirs, lifting his legs, which always scream with disuse. The sign of healing that he notices, though, is how fast the pain fades now. He draws his knees up halfway to his chest. Yes, he is getting more range of motion back. Do more with less pain. That’s his motto going forward.
“Ai, Alonso, what are you doing to yourself?” Flavia appears from the cave mouth with Maahjabeen. “Sit. Sit. What do you need? I will get it for you.”
“Ah.” Alonso falls back, the struggle just started and easily abandoned. “Flavia, you are a superhero. Yes, water, por favor. And lots of it.”
“Of course.” She ducks back into the cave and returns bearing a wide-mouth bottle and a mug. “Alonso went and got himself lost in the data, didn’t he?” She leans down and hands him the mug with a smile and a caress of his grizzled jaw.
He drinks greedily, emptying the mug, then hands it back to her for a refill. “Perfect. Thank you. No, not lost. Far from lost. Just forgot about my bodily functions all morning. Now it is after noon and I don’t know where the time went.”
“We bring you,” Maahjabeen holds up a pair of Dyson readers, “samples from the sea cave. Every corner of it.”
“You are also a superhero, Maahjabeen. Thank you so much. Do we have a terminal for them set up? Ah, yes. Here. At my feet. That dock is plugged in. Someone must have done it for me.”
Maahjabeen regards Alonso, sitting like a fat spider in his techie web, cables leading to metal cases and solar panels and the duffel bags of like five people stacked in there unzipped. There is no trace left of Morska Vidra’s home, only this untidy mess of modernity sitting in its place.
But Alonso doesn’t think of any of this. He is working like a man possessed. He hunches over the keyboard again, fingers flying. The struts and beams of this new architecture he is building are starting to become clear in his mind. It exists nowhere but in an abstract dataset of computational biology, and if he can pull it off with minimal errors, he may be able to dispense of nearly half of the executive process error margins. Its completion will resolve many of the remaining limitations of Plexity. They might just escape this island with a working prototype after all.
Flavia takes a long drink herself and wipes her hands on her jeans. But the jeans are so filthy her hands get no cleaner. She will have to go down to the creek or something and take a bath. Maybe she can get a few of the others to join her… such as her colleague who has just arrived. “Eh, Doctor Triquet. How are you?”
Triquet hurries across the village square, preoccupied with what they study on their phone. “Hmm? Oh, hi doll. Doing peachy. Just got a final clue here, perhaps. An entry in Ingles’ diary. Popping back down to the sub. How is it down there?”
“Very dirty. So I was hoping you would like to join me for a bath at the creek soon.”
“Sorry, Flavia. Got to go get myself dirty first.” Triquet winks at her, saucy, then continues toward the mouth of the cave.
“Wait. What is this final clue?” Flavia calls out.
Triquet scrolls back through the image to read it from their screen. “Dated December 12th, 1959. ‘Finally put a stop to all this nonsense once and for all.’ That’s all. But you know, at first when I read it, I just thought he was complaining about some trivial thing but now that I am more familiar with the Colonel’s understated way, I can tell this was a huge deal to him and he was recording his only response to the whole drama. All the dates line up.”
“The whole drama? So 12 December is the day he killed the Dowerd lady?”
“Give me two hours in my stacks downstairs and I’ll let you know. So close!” With a wave, Triquet disappears into the cave. Flavia turns back to view the village. Their voices had been loud enough to carry across it. The old woman with Katrina is staring at Flavia, mouth open, eyes wet with distress. She mouths the word Dowerd and wrings her hands.
“Oh, what have I done this time?” Flavia waves weakly at the pair of them and turns away, catching up with Maahjabeen, who is finishing her own mug of water. “Eek. Get me out of here. You will take a bath with me, yes, my dear sister? Get all this mud off us.”
Maahjabeen nods. “Modestly, yes.”
Ξ
Xaanach laughs at Mandy and pushes her out of the grass back into the treeline. She lectures her, pointing at the grass with her chin and the tip of her thumb.
“Uh… Okay…” Mandy smiles weakly, looking for help from Katrina and Esquibel, but they are flushed with their exertions and preoccupied with catching their breaths. Jidadaa and Xaanach set a wicked pace. And it’s not like this is a trail or anything. Mandy’s poor legs are already bruised and scratched from barreling through dense stands of buckthorn. The two Lisicans slipped through the brush, hardly making a sound. But the three women tromping behind left a passage through the bush as wide as a sidewalk.
Katrina had asked them, when the Lisicans waited once for them to catch up, how they managed to move so freely in the thickets. This led to a long conversation between Jidadaa and Xaanach. Finally, the little girl pulled a branch of the buckthorn off and waved it, its thorny leaves the shape of her hand. She offered it to Mandy, lecturing, pointing at the structure of the plant.
“Xaanach say,” Jidadaa translated, “step to heart of daakakʼáts… eh, this bush? Yes. Every bush have door. Find door in, walk to center, then out. Leaves face out. Thorns face out. Always step from in to out. Yes?”
“What? What the bloody hell does—”
“Language…” Katrina reproved Esquibel like a schoolmarm before the doctor could explode.
“Whoa. Okay.” Mandy hadn’t even felt stupid for not getting what Xaanach meant. It was inexplicable. She just tried to think of ways to keep the conversation going. “So, like, that big stand of bushes there. Could you walk through it? I don’t see any door.”
Jidadaa stepped slantwise toward the buckthorn, pointing up and in from her left knee. “Here. You see? Every bush have door. If you a polite guest it show you.” She crouched, stepped forward and down to the left, then moved through the brush with only the slightest of rustling crackles.
“Huh.” Mandy frowned, not really getting it. She watched Xaanach move off once again, effortless through the buckthorn. She and Katrina practiced for the next hundred meters or more, while Esquibel still stomped loudly behind, complaining of the thorns and the impracticality of this entire endeavor.
Then they reached this grand meadow, its long stalks yellowing and waving in the breeze. Mandy had sighed in both frustration and relief. She had just been starting to get what the Lisican girls had meant about the doors in the bushes. But she is also happy to have their choked path lead to an open field.
When she tried to follow in Xaanach’s footsteps into the meadow the girl had stopped her and pushed her off the grass, lecturing her about something, some monster lurking in here?
Now Jidadaa arrives from her own hidden route up a narrow draw to their right. She laughs at Mandy’s uncomprehending look. “Pigs in grass. No walk in line. They knock you over. Walk here.” And she leads each woman to a place in a staggered formation, about three meters apart, facing the meadow. “Now we walk.”
“Just how far away is this supposed emergency anyway?” Esquibel asks. At least this new tactic makes sense to her. Boars are a real thing, not mystical doors in bushes. “If we need to move a patient back to the clean room, I don’t see how we can do it.”
They wade into the grass, dividing the waves of green and gold that reach in places above their heads. Now Mandy can tell why they didn’t place them even further apart. If they moved into a wider formation at all they’d lose sight of each other.
They smell it before they see anyone, the unmistakable odor of cigarette tobacco on the wind. Then the acrid edge of something rank and unwholesome.
Mandy steps out into a small clearing in the grass, a hidden nest open to the sky. Katrina is to her left and Esquibel is to her right, with Xaanach and Jidadaa watching for their reactions from the other side of Esquibel. Mandy takes in the scene:
Garbage everywhere in small disordered mounds. Flies buzzing. A stained camouflage tarp has been tied down at a drunken angle on scavenged branches. A pair of boots pokes out the nearest end, where the tarp is tied low to the ground. The smoke emerges from within. The boots twitch.
Mandy doesn’t like the look of this at all. She backs away from it, into the safety of the grasses, crouching like a spooked cat. Beside her, Katrina goes still, her mind racing at this unexpected assault on her senses. Esquibel recognizes military-issue boots when she sees them. With a silent grimace she shoves her medical kits off her hip so she can access the satchel that holds her sidearm. But before she can draw it the grasses part on the far side of the clearing and a Thunderbird elder emerges. He calls out to Jidadaa in challenge.
She responds, making a firm point. They fall into a long dispute, with Xaanach crying out seemingly unhelpful bits as punctuation. Jidadaa refers to the three women again and again, specifically Esquibel. Finally, the elder drops his head and relents.
“He will let you see him now.” Jidadaa leads Esquibel across the clearing. She still holds her hand in her satchel, eyes darting.
“How nice of him. See who?”
Esquibel crouches at the side of the tarp at a safe distance from its shadowed interior. She can’t see much in there, only the outline of what looks like a bundle of clothes. Then the clothes shift and she can make out his profile. He lifts the cigarette with shaking fingers and takes another long draught.
She can smell the necrosis from here. It is an awful tang in the air that reminds her of that one ward she once knew full of Ethiopian refugees. They had come to them seeking medical care after weeks on their own in the bush. So many of them could not be saved. This man smells just like the Dadaab refugees.
“Does he have friends?” Esquibel asks Jidadaa.
“No. Man alone. Very sick.”
Esquibel finally takes her hand from her satchel and pulls her medical kits back into place. She unzips her traveling pharmacy and takes out a syringe kit and ampoules of Amoxicillin. “I can tell. Where is he hurt? Does he speak English?”
The man’s head lolls to the side, finally acknowledging the activity happening outside his shelter. He whispers something broken, fragmented syllables ending again and again in ‘avos.
“Not English,” Katrina answers Esquibel. “Russian.” She calls out to the wounded man, peering into his shadows. “Ona vrach. Ona pomozhet tebe.”
The man whispers something else and Katrina has to cross the clearing and crouch down to hear it. “He says it is too late.”
“Yes, well,” Esquibel wrinkles her nose and edges closer. “He is probably right. Is he armed?”
“Don’t shoot her. Ne strelyay v neye.”
“U menya…” He coughs, an ugly wet sound, “net oruzhiya.”
“He has no weapon.”
Esquibel holds up the syringe. “Medicine. Antibiotics.”
The man waves the cigarette, coughing, mumbling his words. Katrina leans in, nodding.
Esquibel waits for him to finish. “What? What did he say?”
“Nothing. I mean, I couldn’t follow… He is raving.”
“Yes. He is very close to the end. Jidadaa. Where is his injury?”
Jidadaa asks the Thunderbird elder and he passes his hand under his left ribs and along his left leg.
Esquibel nods, pulling back and circling over to the far side of the tarp. She can access his left side more easily from here. “Mandy. I need a hand. Please, uh, put this towel down here. Keep it clean. Sir? I am going to give you a few shots, yes? Make you feel better?”
But her patient holds up his trembling hand in protest. He takes a deep breath and says something forceful.
Katrina translates. “Wait. He says he needs to tell you something important first.”
Chapter 54 – Where Did It Go?
January 6, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:
54 – Where Did It Go?
“What a total disaster.” Mandy yanks on the rope, now tangled in the branches of a nearby madrone. Her weather balloon hangs from a high limb, deflated, its instrument suite swinging like a pendulum beneath, perhaps twenty meters or more above.
“Don’t pull.” Katrina grabs Mandy’s arm. “You’ll just make it worse. Uh. Maybe we can cut it out of there?”
“How?” Mandy drops the rope and tries to find a calm place in her center. But she can’t even feel her center. She only feels an electric irritation racing over her skin. Oh my fucking god. How many times does she have to look like an idiot in front of Katrina?
“Yeh, that’s the question, innit?” Katrina tries snapping the end of the rope to flip it over the branch above. But there is no chance. It is too little snap for so long on such a heavy rope. If someone could climb… even part way… “Jidadaa,” she calls out, catching sight of the girl before she departs camp upslope among the pines. “We need you.”
Jidadaa turns back. Her face is set, a decision having been made. But she returns to Katrina anyway, wordless but with an expectant look on her face. It is Mandy who points glumly upward.
After a moment’s consideration, Jidadaa grasps the trunk of the mature madrone, a meter wide, its rough russet bark only giving way in patches to orange hardwood beneath. With her bare feet and strong hands she scales the trunk, rising five meters before she grasps the first limb. Now she moves even more quickly, weaving through the tapering branches until she reaches the limb that bears the weather balloon and rope.
“Oh! Careful, sweetie!” Mandy cries out, appalled at the precarious position the Lisican girl has so quickly put herself in. The branch is no wider than Jidadaa’s leg and bounces every time she steps out onto it. They wait in dread to hear a crack.
But Jidadaa is too light. She hovers above in the canopy, one leg stretched out to a nearby fork for stability, while she picks at the twists and knots in the climbing rope. But she makes little progress.
“What’s wrong?” Katrina calls out after an impatient minute.
Jidadaa tilts her head down and makes helpless gestures with her hands. “I do not know this.”
“The knots? Just unravel them. You know, like with…” Mandy falls silent, realizing the examples of shoelaces and power cords she was about to use are probably outside Jidadaa’s knowledge. “Uhh… Do you like know about knots and rope at all?”
“Necklaces and nets. This one too hard.”
“Oh! That is Jidadaa up there!” Flavia appears, drawn by the shouting. She has finished packing and is eager to get back down underground where it’s safe. “What is she…?” Then Flavia sees the weather balloon. “No. That is too high. She cannot stay up there.”
“The knots are beyond her.” Katrina’s shoulders sag in despair. “She can’t get the balloon down.”
“Knots? Oh, I love knots!” Flavia perks up. “They are one of my favorite hobbies. No, I am not making a joke. It is true. The topology of knot theory is some of the most advanced maths there is. This is the practical type but still, I wonder what kind they are?”
“Wait!” Mandy brightens, reaching into her pocket for her phone. “I know! If you had pics of them could you figure it out?”
“Maybe…” Flavia shrugs. Whatever gets these ladies moving so they can retreat before the Ussiaxan arrive. “But we should hurry.”
“Mandy, you’re a genius.” Katrina kneels beside her. The smile Mandy responds with is far beyond the worth of the compliment. She primes her phone as a camera then wraps it in the end of the rope. They stand.
“Jidadaa! Pull it up!” Mandy tugs on the rope. “My phone’s in the end! We need pictures!”
By fits and starts the rope is drawn upward. Figuring out how to pull a rope by instinct is something not easily done twenty meters in the air. Then Jidadaa finally grabs the end and pushes the phone out between the gaps in the ball of the knot they tied.
“Take lots! From every angle!” Katrina drops her gaze to ask Flavia, “Or would video be better?”
“Like you could get her to figure out how to switch camera modes. No.” Flavia waves the question away. “Pictures are fine.”
After another excruciating moment of bouncing limbs but no sight of her, Jidadaa finally leans down and waves the phone at them. “Many pictures! Like Jay’s phone!”
“Yes! Exactly! Brilliant!” Katrina claps. “Now just stick it back in that rope end and lower it down to us!”
Jidadaa does so, shoving the phone edge-wise back into the balled knot.
“Slowly!” Mandy begs her.
But this is another thing that is difficult to reason through. Jidadaa drops the ball and the rope plummets to the ground, bouncing off a rhododendron and thudding into the dirt.
“You broke the screen!” Mandy wails after she extracts the phone. “Why did you do it like that? We told you to take it slow!”
Jidadaa watches from above, impassive. In response, she retreats from the crash site to more firm footing in the center of the canopy.
Flavia pulls the phone from Mandy’s hands. “Yes, yes. Let’s see. Ehh. Horrible photos. Ah. Here is one. Here is the problem. The big knot here and the satellite hitch beside it. See,” Flavia adopts a lecturer’s tone. “The linking integral is an invariant that describes how two closed curves link. That is the important part here. But usually maths theoreticians just think of abstract knots in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, but here the linking integrals are still key. See, I like to spend my time solving these riddles in actuality. Other people play sudoku. I untie knots. So there have recently been a number of papers published that blend abstract topology theories with actual mechanical forces and friction. Fascinating work, good for surgeons and industrial… Ah. Yes, first she must free the hitch here and then she will have slack to attack… ehh. No. Look. If she comes at it from the opposite way instead, this part here is a looped mass that only connects to the rest of the tangle at two points. And… Yes! Here. And here. How do I make marks on your phone?” Mandy helps her draw red circles around the two important points. Then they force her phone back into the rope’s ball knot. “Jidadaa. Attack it where I made the red circles!”
The rope ascends more smoothly this time. Within moments, the weather balloon crashes to earth. Mandy squeals in delight and races to it, gathering up the torn fabric and tangled rope to locate the instruments beneath.
Jidadaa descends as quickly as she climbed, dropping lightly back to the ground. Katrina claps for her.
“Yay! Jidadaa in the house! Thank you so much, love!”
Jidadaa, sheepish, accepts the compliment. But she is far more excited about something else. “Now lunch!” She holds out a bird nest she has stored in the folds of her ragged hoodie. It contains four dead spotted chicks, their necks snapped.
The others pull back from the macabre sight. “Oh! Uh… That’s fine. All yours, girlfriend!” Mandy squeaks, patting Jidadaa on the shoulder, then withdrawing when the girl goes still. “Oops. Right. No touching. Sorry.” Mandy sadly lifts the wreckage. “Well, another anemometer in the trash can. Great. That was my last one. I sure hope it got some data at least.”
Katrina gives Mandy a sideways hug. “Aw, poor Mandy dandy. I’m sure it did. Flavia. Let’s download it and perk her spirits up.”
“Now? But my machines are all packed.” Flavia waves at the camp, where her bags wait in a neat row. “We are in the middle of a retreat, remember? The bad guys, they are coming? To kill us?”
“You’re right.” Katrina helps Mandy gather the remains of the weather balloon. They all start walking back to camp. “But I still need a few minutes to get my things together. And so does Mandy. So if you don’t have anything else to do…”
“Ehh! Fine!” Flavia throws her hands into the air. “Anything to make Mandy happy, even if it means we get turned into slaves!”
“You don’t have to…” Mandy begins but Katrina shushes her.
“Thanks, Flavia,” Katrina answers instead. “You’re the best.”
Jidadaa strides away from them with purpose. Katrina calls out after her. “And where are you going so suddenly, little miss?”
Jidadaa turns back, her face troubled. “Today. It is a very important day. No time. No more time!”
“No time for who?” Katrina hates these cryptic warnings. How have they ever helped?
“For our prophet poem. Me and Kula.”
“Oh. You and your mom have your own? I guess everyone does. But… I mean, what’s today that’s so important?”
“For lidass to bow down and give blood to summer wind.”
“And if he doesn’t, your poem like, what, fades away?”
Jidadaa stares at the ground. “It go down one trail. We go down another. We see it through the trees, then no more. We forget. Right now the poem make promise to us. If it is broken, it pass like the wind.”
“I mean, maybe you can ask Jay for a bit of blood, I guess, but he hasn’t been very happy about…” Katrina trails off as Jidadaa stalks away through the camp and into the trees, ignoring her. “Aw crap is she going to be gone for like another three days again?”
Mandy gets serious about removing her belongings from her tent so she can break it down. As she shovels her clothing into a duffel bag, Flavia hurries up to her holding her laptop.
“Mandy, wait. Look. Look.” Flavia thrusts her laptop in front of Mandy, pointing at columns of data. “You did get something. See?You got what you were seeking, eh?”
Mandy’s shoulders slump. “Sorry. I don’t speak math. I only speak English, and not even that good. When will you people realize I’m like way less smart than—?”
“What is this instrument? The CSN-11957?” Flavia indicates the source of the data at the top of the column.
Mandy just shrugs. “I have no clue. What is that, like a serial number? I don’t…” But she moves over to Flavia’s platform, where the remains of the weather balloon’s instrument suite are plugged into another laptop with black USB cords. Lifting each of the units, Mandy finds identifying numbers on each of them. “Yeah. Here. The differential-absorption optical hygrometer.”
Now it is Flavia’s turn to be mystified. “And what is that?”
“Measures humidity by shining two lasers, one that refracts H2O and a control that doesn’t. So it got these like amazing readings? Great. What’s so amazing about them?”
Flavia shrugs. “It is three things. First, the volume of data is far more than from your other instruments. And second, the quality of that data is very good. Its sampling rate seems to mainly be limited by storage, not any performance constraints. So your laser is very busy, giving us these values five times every second. And, three, what the values show is a tremendous dynamic shift in the weather here. That must be of some importance, no?”
“Yeah, it’s a change in humidity. Happens several times a day. Thanks, Flavia. That’s super cool. I’m glad it wasn’t like a total waste of your time…”
“Not at all, not at all,” Flavia answers absently, back at work on the data. “Glad to help. Now I just want to plug this new source into our database quickly here. And look. Remember your heat map? Now it has this extra refined layer of humidity, yes?”
“Yes…” Mandy breathes, leaning in. The island is nearly black with the density of its humidity. Air currents deform around it in every direction. She scrolls outward, seeing the humidity as a spike pinning the wheeling currents and storms of the entire Northeast Pacific. “Look at that, Flavia. It’s all the surface biomass on Lisica. Respiring like a champ. Just enough to make things stick. Oh my god. We really are in the center of the world. The saline shift. The water column. I can’t believe we didn’t know about this place! This will change every model NOAA uses for… everything! Knowing there’s this like pin in the pinwheel is…” Mandy shakes her head, helpless. “It’s all these trees. These giant trees. See, they attract the water in the air locally, but that starts a cascade effect that draws more and more water to them from further and further away until a forest of sufficient size can condense a rainstorm out of clear skies. Add some mountains to break the surface-level wind and this becomes like a major feature on the open ocean. This tiny dot of green. Oh my god.”
They look first at each other, then at the emerald treetops waving above. “It is like,” Flavia points at the sky, “a column of water rising like a volcano. It is invisible, but it never stops erupting. Not for a million years.”
“And it’s all feedback loopy. The more moisture the island calls the more rain falls and the more plants grow and it just goes and goes until, I don’t know, maybe there’s like a maximum, uh…”
“Carrying capacity for every square meter of the island? Yes, there must be. Finite resources, constrained on multiple levels. We could work on that next if you like. See what the upper limit of the island’s humidity generation is. It is too bad we lost the drone, because we do not have any close scans of the north half. But maybe we could extrapolate, based on what data we do have. Well. Enough. It is time we must go. Again. We will do this work when we are safely back in the sub. Now if you need any more help here, I will be happy to do whatever. Packing, cleaning up. But we need to go.”
Ξ
“Ugh. Where is Katrina? I can make no sense of this woman.” Esquibel stands at the edge of the village square in a mask and gloves haggling with the Mayor. “Look. We won’t even stay for lunch or put our things down. We will just pass right through. Down into the ground, yes? And you may want to join us. The Ussiaxan, yes? Very angry. Bloody furious. On their way.” She mimes holding an imagined spear above her head but the Mayor responds with equal fervor, indicating the village and the people, her hand on Esquibel’s arm, pulling her close.
“I tell you they are coming. We had a drone. Remember?” She points at the sky and makes a bzzzzhhhh sound, tracking it across the treetops. “Then the Ussiaxan shot it down. They scattered into the hills in fright. But Jidadaa tells us they will regroup and attack in the dark.”
The Mayor calls out to one of the youths. It is the non-binary villager, their hands busy packing a wet paste into woven baskets. But without a word of complaint they set their work aside and fetch something from the Mayor’s hut. It is a spear. The Mayor takes it from them, still lecturing Esquibel, and holds it above her own head. Her meaning is clear: We will stay and fight.
Esquibel blinks rapidly, shaking her head. “No, no, bad idea. Look. There is no defense here. Once the enemy got across the creek they’d just overwhelm you, wouldn’t they? Think this through. You can’t have more than, what, sixty people here? Fifty who can fight? They have four times that number if they come at you with everyone they’ve got. And they can just come at you across this entire line here. This broad slope. You can’t hold it. They would have every advantage. Triquet. Come here. Help me reason with her.”
But the Mayor doesn’t wait for Triquet’s arrival before spreading her legs into a stance that grips the earth, taking a deep breath, and intoning a long and formal chant. Her thumbtip points at spots across the island, near and far.
Esquibel drops her hands. “Oh, great. Now what is she doing?”
Triquet listens closely, finally starting to hear the individual words in the cascade of sound. “My guess is this is her prophet poem. You know, that thing everyone’s banging on about right now? And she believes it holds all the answers to our questions. She is giving you your answer, right here. Shame we can’t understand it. But I don’t like this. Seems they’re all headed for a big conflict, where all the prophet poems say opposite things about these days. They’re all getting really heated about it too.”
“So she is just…” Esquibel reaches for the words. “This is her briefing. Situational overview. Mission objectives. Available resources. But what happens when we get to the review? We need to be able to understand each other to work together, and I’m trying to tell her we can do that much better together in the caves. Bottleneck their assault. Small numbers can hold up far better against larger forces in… Wait. Now where is she going? Is she upset because I am ignoring her?”
“What do you think?”
“Well she is ignoring me too, so…”
Alonso catches up to Esquibel and Triquet, limping along behind them carrying a small backpack. “What is it? Something wrong?”
“It is that Mayor woman,” Esquibel says. “She won’t let us go into the caves. And I have told her that she is about to be invaded but she thinks…” Esquibel gives a helpless shrug, unable to describe what the Mayor thinks.
“There’s a ritual thing going on here,” Triquet interjects, their voice quiet. “Pretty sure. We’re getting deep in their cosmology now. We are like so so in the wrong place at the wrong time with these people. Who knows how peaceful their little transition would have gone if we’d never shown up and wrecked it all.”
“What did we wreck?” Alonso asks. “We have been very good. After we leave, there will be no trace of us.”
“Except for a burned out elevator shaft. That was us.” Flavia is compelled to keep the record straight, even though calling it out makes Mandy—who approaches arm in arm with Katrina—turn away in sudden grief.
“Well, yes, but that could have been anything.” Alonso gives them an eloquent shrug. “Lightning could have done that.”
“Katrina.” Esquibel raps out an order. “Go make sense to that Mayor person. We don’t need anything from them except passage through their village. See if you can make her see—”
“Make her? Ah, Christ,” Katrina groans, “What have you done this time, Lieutenant Commander?” She pushes past Esquibel with a smile on her face and a Bontiik for everyone she sees. Slowly Katrina makes her way across the village to the Mayor’s hut, where the older woman is in and out, packing a small pouch with stones and cords. A sling? Is she going bird-hunting? Now? “Bontiik?” Katrina offers, stepping close and chucking the chin of the Mayor. The woman looks tired today, her eyes even more deep-set and worried than usual. Katrina studies her, marveling at her features. She has a strong aquiline nose with a blunted tip that hangs above her pointed chin. Wide sad eyes. A broad forehead that somehow promises strength and wisdom. An expressive, downturned mouth. She likes her. Katrina smiles at the Mayor in admiration, like some daffy undergrad meeting her favorite folk singer at the coffee shop, and tries to communicate. “The Ussiaxan…”
The Mayor grunts and steps past her out into the village square, headed for the slope behind the huts and the line of trees to the west. Unspooling the cords as she goes, a leather patch is revealed that can hold the surprisingly small stones. She is going bird hunting. This isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing. Not at all. There’s a fucking war about to start, mate. We have to defend ourselves. Yet Katrina can’t say these things. She follows at a discreet distance instead.
The Mayor steps softly through the undergrowth, head cocked, sling hanging from her wrist. Her feet are noiseless on the dry pine needles. Her eyes flick from tree to tree above.
The canopies are alive with birds. If she’s hunting for food there’s plenty of fat targets flying all around her. But she must be after one particular kind of bird. Or maybe one bird. Maybe there’s like one bird out here who’s been keeping her up all night and she’s just had it. And his name is like Justin. Justin, you’ve had your day, boy. Now she’s coming to get you.
When it happens, it’s so fast Katrina doesn’t really grasp what she saw. Reconstructing it later, she figures the Mayor dropped a stone from her palm into the leather patch, swung it like not even more than a half-arc with a snap of her wrist, and was stepping to where the dark songbird lay twitching on the ground before its suddenly stilled song had left the air.
It has a black coat and blue edge feathers. That’s all Katrina can see of it before the Mayor stoops over her victim and disembowels it with a flake of obsidian hafted to a wooden handle like a pencil. She pours its innards and blood onto her hand and pokes through them with her miniature spear.
The Mayor turns to Katrina and glares at her, as if displeased to have been followed. But then she says something… something about the Ussiaxan…
“The Ussiaxan, they are not coming.” Katrina turns to find Jidadaa standing behind her, along with an old villager. Ah. That’s Morska Vidra and his fox. Katrina takes a long moment to ingest the meaning of these translated words.
“They aren’t…? You mean like according to the poor little bird entrails?” Katrina doesn’t think she can get her rational-minded colleagues to go along with that.
Jidadaa nods slowly, a gesture she’s seen the researchers make. “And me. I go there. I listen. They talk about fox. Not Keleptel village. Ussiaxan not come here. Fox has babies tomorrow. They listen to new poem. Now Daadaxáats is koox̱.”
It takes a moment for Katrina to translate this. “Daadaxáats is the sky shaman. Sherman. And koox̱ is slave. Yes, they have them as a slave. I saw. So the shaman is getting the villagers all riled up about the fox with their own prophet poem?”
“Shaman lead them. They all go back into the hills. To find her. Fox babies are all thing to a village. Ussiaxan live with none. Many years now. Why them so danger. No soul. No heart. No love.”
“Okay. So what you’re saying…” But now Jidadaa is telling the Mayor the same news in her own language, that they are safe, that the Keleptel village will not be invaded. “Yeh, your Honor,” Katrina agrees. “Turns out the entrails spoke the truth.”
The Mayor leads them back to the village, to find that Esquibel has moved into position at the cave mouth, while Alonso stands with the others where they were left, now engaged in animated arguments about what to do next. He sees those who approach and breaks off his dispute with Miriam, squeezing her arm. “Eh. It is the Mayor! Uh, Bontiik! Ma’am! I very much want to thank you for those leaf wraps and your herbal treatment! It has done wonders! And I was hoping I could perhaps get another, when you had a chance… Oh! Pardon.” Alonso steps back, realizing that the Mayor is trying to get around him and has something to announce. She calls out in a voice loud enough to carry to every corner of the village. Heads lift then drop, the villagers going back to their daily chores. They all seem content to let her news pass with silence. Then the Mayor returns to her hut and goes inside.
“What did she say?” Alonso asks Katrina.
“That there will be no attack. The Ussiaxan are hunting foxes.”
“Oh, praise be.” Miriam sighs and puts down the huge pack she carries, like ninety percent of their belongings. She hadn’t looked forward to wrestling it through the tunnel and now she won’t need to. “So can we stay here?”
“Did you hear that, Esquibel?” Alonso calls out across the village. “Peace has been restored. There will be no attack.”
“What?” Esquibel squawks, too far away. She steps from the cave mouth, unwilling to come out much farther. “Why?”
But instead of answering her, Jidadaa turns to Alonso. “And Morska Vidra. He saw your friend Amy.”
“He did?” Alonso and Miriam both turn, to the girl and the old man and then back to each other, overcome by the sudden relief of hearing word of Amy. “She is fine?” Alonso asks.
“She is with the fox. For birth.”
“Oh my days she’s a midwife,” Miriam laughs, releasing even more tension. Then she sighs. “This must be some kind of absolute dream come true for Amy. And she’s well? She’s safe?”
Jidadaa smiles. “The fox is still alive.”
Ξ
Pradeep walks under the eaves of the trees the Mayor just visited. The bird life here is so rich. They flit and soar and flutter, the air alive with their wings. In just a single glance he finds a Steller’s Jay, two nuthatches, and a family of robins, with two red-tail hawks soaring above and a clutch of quails rustling below. A riot of passerine life, loud and boisterous and mostly fearless. The jay lands close and brays at him, cocking an irate eye.
Pradeep bows. “Pardon my trespass. I am only here to look.”
He steps deeper into the trees, thinking of Amy. She is out here somewhere living like an animal, in the world of animals. If it had been anyone else, Pradeep would have been concerned. But back at Cal State Monterey her exploits were legendary. Who knows? This is maybe just another Tuesday to her.
But he misses Amy, so he consoles himself with the birds she loves. She taught him nearly everything he knows about West Coast populations and distributions. They only had a handful of mornings together in the hills above Prunedale, cataloguing the chickadees in the grasses. But she expanded his view out to the horizon and the sea birds that dwell there. The dunes and coastline are themselves an entire ecosystem, with pipers and pelicans and egrets seen nowhere else.
On Lisica, he’d just like to find an inland pond of some size. That’s the goal he’s set himself these last few days here. Alonso wants new data, from under-represented sites? Good. A nice pond or lake would be brilliant. So he’ll just stretch his legs to the top of this ridgeline and see if the neighboring valley has any bodies of water he can see from above.
As he ascends to a saddle between two impassable outcrops, a head disappears from view. It is one of the Thunderbird clan. So Jidadaa was right. They are still watching from a distance. What an odd name for them. How are they in any way the Thunderbird? They are the most secretive and mystical of all the tribes here. Why would they have such a bellicose name? Maybe Katrina knows…
No, he can see nothing of the next valley on the far side. The view is too obscured with thick forest. And there’s no clear way down from here that wouldn’t involve some bouldering and perhaps a bit of rappelling. So. Time to turn around.
He is surprised to find Xaanach trailing him, chewing on a stick. “Oh. Hello. Pleased to meet you.” Pradeep doesn’t recognize her. He’d been insensate when she led the others back to him before.
“Wetchie-ghuy.” She crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out, then smiles wolfishly at him.
“Ah. Yes. Indeed.” There is something uncanny about this child. She is tiny, and waif-thin. Also quite ratty in appearance, with her hair a tangle of detritus and her shift torn to rags. “Wetchie-ghuy is a bad man. Common enemy. Friends, yes?” Pradeep can’t seem to shake his stiff formality. He had never been good with kids. Even when he was a kid. Perhaps this little urchin has the same problem. “Pradeep.” He places a hand on his chest and bows.
“Xaanach.”
“Ah! Xaanach! I remember you now! Our little rescuer. Flavia loves you, you know. And you don’t live… with the others or… anywhere…?” He looks around, questioning each compass point. But she doesn’t seem to respond to any one direction.
So Pradeep points to the birds instead, naming them. “Let’s see. Black-capped chickadee. Goldfinch. Goldfinch. Steller’s Jay. You know what?” he asks her, heartened to see Xaanach pays close attention. “I haven’t seen any of the larger Corvidae since we got here. No crows or ravens or… Huh. These jays are the largest we’ve seen. No magpies. Do you have magpies here?”
The girl responds in a torrent of mish-mash. It sounds like child talk, not even Lisican. She presses her filthy palms together and twists them, then reaches out to grasp him by the wrist.
“Oh. Uh… Okay.” Pradeep allows himself to be led back down the slope, but at a northeastern angle away from the village below. Yet she almost immediately thinks better of it. She halts and says something abrupt, then pulls Pradeep around and releases his hand. She yanks at the tail of his shirt, trying to get under it. “Wow! Uh, what are you, uh…?”
She repeats one word until he understands it. Lisica. She wants to see if he still has a fox on his tailbone. “How do you know about that? Just who is this kid?” He looks around, as if he might see her parents waiting patiently at a distance. But of course Pradeep and Xaanach are alone. And evidently his Thunderbird bodyguard doesn’t consider her a threat. So…
Pradeep untucks his shirt and displays his lower back to her. She gets uncomfortably close and he smells her rankness. The poor thing has maybe never had a bath in her life. She prods his skin and picks at something like a scab. Then she steps away and grabs his wrist again. But he pulls away. “Let me—Hold on! Let me get my shirt back in first then I’ll go wherever you want. I promise.”
The instant his hand is free again she snares it and pulls him forward once more. She drops down the steepest pitch of the slope, heedless to the dirt sliding around their feet, then picks her way patiently along a spine of descending rock to the crown of a massive red granite outcrop overlooking the valley below.
“Whoa…!” They stop at the very edge, the void appearing suddenly beneath their feet and falling away a hundred meters to a jumble of fallen stone. Maybe more. Pradeep scrambles back and Xaanach giggles, joining him, still holding his wrist. “Could use a warning, if you’re going to take me over a cliff. Next time.”
He examines the view more closely. This is one of the most narrow valleys he has seen. Beyond the rockfall is a pretty glade of ancient bay trees and the glitter of water through the trees. Is that the lake he seeks? “So pretty. Such a nice little sightseeing tour…”
But now the girl only grows more serious. She begins chanting, in ragged imitation of the other prophet poems they have heard. Pradeep turns away from the view of the canyon to study her instead. This is hers? This little wilderness orphan even has a poem? Who taught her? What is her story? Oh, how he wishes he could understand her. Pradeep fumbles with his phone, to record her, but of course only gets the last few fragments before she stops. Then she grasps his hand again, this time in a ritual manner.
Pradeep puts his phone away and stands straight, attempting to give this girl the gravity she demands. Then she takes out a small flake of flint and slices open the tip of his ring finger. “Ow! Hey! I didn’t say you could…!”
But she waves his protests away and snares his hand again, chuckling to herself in a way no child does. She pulls on his finger, pressing it against the stone of the cliff top, as near to the edge as he will let her take him. “Stop! You’ll get it infected!” But she isn’t satisfied until a good fat smear of purple blood is pressed into the granite. Then she releases him.
“Absolutely mad, you are.” Pradeep backs away from the girl and her precipice, holding his finger up. Wilderness medical training says to bleed a small wound like this, use the blood to wash the dirt out. Flush it back up to the surface of the skin. So he is satisfied to see another bright bead roll down his finger. Good. The cut is clean. That rock had been sharp. It should heal fine.
Xaanach appears to be done with him. In fact, the smile she grants him is one of great relief, as if she just accomplished something she has long been attempting. Then she turns away, looking out over the valley, and emits a piercing scream in perfect imitation of the red-tail hawks soaring over the treetops.
Ξ
Several of the villagers are still awake in the dark, tending small fires before their huts. Their murmurs are punctuated by laughter. Where Morska Vidra’s house had been is now a makeshift camp for a handful of the crew. Alonso stretches out on a pile of mats and bags under the cloudy sky while Mandy and Katrina try to resume their treatment of his legs. Jidadaa sits nearby, watching.
Mandy marvels at the progress he has made. “Oh my god. The tissues are actually moving again. Feel that?” She moves her hands at contrasting angles across his left calf. Before, it had been a shockingly undifferentiated mass of scar tissue and swollen flesh, but now the individual muscles and tendons can be identified. “Even your scars look better. Like the ones on your feet. We got to get some of that magic herbal treatment for Esquibel’s hip. And for everything Jay’s gone through. How does it feel?”
“Still very painful to the touch like that,” Alonso answers tightly, his breath caught in his diaphragm. “Yes, it is much better, more than I could dare dream, but I’d also say that your adjustments were a critical part of that, Mandy, even though they hurt like the fucking devil. So you have my deepest gratitude. Are you going to now do more of the same?”
“Oh yeah, frankly we’re just getting started. You need months of these treatments. But better the pain now…”
Alonso lifts an interrupting hand. “Platitudes are unnecessary.” He lies back, frowning at the dark gray sky. “Do what you must.”
“Ooo look at the tough chap.” Katrina pokes him in the shoulder and Jidadaa laughs. “Trying desperately to remember the Stoic philosophers he read in college right now. Or is it the Buddhists?”
“What are you adding here, Katrina, exactly?” Alonso pushes her irritating pokes away. “Did you expect me to take your drugs? Here? With all that is happening?”
Katrina shrugs. “I mean, I did bring them…” She takes out a folded and sealed ziploc. “But I understand your concerns.”
Alonso waves the baggie away. “I cannot, as the head of this mission, with all these active security concerns. I must be better. No more nights of drunken stupor. No more drugs until I am relieved of command. Please do not try to convince me otherwise.”
Katrina shakes her head and sets the MDMA and LSD aside. “I will not. I never would. I mean, these tiny paper squares only make the pretty pictures if you’re open and ready and your surroundings are safe. And our surroundings…” She looks around herself, shaking her head in despair. “Nice to hear news of Amy, yeh?”
“My god, yes.” Alonso appreciates how carefully Katrina is handling him as he deals with the apprehension of yet more pain. Mandy’s hands have already started to pull apart things that do not want to be separated. He wants to focus instead on Katrina. “You know, I do find that our two sessions have had a very deep, very profound effect on me. I would not want you to think I do not appreciate them, even if I do not quite recall most of them, and what I do is very… Ah! Yes, that long one, Mandy, is the center of the whole left ankle problem. No, Katrina, what I do recall is very embarrassing. But the thing is, it actually isn’t. I mean, I remember weeping like a baby and saying all kinds of humiliating things. All my weakness on display. And yet, even with these memories, I am not embarrassed. I know I should be, or rather that I would have been in the past, but none of the crazy things I did before you mattered because I know I was surrounded by love. We all love each other. I hope Pavel your brother, when you see him, appreciates all the love you bring to his healing.”
“Aw, that’s so kind and thoughtful. Thank you so much.” Katrina smiles sincerely and cocks her head. “So can I ask you what your trips were like, I mean as much as you can tell me, and about how it changed? You know, for like my own research…”
But now Alonso is groaning as Mandy presses on his ankle’s scar tissue and flexes his foot, forcing the fibers to stretch and align. He starts panting, reaching out for Katrina’s hand to squeeze.
“Breathe.” Mandy spares a hand to press down on Alonso’s diaphragm. He is shocked to have his attention brought there and it makes him gasp, releasing so much of what he holds. He takes his first deep breath and Mandy stretches his foot even further.
“Oi.” Katrina is playfully merciless. “I’m talking here. Taking data. You know, for science? So if you could maybe stop thinking about yourself for a moment, you old queen, and answer?”
Alonso stutters a laugh through the pain. “Alright. Yes. Good idea. Get my mind off it with some pleasant—ah! recollections. Yes. Well, I will have to say that I did not enjoy either drug so much as when we finally combined them together that one night with the dancing. That was… I mean, that was space travel.”
“Yeh, that’s what we call it. Space tripping and candy flipping. The mind and the body altogether at once. The deep celebration.”
“Yes, that is very much how it feels. To allow yourself to love what you have, even the very ooooohhhhhh…” Mandy’s hands grind his words to a halt.
“Even the very…? Yes?” But Katrina will get nothing more from him for a long while. “Lots of forgiveness in these sessions. To other people and also yourself. I saw you forgive yourself for a lot of things on those nights.” Katrina takes her own deep breath and gently shifts her hand in his tightening grasp before he breaks it.
Alonso squeezes tears out from between his closed eyes. “Yes. Gracias. This is much of what I oohhhh… what I am saying. I have forgiven my legs for looking like this. The pain for making me feel so stupid and depressed. There had been… so much guilt.”
“Breathe!” Mandy presses on Alonso’s diaphragm again. “You tense up and it doesn’t work.”
But Alonso finds it nearly impossible to release and face the pain defenseless. It is just too much. And Mandy is relentless. He goes rigid, slamming the back of his head against the ground to take his attention away from Mandy, who is tearing his feet from his legs and taking whole minutes to do it.
“Hey, hey… Shh…” Katrina cradles Alonso’s head and his eyes snap open, flicking up and left, then off to the middle distance. “Okay, bit of neuro-linguistic programming here. According to my sources in the military what you’re doing is processing some of the trauma that’s connected to those exact injuries here. A little bit of flashback, maybe?”
Alonso nods, trying to let the shade of the cackling sadist pass through him and not catch on anything rough or jagged. He needs to be clear to survive this, to let the pain cleanse him instead of damage him. The acrid smell of his torturer, the chill in the air. These are the sensations he needs to forget before he can finally face the looming silhouette of the man over him. “There is still… one forgiveness…” he pants, “I am having trouble with, Katrina my dear…” Alonso gags on the memory. “I thought I was doing far better than this. But there are still demons hiding in my legs. Ah!”
The Mayor silently appears at the edge of their camp with a frown. She holds wads of black leaves and a jar of paste.
Alonso sees her. He sits up and reaches out to her as a savior. “Ah! Yes, please, Your Honor! Thank you so much for your help!”
But the Mayor doesn’t approach. She shares a disturbed look with them instead, distressed by this much pain.
“It isn’t me, mate,” Katrina mocks, “Mandy’s the one who did all the nasty stuff to him. I’m just here for the internal bits.”
“I never hurt him!” Mandy is indignant. “This is healing pain!” She reaches tentatively for the Mayor’s left arm and grasps it. Then after rotating it, Mandy says, “this one’s a bit tight here. See?” She traps the tendon and pulls gently on it. Then she massages it a bit and hands the Mayor her arm back.
The Mayor flexes her arm and studies Mandy. Then she drops to Alonso’s side and begins to cover his right leg with paste while Mandy continues her work on his left. They work in silence. Soon he is wrapped in dark leaves and dozing, his head in Katrina’s lap.
After all the others quietly depart, Katrina is alone with Alonso. “Now where…?” She pats around herself for the folded ziploc baggie, unwilling to shift and disturb him. “Uh oh. That’s bad. Where did it go?”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 