Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us on our 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 chapter:

5 – Six Hundred And Twelve

Alonso sits in the camp chair on the beach. But this time he faces away from the surf. He regards the towering black cliffs rising up into gray mist before him. How mighty they are! It stirs his love for nature’s majesty in his heart. That had been one of the only other things his captors hadn’t been able to take from him: the wonder and awe the Altai Mountains bestowed on him every time he was allowed outside. Spectacular views from their high notch canyon, crowded by peaks that never lost their white caps…

Bah. But no more visions of that hellhole. No more thinking behind. His demons must crawl back into their pits. They must! Only think ahead now. Don’t mourn your losses, Alonso, you little baby. Invest in what remains. Miriam. Plexity. Lisica. If that means a wheelchair for the rest of my life, so be it. If that means pain? So be it. I am here. I am free again. I have already won.

But the majesty, oh the majesty of these vaulting cliffs of Lisica! So grim and forbidding, but yet so lush and exotic. They are built for opera, for grand gestures, for learning the dimensions of god!Whatever god he has been able to identify (despite an intensely Catholic upbringing) comes from his study of the natural world. The profound and beautiful are keepsakes he collects and stores in his heart. Sometimes they are all that keep him going!

Here comes Maahjabeen. She wears a jade ankle-length sarong and ivory silk headscarf and looks like a tropical figure out of time. Her face has softened from a day on the water and her half smile still connects her to something beloved and faraway. For the first time, Alonso realizes she is a beautiful woman. He resolves to treat her with even more formal professional distance than before.

“Doctor Alonso,” she calls out in her throaty Mediterranean alto. “Thank you so much for introducing me to this lagoon. It is truly a marvel. I’m not sure there’s anything like it anywhere in the world! Oh, the papers I can write!”

“Well, it is my pleasure to have you here, Miss Charrad. And I hope it leads to the position of your dreams. What did you find?”

“Well, first, the water is brackish. That means significantly more freshwater than the waterfall can bring is somehow being added to the water of the lagoon. Maybe from underground?”

“Miriam supposes the same thing. There is a limestone layer to this island that may be filled with caves and tunnels.”

“Yes, I see. It changes the salinity and temperature to a dramatic degree. There are some fascinating water column interactions, especially in the eddies along the barrier rocks. Quite dangerous.” Alonso still faces the cliffs but Maahjabeen stands at his shoulder looking out, as ever, over the surf. What more should she tell him? Despite her initial frustration this morning, the remainder of the day had been magical. The lagoon is absolutely pristine, in ways no body of water she has ever been able to study is. And Pradeep as a biologist guide had been a fascinating experience. He possesses one of the most unique minds she has ever encountered. And he is no more than a doctoral student here. Who are these people? She had been reasonably impressed by Miriam Truitt’s resume when she researched it before accepting the position but now she’s fairly convinced she’s somehow fallen in with scientific royalty and she hadn’t even realized it. And now the lagoon! “It is the perfect laboratory for a number of different wave and surf experiments because it is so perfectly excluded from man-made effects. I was just reading literature before I left about how much of a challenge it is in the oceanographic research community to get true baseline readings of a lot of ocean characteristics in certain regions these days because they can’t control for human influence. But here we can! As long as we keep it as pristine as possible!”

“I understand. No swimming.”

But she is transported by the possibilities now. The open water will always be her first love, yet what the stewardship of a lagoon such as this one could provide, with a claim none can dispute… Well, it really is beyond her wildest dreams. Being able to build her own program in her own remote location has always been what she desires most. Since she first realized she could marry her two loves, maths and the ocean, into a daily routine, a career, a gateway to the whole world, this has been her dream. Now, just by being the first and best candidate in Japan with her gear when it came time to leave, she has fallen into a preposterous fantasy of beauty and possibility. Oh, God is good, indeed. She realizes she hasn’t spoken for long seconds and the old man’s haggard face searches hers. Maahjabeen sighs and drops her eyes. “Eight weeks. It is not nearly enough time.”

Alonso merely watches the sweep of emotion and hope fill and drain from her face. Why, everything about her is tidal, with deep unexpected currents. Alonso has felt many of these things himself, and guesses where her thoughts lead her. “Let us know what title and bio you’d like for us to use in our publications. We’ll do what we can to keep primacy of place here after the island opens up to outsiders, but…” He shrugs. “It is a complex system, that is for sure. Political and geostrategic and all that nonsense. But speaking of complexity, I hope you’ve had a chance to review that document I shared yesterday. I need you to be able to approach the lagoon and the ocean—and the beach and the cliffs and the sky—with our new classification system. I want you to be looking at relationships and connections first. Plexity means that we see life as a massive supercomputer running trillions of algorithms at once. So in our short time here let us get to the metadata.”

Maahjabeen is nodding along with the points he makes. This is language she can understand. Frankly, his idea is too revolutionary to appeal to her. It scares her and she worries about getting too caught up in it. This is not her fight. But as a maths student she grasps the wisdom of his approach here. They have limited time. “Try to make a quick sketch of the whole thing,” she slowly reasons, “instead of focusing on a single feature. Is that it?”

“Not quite. I believe that our study must not be a sketch. It must still maintain the greatest detail and rigor possible. Only our focus has changed. The features we study now are the connective tissues themselves. The bit players in the opera, the chorus. You know opera? How there is nothing without the fullness of the chord structure and the power of the voices raised together in harmony?”

Maahjabeen shakes her head. “I think you missed your calling, Doctor, as a cult leader. You make very persuasive arguments.”

Alonso shrugs. “Or an opera director. But there is still time for me! Watch out, La Scala! Here I come!”

Ξ

Jay runs through the ferns, hunched over, ducking and weaving through the thin branches of flowering trees he doesn’t recognize. He holds his one remaining hiking pole in his off-hand like a spear. He feels primeval. Finally.

For somebody used to trail-running sixty kilometers per week he is starting to lose his marbles here.

Sure, Alonso told him not to worry about climbing the cliff and to focus on the beach but come on. He can do both. There’s enough hours in the day, and he already spent the morning crawling through redwood duff collecting owl pellets. So now it’s time for the cliffs again.

The run is frustratingly short and he soon fetches up at the skirt of a talus pile at the base of the cliff. Jay has now examined the base of the entire edifice, from the point to the north where the cliff terminates in a jagged line of barrier rocks that continue out into open ocean, to the knob in the southeast that is nothing but a giant clay deposit with slick chutes leading right into the surf.

The far side of the waterfall’s pond and creek, apart from being unreachable, is fully coated in vegetation. There will be no climbing on that nearly vertical layer of soil.

When he stands back on the beach and regards the cliffs, their bare rock faces rise out of the misty greenery at about the height of the trees, which varies from around sixty to a hundred meters. It’s that bare rock he hungers for, nearly as much as Miriam does. He loves free-climbing, especially virgin routes. And here, here is the one spot left where he thinks he has a shot at getting up to it.

The talus pile is a collection of jagged silicates. Shiny pyrite veins in dark gray rock indicates that much. But it is covered with loose soil that he needs to somehow stabilize if he is going to be able to test those lowest-sprouting manzanita as anchors. He wishes he had more than a hundred-fifty meters of rope with him, but it is what it is.

Jay runs back to camp, to loot the last bits of material left over from building the platforms. Maybe he can build something like a pier system with some framing, perhaps start with some terrace work to shore up the loose soil beneath. He can make this work. He can make anything work!

Ξ

Amy has spent the morning sweeping and cleaning the bunker to turn it into a fully-functional residence. Something better than those tarps would have to cover the holes in the roof at some point and she’d need a different answer for the front door. She can’t use the one at the bottom of the stairs, it wouldn’t be removed from its steel frame in the concrete wall without explosives. So she hasn’t solved that one yet, though next time she has a moment she’ll go browse the edge of the lagoon and see if she can find any cattails or similar fibrous species that she can use to weave a door panel.

“Prad, can I get a hand?” She spots his lean figure stalking like a heron through camp. At least, she is fairly certain it is him. She doesn’t have her glasses on and people are just fuzzing out at distance these days.

“What is it, O Principal Investigator of mine?”

“We’re moving these tables inside. Get them away from the crabs and everyone. Help me clear them off.”

They busy themselves with quiet industry. Both grew up learning what hard work is in relatives’ restaurants. For Amy it was her father’s noodle shop. For Pradeep it was his uncle’s pizza delivery. It is something she likes about him, that he can hose out a lab and scrub the walls clean in record time. Jay would still be leaning on his mop trying to decide which album should be his soundtrack to the end-of-shift duties while Prad would be cleaning the grout with a toothbrush.

Amy is stronger than she looks. She lifts one end of the longest table and after Pradeep lifts the other she starts walking backward toward the bunker. Soon they have it installed along the lefthand wall and Pradeep is describing how he can set up a row of serial workstations with a shared power source running behind.

“Well, then the kitchen can be back here.” Amy points to a back corner, the one closer to the front of the bunker that doesn’t have the trapdoor set in it. “See? There’s already a hole in the roof for ventilation.”

“Isn’t that where you were sleeping last night?”

“I can find another spot. Don’t worry about me. I’m thinking like shoji screens. Some privacy for people. We could probably squeeze like six different little rooms in this middle space here.”

“Cells. Like monks. That’s fine. I’m happy outside.”

“And don’t tell anyone but I’m tempted to sleep in the Captain’s bunk down in the sub, it’s only Triquet won’t let me yet.”

“I still haven’t seen it.” Pradeep glances down the stairs with a frown. “It’s… a submarine. That’s just so weird.”

“It sure is. And it breathes.” Pradeep only frowns more. He falls silent in an uncharacteristic way. Amy’s mothering instincts kick into gear and she puts a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. What is it?”

“Ehh, something I was hoping I wouldn’t ever have to share. I just, when I was a kid, well I had a long history of anxiety and panic attacks. I never said, but when we first met I was on a whole pile of daily pharmaceuticals.” She tries to say something but he holds up a hand to forestall her. “I’m off them now. All of them. I’ve gotten better as I got older. But that’s from usually having a good long time to prepare myself for changes. I wasn’t able to do that this time, and well, these are changes. Big changes.”

“Submarines buried in a beach are like that.”

Pradeep laughs, a tense stuttering sound. Amy catches his hand. “It’s okay, Prad. I’m here for you. We can do this, right?”

“Please don’t tell anyone.”

His eyes possess a strange light, one she’s never seen. Then she realizes that it’s true, she’s never seen him outside of prepared environments. Oh, Amy! She should have realized his reticence and aloof manner had darker roots. This was really her fault. “I shouldn’t have put you in this position. I’m so sorry.”

“No! I can overcome this.” He shakes himself like a cat. “I can. Lisica is the opportunity of a dozen lifetimes. I just… I have what you can call a hyperactive imagination and normally I’m able to keep it under control but… I think I’ll be spending most of my time with Maahjabeen in the lagoon if that’s okay with you.”

“It is. Of course. She’s literally glowing about your discoveries there. It really transformed her. I hope we get a chance this…”

But Pradeep only nods at Amy, dark eyes hooded, mouth in a bitter line. He steps past her and backs to the bunker’s entrance, his eyes never leaving the open trap door.

Ξ

Miriam stands at the foot of the talus pile, taking a video with her phone. The battery is getting low and she needs to find a place to plug it in. Her external batteries are getting low too and since Esquibel won’t let anyone set up their solar panels in direct sunlight they are drawing nowhere near their maximum.

It’s a shame the impulsive California lad didn’t wait for her before starting to dig up the slope. Even a few pictures of how the rocks and soil naturally fell could speak volumes about this cliff and its recent history. But by the time she has gotten here he has already turned the pile of soil into compacted terraces and he’s attempting to sink poles into the gaps between the fallen rocks to build a platform here against the cliff’s crumbling base. “And then what?” she wonders aloud.

Jay startles, muffling a yelp. Then he laughs, turning to see her. “Doctor Truitt. Didn’t hear you coming.”

“Forgot you invited me already, eh?”

To her surprise, he blushes, dropping his eyes. “No, no! Never! Just got caught up in my little engineering project. Flashing back to my landscaper days.”

Her eyes fall to the joint he has going, balanced on the knife-edge of a piece of quartzite. A thin ribbon of smoke uncoils into the fitful breeze. She looks at him, her gaze heavy.

“Oh. You want a hit?” He doesn’t know how to handle her gaze and he pinches it between his fingers to offer it to her.

Miriam laughs. “I was actually trying to figure out how to ask without sacrificing my dignity. Thanks.” She takes it and inhales, her eyes almost instantly going wide. She exhales in a gush. “Saints preserve us this is so strong.”

“Yeah, grew this Sour Diesel myself. It’s my morning weed. Better than coffee. But if you aren’t used to…”

Miriam giggles and puts a hand out, sagging against a pole. “Dear Mary and Joseph… Ah! Listen to me! Ha! I’m so high I became Catholic again.” She giggles once more and then takes a deep shuddering breath. She sags even more deeply against the pole, threatening to dislodge it.

“Hey, whoa, whoa there…” Jay gently grabs Miriam’s arm and directs her to a soft spot in the dirt. “Just finally got that one set.”

“Sorry.” Miriam’s gaze is wheeling, across the gray clouds that cover them like a quilt to the black silhouettes of the cliff’s edges high above. “Haven’t had a puff in… I mean, it’s still quite illegal in Japan. Months now. Maybe a year. But I was the biggest pothead before, when Alonso was gone, and… Who-eee!” Miriam grabs her temples and rocks back. “You’re actually functional on this shit?”

Jay grimaces. “Tolerance is a bitch. Yeah. Just take it easy for a few minutes. You’ll be fine. Did you bring any water?”

But Miriam is lost in her high. Her eyes scale the cliffs, words that identify formations falling away like cheap labels. Just because one stratum shares minerals with another doesn’t justify that they can be called the same thing. They are as dissimilar as two people, that one tall narrow outcrop and the other beside it with the broad forehead and wise demeanor. Miriam chuckles again. Yes, she never gets weed like this. It’s nearly a psychedelic trip.

Jay is worried he’s broken her. He didn’t bring any water himself. He’s always forgetting it. Maybe he should run back to get some but he can’t just leave her here in this state. He takes a meditative drag on the joint and exhales. Might as well get back to work.

Miriam pushes clumsily against Jay’s shoulder and giggles again. “You’re dangerous.” But the alluring way she says it, it sounds like a compliment. Now he’s worried she’s hitting on him. Oh, great. Not the boss’s wife. Not again. Yet the way she looks at him isn’t coy at all. She’s assessing him like an officer looking for volunteers for a suicide raid.

How is he supposed to respond to her? He’s suddenly uncovered some mad Irish layer to this middle-aged geologist. Well. When in doubt, smoke more. He takes another hit. “Thank you.” But he doesn’t offer her any more. Jay goes back to work, setting the first crosspiece against two vertical poles. He lashes it with twine. Whoever thought to bring so much twine was a genius.

“Whatever is the plan here?” Miriam’s voice is still idle, her pale face yet pointed at the sky. “All this work and you’ve only gained yourself, what, eight meters?”

“Well,” Jay is happy to share his ideas but he’s all too aware that it will sound insane. “The platform isn’t about height. It’s about getting close in to the wall. Having a stable place to start from. So once I get that set up then it’s a matter of tying some fishing line around a rock and trying to get it over that branch up there.” He points straight up, to a tough-looking gnarled limb sprouting from a larger manzanita cluster.

“Impossible. That’s like forty meters,” Miriam says. “Straight up. There’s no chance.”

“I don’t know.” Jay shrugs, looking like a child in his stained ball cap and t shirt. “I got a pretty good arm.”

“Okay.” Miriam takes a deep breath. She finds that every dose of oxygen to her brain brings with it a sharp thrill of joy as well as a whirling disorientation. “Sweet Jesus, I’ve never been so high! This is incredible. Fine then. You’ve got a cannon of an arm. You get the line over the branch. What then?”

“I tie the fishing line to a climbing rope and get it up and over. Then I climb up. If it holds I consolidate my position. Maybe have to build another stable platform. Repeat, maybe three or four times. I just want to get to the bare rock!”

“You and me both, lad!”

Jay grins. “It’s hilarious how Irish you get when you’re baked.”

“Aye, tis true.” She regards him, starting to feel the bruised edges of her life creeping in again. But Miriam doesn’t want another hit of the devil weed. She’s already done enough hiding in bottles and bongs. Now she has Alonso back and an absolutely excellent piece of research to accomplish. And her greatest work: putting her husband back together. She sits up and scrubs her face. “You’ve got a lot of this herb? Enough to share every once in a while?”

“I brought enough THC to kill an elephant.”

“Thank Christ.” They laugh.

Jay looks soberly at Miriam. “The longer I’m here, Doc—”

“Miriam, please.”

“Yeah, the longer I’m here, Miriam, the more convinced I am that the interior of this island…” He cranes his head up, where the brow of the cliff hides all else from view, “…has got to be a fucking biological wonderland. This is nothing here, on the beach. I mean, it’s already more than our wildest expectations, but the interior. Man, the interior. Can you imagine what we’ll find in there?”

Ξ

Esquibel uses a heavy knife to trim twelve long branches. She hauls them inside the bunker where she’s claimed a section of the back wall for her clean room. With four branches she builds a square frame three meters to a side. Then she builds two more and covers them in the heavy translucent plastic sheeting she brought for the purpose. With a lot of sweat and cursing and help from Mandy she is able to suspend a sheet over the top and, belatedly, under the cube on the bottom. Then Esquibel uses tape to seal the seams. She slices a door slit in one sheet and then hangs an overlapping sheet over it. Finally, she removes a small fan with HEPA filters from its packaging and cuts out a hole for its vent. There. Now she won’t suffocate and nobody will die of infection. Not if she has anything to say about it, at least.

“Knock knock.” A shadow with Triquet’s voice stands outside.

“Yes?” Esquibel wishes for a desk, some useful surface where she can set up her microscope and other equipment. She should commandeer a stack of those plastic bins. For now she just stands awkwardly in the center of her space.

Triquet slips between the overlapped plastic sheets to enter and admire the room. “Very nice. Love what you’ve done with the place. A few throw pillows and some track lighting and we could call it home.”

Esquibel suddenly feels protective for what she’s built. “If you’re here to use the clean room for your dirty artifacts, Doctor Triquet, I must respectfully deny the—”

Triquet interrupts her with an airy wave of their hand. “No no, don’t worry. I need more ventilation than this once I get going. I’ve got a sandblaster that could strip the hide off a horse.”

“Well, then, how else might I help you?”

“I made an oopsie.” Triquet, dressed in a pastel blue smock dress and work boots, with pink lipstick and a matching headband holding back their thin green-streaked hair, looks like some kind of impudent cross between Dennis the Menace and Gidget. They hold up a flask. “I think I’ve been contaminated.”

Esquibel takes the flask and unscrews the lid. “What is it?”

“Water. Just water. But I wasn’t thinking and like an idiot when I was washing at the pool I forgot the water hadn’t been tested yet.”

“Did you drink any?”

“Just a few swallows. I was like, ‘Oh, this is so delicious and fresh!’ and then I was like, ‘Triquet, what are you doing? Your head is made completely out of tuna salad.’ I just wasn’t thinking.”

“When was this?”

“Five or ten minutes ago.”

“And how do you feel?” Esquibel turns on her phone’s flashlight and shines it through the transparent plastic of the flask. The water looks clear, with almost no organic bits floating around.

“Fine. I just don’t want… I mean, I’ve had just about every nasty nasty you can get in the field. Dengue, cholera, malaria… Well, maybe not malaria. It was never confirmed. But I sure felt like butt and lost a good ten kilos. Just in time for bikini season too. I really really don’t want to get sick again. Nothing is worse than gastric issues.” They put a melodramatic back of the hand against their forehead. “One just loses the will to live.”

“I do have test kits somewhere.” Esquibel replaces Triquet’s hand with her own on their forehead. “You feel fine now. But symptoms won’t appear for some time if it’s bacterial. Loss of appetite. Fever. Low energy. Nausea. If you feel any of these things I can give you some Flagyl and it will clear you right up.”

“I really hope there’s no contamination at all.” Triquet clutches their belly in anxious anticipation. “An uncontaminated source of fresh water would be so helpful here.”

Esquibel exits the clean room, Triquet on her heels. “I should have done this when we first arrived but everyone showed up with enough water for the first few days so I let it slide. Here.” She locates one of her medical bins, still unpacked. Triquet helps her carry it back into the clean room. She removes several layers of wrapped medical gear to excavate a row of four red boxes. “These crypto giardia tests are for stool samples. We can use them after to confirm. Just… not yet. Ah, here. The water test unit.”

The Lab paddle blender is a gray and white box about the size of a laser printer. “I used one of these on my last tour. Let’s see…” Esquibel holds up a cord that ends in a plug. “Can you run power to this? I’ll get it set up.”

Triquet drags their own wheeled battery unit into the bunker. It is a twenty kilowatt per hour beast, built for remote construction projects and home backup power. And it is still over sixty percent full. They also brought a water wheel generator they plan to set up beside the waterfall. It worked so well in the Peruvian Amazon.

“How long does it take?” Triquet stands beside Esquibel as she empties the flask into the blender. She turns it on and presses buttons like she’s making an order on an office copier.

“Don’t know. Never used this model. It says it’s supposed to be fast. The one we had on ship took almost half an hour.”

“Skeebee?” Mandy’s voice calls out from outside the bunker. Another shadow darkens the bunker door’s light, diffuse through the plastic sheets, and Mandy enters the building and approaches the clean room. “Are you in there?”

“Yes, Mands.”

“Can I try to zip our bags together? It got so cold last night.”

“Yes, Mands.”

Mandy collects their sleeping bags and kneels on the bunker’s cold concrete floor. But the light is too poor and the zippers just a slightly different gauge. But it might work. She needs more light so she carries them outside, humming a pop song.

In the clean room, Triquet regards Esquibel sidelong. “So how did you girls meet?”

Esquibel makes a face. “Oh, we are not a couple or anything.” She dismisses romance with a firm gesture. Triquet’s face falls, a bit disappointed. “I mean, we were.”

“Aha! The plot thickens!”

Esquibel returns Triquet’s gaze, but finds nothing but a merry twinkle in their eyes. She wonders how much she is comfortable telling here. Aboard ships there is a hard and fast rule, at least among officers, to sharply divide private lives from public. She’d assumed the same rule would apply here. But academics are so loose with everything, including privacy. Now if she withdrew, it would be seen as some slight against team spirit. She takes a deep breath, her last thought that whatever lesbian difficulties she’d encountered over the years were probably dwarfed by the troubles Triquet had gone through. “She was my first,” she finally manages, with a weak smile filled with the tenderness of sweet memories.

“Ahh. The first ones are magic.”

“I was twenty-four, a new transfer from Kenya, with no friends and no idea how anything worked in America.”

“Where were you?”

“Colgate.”

“Ah. Attended a conference there once. Nice campus.”

“Yes. So beautiful. I thought… it was like being in a fairy tale. And all these sleek rich kids whom I was supposed to guide as a section leader for microbio classes. I shared nothing in common with any of them. And then Mandy arrived, fresh off a Hawaiian beach, just eighteen but already so natural and comfortable with herself, with her…”

“Sexuality.”

“Yes. Which I absolutely was not. She knew I was gay before I did. And she helped me discover it in the most beautiful simple way. I didn’t even know how miserable I’d been. She taught me how to love. Not just other people but myself. I had been in a very dark place. She probably saved my life.”

“Oh, that is just the sweetest story.” Triquet clasps their hands over their heart in such a tender gesture that Esquibel is convinced telling them was the right thing to do.

“Can you believe I ever let her go?”

The machine beeps. Esquibel cycles through the results on the tiny lcd screen. Triquet shrugs. “Life. What can you do?”

“I had so much debt. The Navy took care of all that. But they took me away from Mandy. No. The water is clean. You are not ill. We are safe, Doctor Triquet.”

“Hooray! Waterfall showers for all!”

“Yes, well, let me do some follow-up tests to confirm first, both with the water and stool samples from you and Flavia, since she has been more exposed than any of us.”

“Understood. I’ll watch what I drink until then. And Doctor…” Triquet pauses at the doorway slit, a sympathetic smile warming their narrow face, “…thank you for sharing your story with me. I know how—how special that trust is.”

Ξ

“Doctor Daine!” Miriam calls out, wondering if she’ll be able to get Jay all the way back to camp herself. The lad is heavier than he looks and he can’t put any weight at all on his left ankle.

Amy comes running. “Oh, no! What did you do?”

“Knocked myself out with a rock,” Jay mutters. “Then fell off a platform and twisted my ankle.” Amy tries to put his right arm over her shoulder but he hisses in pain. “And I may have broken my hand. Trying to catch the rock.”

“The one that knocked you out? Mirrie, let me take him from here. You look like you’re struggling.”

“I am. Thanks.” One slips out from his left side and another slips in to hold him up. Miriam leans against the nearest tree, catching her breath. “It was a spectacular moment, I’ll give you that.”

“We aim to please.”

“It’s your aim that got you into all this trouble.”

“Ouch.” Jay grimaces from both the movement and her words. “Fair, I guess. Harsh, but fair.”

“He threw the rock straight up.”

“The only angle I had.”

“And it was far too large.”

“The others weren’t carrying far enough.”

“And then he tried to catch it.”

“Hey, whatever. I’m an idiot, okay. But did I set the line? Did it go over the branch?”

Miriam shrugs, an eloquent but tired gesture. “Frankly, I didn’t see. I was too busy keeping you from tumbling any farther.”

“You didn’t see?” His question ends in a plaintive whine.

“Okay, here we go, Jay. Last I saw of Doctor Daine she was setting up inside the bunker. Hello? Patient for you!” They step into the cool concrete block.

Esquibel and Triquet emerge from the clean room and exit the bunker. “Oh, no. What has happened here?”

Jay shakes his head, rueful. “You’re not gonna like this.”

She leads him into the clean room, interrogating him mercilessly.

Triquet shares a look with Amy. “Got the field hospital up in the nick of time, it seems.”

“What is it about the male of the species that leads to so many injuries?” She shakes her head, perplexed. “I don’t understand.”

“And always with the feet.”

Jay yowls in pain. Esquibel snaps, “Stop being such a baby. You did it to yourself and I have to put it back, don’t I?”

Jay gasps, lying on the floor holding his leg. “Don’t they teach bedside manner…” He tries to sit up to brace himself but his injured right hand won’t bear his weight. “…in the Kenyan Navy?”

“We save our kindness for people who don’t make extra work for us out of their stupidity.”

“I get it. I get it. Imagine how I must feel. Now I won’t be able to run for months.”

“Oh, it’s only dislocated, not broken. Weeks at the most. You’re young. With some rest you’ll be fine.”

Jay calls out loudly, “Will someone please go back to the cliff and let me know if the line actually caught?”

“Maybe Miriam can show me where,” Amy responds. “After dinner. But I’d like to finish setting up the kitchen first.”

She waits for an answer from within the clean room. Nothing but low voices. Then a scream followed by several sobs.

Ξ

Miriam finds Alonso sitting in his camp chair beside the big platform, reviewing his work on his laptop. He looks up at her, peering over the rim of his reading glasses. He looks so old, so tired and gray. She wonders if she herself looks like this now, if age has finally caught her like it has caught him. No matter. She smiles, letting her love pour forth.

“What was all that about?”

“That kid smokes the fiercest herb, Zo. Nearly knocked my own self out. But what a clown. He nearly brained himself with his big plan.” She describes the scene at the cliff base to him.

Alonso curses. “Ai, caramba. I told everyone to focus on the beach. Why can’t people listen?”

Amy, passing by, puts in, “Yeah Jay isn’t what I’d call my best listener. But I do understand his eagerness to get over these cliffs.”

Alonso just stares at her. Then with a heavy sigh he points at an unpacked gray bin. “Can you please take the lid off that one, Amy? I guess our days of focusing on the beach are over.”

She drags it across the sand to him. It is heavy. “What’s in here?”

“Did I not tell everyone,” Alonso declares loudly, “that all the resources are here and the problems have been anticipated?”

Amy squints, trying to guess his riddle. Instead, she gets busy unpacking the bin, knowing this is how he wants to reveal whatever it is in here.

Esquibel and Triquet lead Jay out of the bunker moments later. He is still lost in his pain, but his eyes fall on the gear laid out on a tarp before Amy, Alonso, and Miriam. “A drone?” he squeals. “You brought a—? You had a motherfucking drone here this whole time and you didn’t even—?”

Alonso waves his cane at him. “I told you we needed to focus on the beach first!”

But Jay is too outraged to accept this. “I spent like… what day is this? How long have we been here now? Five days? Ten?”

“Uh, four. Concussion,” Esquibel explains to the others.

“Crawling over every available surface trying to find a way in!”

“There is no way in. Baitgie said the cliffs go all the way around and there’s no way past them. He said, the only times the Air Force explored the interior in the last few decades was when they dropped a team from a helicopter.”

“And…?” Jay watches as Triquet disassembles his hammock to pull his pad and bag out. They lay them on another tarp beside Amy. “I mean, what did they find in there? God damn, dude! Why didn’t you tell us any of this?”

“Because they didn’t find anything. Or if they did it didn’t register as significant to their military minds. For our purposes, it remains unexplored. Until now. But does anyone know how to fly one of these things? It is like a video game. And I am too old…”

“Prad does,” Jay says. “He ran one during his last field survey. I don’t know if it’s the same kind or if they have the same controls.”

Miriam sees Pradeep crouching at the lagoon’s edge. “I’ll ask.”

It’s taking a long time for Jay’s outrage to cool. “Can’t believe you brought a drone. What else? In what other ways are we utterly wasting our time here, Doc?”

“Please, I am not hiding anything from you, Jay. The resources I brought are too extensive to catalog. But I have a plan. And when we need things, we generally have them. Just trust me, okay? And stop trying to jump ahead.”

“Come on. Don’t be too hard on him, Alonso,” Amy interjects. “Jay is the kind of guy who reads the last page of the novel first. But in a way it’s what I love about him. He is… irrepressible.”

“Irrepressible. Laugh out loud.” Triquet fluffs Jay’s pillow and helps Esquibel lower his groaning form onto the ground. “That sounds like he’s a cartoon mascot for a kid’s cereal.”

“I hate,” Jay complains, “sleeping on the ground.”

“We need you close for observation,” Esquibel tells him. “We’ll have you inside for the next couple nights and I’ll wake you up every ninety minutes for a little neurology check.”

“Please don’t die in your sleep,” Triquet says. “That rock would never forgive itself.”

Katrina returns from the beach. Without taking in the gravity of the scene first, she sings out, “The survey is complete!”

“The survey? It is?” Esquibel laughs, a condescending sound. “We can all go home now?”

“No,” Katrina’s laugh is free and easy. “Just the survey of the cliff face. Sorry. Should have been more clear. Only a bit of geometry and shadow watching, multiplied by the hypotenuse and I’ve got the height, well… of the cliffs we can see, that is.”

“Seriously?” This flips Jay’s mood at once. He hadn’t needed to know how many impossible multiples of one hundred-fifty meters of rope the cliffs were. But there is no such thing as too much data.

“Wait,” Katrina’s eyes fall on the partially-assembled drone. “Is that the newest Airpeak? What the bloody fuck? What’s it doing here? Who was hiding this away this whole time?”

“Thank you!” Jay crows, vindicated. “Like I’m saying!”

“And what happened to you?”

Alonso shares a weary glance with Amy. “Were we ever like this? This is like teaching kindergarten.”

“Oh, we were much worse,” Amy chortles. “It was the eighties, remember?” She lifts the chassis of the drone. “Air… peek? Is that what it’s called? It just says Sony.”

Katrina nods. “Yeh, that’s a pretty piece of kit, that’s for sure. Cinema-grade platform. What’s its range? Flight time?”

“I have no idea. Somebody read the specs.” Amy hands the booklet to Katrina as Miriam leads Pradeep back to camp.

“Ooo, damn, that is like a Porsche of drones,” Pradeep croons. “I just, well, we had no budget for ours. Mine was like a bicycle.”

“It’s the new Airpeak,” Katrina says. “Okay, says here it’s twelve minutes flight time once we get the gimbal and camera on it. Not bad. It goes like eighty kilometers per hour so we should be able to cover the whole island. Oh. Except controller range is like two km and I don’t know about line of sight with Sony controllers.” She asks Pradeep, “Do you?”

Pradeep points at his own nose. “Bicycle.”

“Right. Well, maybe we can pre-program a flight path to get everything. But we can certainly peek up over the top first! So guess! Guess how tall those cliffs are? I just calculated it.”

“You did?” Pradeep shrugs. “Then I will say it is only two-hundred forty meters. The perspective is fooling us.”

Jay laughs. “No way, dude. Those trees are a hundred meters tall at least. And then the cliffs go up like… another two hundred? So I say that’s at least three hundred meters.”

Esquibel guesses, “I think two seventy.”

Alonso adds, “No, I am with Jay. I think it is over three hundred. Three hundred twenty meters.”

Triquet whistles. “That would be one of the highest coastlines in the world, wouldn’t it? Is that what we’re saying here? I don’t think it’s so dramatic. I say two-twenty.”

They all turn to Miriam, the expert. She studies the cliffs through the trees. “The tallest seacliff in the world is Mitre Peak in New Zealand. Nearly seventeen hundred meters. No way this is close. I want to say it’s over four hundred, but I know that’s crazy.”

Katrina says, “The winner is Miriam! Six hundred and twelve!”