Lisica Chapters

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:

53 – Before It Died

Mandy stands at the anchor point, watching the weather balloon rise above the meadow. And at a hundred meters it stops, far too low for any interesting readings. But it’s all the rope she has.

Someone joins her. But she doesn’t even turn to see who it is. All she knows is they are witness to her failure.

“So high!” Flavia is impressed by the weather balloon and the skill it took to raise it. “Ehh. If you have any more of those helium canisters maybe we can make an even bigger balloon and just sail away over the ocean back to civilization.”

“Isn’t that how Dorothy traveled back from Oz?”

Flavia registers the despair in Mandy’s voice. “Aw, che chos’è? What is wrong, sweet Mandy?” She pets Mandy’s long lustrous black hair and tilts her head in, to intrude into the young woman’s avoiding gaze. “I thought this would make you happy.”

“I can’t even…” Mandy lifts her hands and drops them. Her shoulders slump. “I mean, I can’t even get fully above the trees. This is just a waste of time.”

“No no no. You are a scientist and this is your data. How could it waste your time? No. Here. Leave this. It will be fine.” Flavia takes Mandy by the hand and draws her back to pine camp. “I have something to show you anyway. Very important. You will see.”

Mandy allows herself to be drawn away from the weather balloon in the meadow and the site of her latest defeat.

Flavia brings her to a workstation she’s built on the platform of Alonso and Miriam’s Love Palace. Three laptops are connected to his external hard drive, their screens alive with activity. One charts a linear measurement, scrolling sideways while numbers wheel up and down. Another is a heat map with every color of the rainbow. The third screen is split in two, columns of everchanging data beside a programmer’s window. It is into that last screen that Flavia clicks her cursor. “Here. Here is my control panel. From here I can ask it anything. Go ahead.”

Mandy despairs of being stupid again. Why does everyone think she knows anything about, well, anything other than the weather? “Uh, will I have a successful career?” Mandy intones the question like she’s asking it of a magic 8-ball.

Flavia rocks back, glaring at Mandy with exactly the expression Mandy feared. Utter scornful disbelief. But she blinks her ire away. No no. Flavia has done it again. Gotten too far ahead of herself. “Ah. Apologies. Not those kinds of questions.”

But Mandy saw that scorn and now all she can hear is a roaring in her ears that sounds of shame. Why can’t she ever have a day where anything goes right? Just once? “It’s amazing. Super cool, I swear,” she finally manages unconvincingly. But Flavia interrupts her with a squeeze of her arm.

“No! I am stupid. I make this whole thing a surprise so of course you don’t know. It is your weather modeling system. Limited to an area about a kilometer larger than your instruments and the drone could reach, but still—”

Mandy screeches and drops to her knees in front of the laptops. She grabs the one displaying heat maps. “Really? Oh my god. That’s what this is? This is—I mean, thank you. So so much. But how? Where is this? What am I looking at here?” Beyond her view, Alonso’s dark shape sits up in bed. “Oh! Sorry, Doctor Alonso. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No. I am just happy to hear your enthusiasm.”

“Here is the valley from above. If we center it on pine camp…” Flavia inputs a burst of keystrokes, changing numerical parameters. The heat map changes shape, with the dark black ribbon of the creek bisecting the meadow from above.

“Oh my god, Flavia. You just drew us a map.” Even though all her thoughts are racing skyward, Mandy can’t ignore the profound utility of this simple cartography.

“Eh? Yes, a weather map. Perhaps I am not explaining myself correctly…”

“No, you are. But look. I know you don’t care about graphical representations but the rest of us do and this is the whole valley from above, with like a what, three meter resolution?”

“One meter. We scanned this whole valley with the drone before Katrina lost it.”

“That’s astounding.” Alonso scrubs his face and sets aside his Plexity thoughts. “What is this? Some kind of side project?”

Flavia nods. “Yes, Katrina and I had this idea to create a virtual weather environment for Mandy, but as large as, well, maybe the southern half of the island. Beyond that point our prediction models just turn into white noise. So I collated the data from Mandy’s weather stations and instruments and then we used the drone to map out the values of… Yes, yes, I see. Now we have a map. An actual map. I apologize. That is just not how my brain works but I can see that it will be very useful.”

“But what does it tell me about the weather?”

“I think the most important thing is that each one meter square is a tile and each one of those tiles has a number of values associated with it, including angles of deflection, humidity, friction, dynamic heat sampling that can be adjusted to… well. A whole bunch of values. And these have been tuned by your observations to create a kind of probability map of how weather will behave within this abstract space.”

“But it isn’t abstract. I mean, I guess it is when you first predict it, but—but… This is incredible.”

“Good work, Flavia,” Alonso adds. “Genius.”

“No, not genius. Just a big data solution and the data isn’t even very big. It’s just that if we put more than maybe three values on each of these tiles our processors start smoking. So…”

Mandy runs a cursor across the screen. “Can it go back and forth in time? Like, can we see what the valley looked like yesterday? No. Wait. What about the aftermath of the bombogenesis? No! Actually, can we see the formation of it first? Do you have that?” Mandy claps her hands like a child with a pile of gifts.

Flavia frowns in apology. “We had not really scanned pine camp with the drone until after the storm left, and it carried away the data from your weather station before we could download it. So, I am sorry. I can only go back maybe thirty-six hours.”

“Oh, well. Understood. But can you, like, run it forward like in a movie? And what’s that other screen representing? What is that, like a waveform?”

“It’s a probability display that Katrina made. She thought it might help you visualize the trustworthiness of the data. See? If I scroll forward in time you see the sine wave widen? That means the possible outcomes have become too multivariate to track and you can have little to no confidence in the reading.”

“Brilliant. Yeah. Cool. So how far forward can it forecast?”

“Well that is the part I am working on now. I understand that most weather forecast models are drawing on decades of records that we don’t have for this location so I am trying out a number of mathematical tricks to see if I can make something useful.”

“And what happens if we zoom out all the way to like, the whole Northeast Pacific?” Mandy wants the widest possible context before she starts making decisions on what to study first.

“Ehh… Let us see.” Flavia’s fingers fly again and the heatmap changes. It is a field of cold blue, two shades, with a thermocline at a shallow diagonal bisecting the ocean. A small dot of color sits on the line, right in the middle.

“Is that the island…?” Mandy points at the dot. Flavia peers at it with a frown, then nods. “So, wait. You’re saying there are roughly two sea temperature readings here and the island like straddles them? That can’t be a coincidence.”

“It can’t?” Alonso pushes himself to his feet and shuffles out of the tent, blinking in the brighter light, to join them.

“Look, Doctor Alonso. The map changes frame by frame as she advances it, what is this, like hourly?”

“Yes.”

“And even though the line changes, it always goes through the island. There’s always a temperature boundary here. Which one is colder, the north? It has to be the north, yeah?”

Flavia nods. “Yes, of course.”

“And this is where the North Pacific gyre hits some warm current from the south. Aha. That explains the constant marine layer over the island. The extreme temperature gradient. Oh, it all makes sense! Thank you so much Flavia for getting it to make sense!”

“Huh.” Alonso watches the line tilt on the axis as the forecast progresses. “This little island is more important than we thought, eh? It is like Archimedes’ fulcrum and this line is the lever. Give him one long enough and he will move the whole world.”

“Well, this lever definitely moves the world, for sure.” Mandy draws that line. “If the North Pacific is like a giant mixing bowl, this line is like the Cuisinart paddle stirring the dough. But how can the island always stay in the center of it like that? Changes in salinity is one of the major factors. But there isn’t enough fresh water here to dilute it. Maybe there’s like some undersea volcanic activity nearby we don’t know about.”

Alonso shakes his head in disappointment. “Storms from the North Pacific. They do affect the whole world. Ah, Plexity! This doesn’t bode well for you, my dear child! I tried to build you on the most remote island of the planet and instead I put you in the center of the world!”

Ξ

Alonso puts his plate down, wipes his mouth with a paper towel, and burps. “Ah, that’s better. Now I want to start the meeting with what Mandy and Flavia have to say, because I was with them when they developed this new idea. Very powerful. And it will certainly help everyone with everything else. Mandy?”

“Oh. Uh…” Mandy didn’t realize she was going to have to like present. But she allows her enthusiasm for the project to override her performance anxiety. They all sit in a loose circle around the log tables, finishing a communal dinner. “Well, Flavia and Katrina made this super cool computer program for me. It can like model the weather over the whole south of the island. I’ve never really seen anything like it. All kinds of crazy discoveries. And when we zoomed out we could see that we are right at the dividing line between a cold current to the north and one in the south. This island is where they like meet. It’s like this is the seed that starts all the great storms in the southeastern region of the North Pacific gyre. I mean, isn’t that so cool? We’re right at the boundary. See, the North Pacific has like the lowest salinity of any ocean in the world and that really inhibits heat transfer to the pole so this must be where the actual boundary is…”

“Yes, this part is very fascinating,” Alonso interrupts, “but I was hoping you could tell them of your own discovery of how we now have functional digital maps of this area.”

“Oh my god! Right!” Mandy claps a hand over her mouth. “So their scans have given us a meter-resolution map of the whole area. We did it with the drone. And like a whole bunch of fancy math.”

Flavia bows. “The maths they were not so fancy but…”

“Stop.” Maahjabeen can’t restrain herself any longer. She sits in a camp chair beside Pradeep, one hand holding a steaming mug, the other squeezing his knee. “So what are you saying about this island being the center of the storms when we have just met the old shaman that Katrina tells us was known as Father of Storms? Aan Eyagídi. We met him. He lives in exile on the north side of the island. And he talks to the orcas.”

“Wait, wait…” Alonso can’t process all of this and he needs to forestall the barrage of questions these statements will bring. “Let us not move on quite yet. We need to hear if Flavia has more to share with us before we move on. Signora?”

Flavia shrugs. “Nothing more. Only, six days until… arrivederci!” She skips one open palm across the other, flying away.

“Quite. Okay, Maahjabeen. Let’s hear from you. You can tell us more of what your adventure held. I knew you were in the boats but how did you get all the way to the north of the island?”

“The orcas, they led us there. And we paddled back all the way around it. So the man who lives on the north coast said Wetchie-ghuy had exiled him there many decades ago. He was very sad. And maybe a little insane. He lives with a dead body. Like inside his hut. A Chinese soldier.”

“Ah, you found a Chinese soldier too?” Miriam wears one of Katrina’s ice blue dresses and she’s woven tiny daisies into her hair. She sits perched on Jay’s knee while his thumbs dig into her shoulder blades. “What are the odds?”

“Yes. You did too? Where?” Maahjabeen has an urgent need to share what she and Pradeep and Triquet have discovered, but Miriam’s news throws her a bit. “Really?”

“Yeah. Underground. Total nutter. Must have tried to dig a new tunnel and he released a cascade of gravel and buried himself. Like three years ago. He was dressed in pretty simple kit but we took pics of all the details and Katrina was able to confirm it tonight. Chinese PLA, soldier of some kind. And digging in a direction parallel to the creek. Maybe hoping to pop up right in the middle of Morska Vidra’s village?”

“Former village,” Flavia amends, pointing at the woods. “The poor fellow lives over there now.”

“Did your Chinese soldier carry a phone as well?” Pradeep asks Miriam and Jay.

“A phone? No. Who would he call?” Miriam laughs. Jidadaa crouched beside her eating a third helping of mushrooms and rice, laughs loudly too, although her face holds no comprehension. Only satiety. She takes another bite.

“Yes, with Triquet’s help we were able to get the phone working again. After a bit of snooping we found that one of its text messages contained a single English phrase…” Pradeep closely studies Alonso and Esquibel as he speaks. But he waits to add anything more to see if either have a reaction first.

Alonso chuckles. “Yes? An English phrase? Wheel of fortune?”

“Void where prohibited?” Jay adds.

“A name actually. Colonel Baitgie.” Pradeep stands and shows the cracked screen of the phone to first Alonso and then Esquibel. She exclaims and reaches to take the phone from him but Pradeep pulls it away. “Just look at the moment, if you please.”

“What on earth?” Esquibel scowls at the phone. “How is this possible? And why won’t you let me hold it? Why don’t you trust me, eh? So what does the rest of it say?”

“Do you know, Alonso? Did Baitgie tell you?”

But Alonso only stares at Pradeep with a mixture of sadness and shock. He obviously doesn’t. He shakes his head no.

“It says, ‘Final word of the timing will rest with Colonel Baitgie. The American operative still believes our team is Japanese. Do not speak, but if challenged, you are Japanese, from the Public Security Intelligence Agency.’”

“Whoa…” Jay fills the silence with a wondering groan. “Chinese dude pretending to be Japanese? Man, they really think we can’t tell Asians apart. This is some grade-A spy shit here, uncut.”

“Jay, please.” Pradeep turns back to Esquibel. “You aren’t sharing Plexity with our allies, Doctor Daine. You have been duped. This USB stick is going straight to Beijing.”

Esquibel shakes her head, her whole world falling apart. “No. Wait. No no no. Think this through. This means that Baitgie is on the Chinese payroll. But he’s a really instrumental figure, in charge of a lot of things behind the scenes, kind of a liaison between the USAF command structure and the black labs. He can’t be some kind of double agent…”

“In other words,” Katrina says, “he sounds exactly like who the Chinese would most want to turn.”

“Yes…” Esquibel drops her eyes. “I suppose it might be true. But I just can’t believe it. Please. I will need more proof than a single poorly-translated text from a dead man’s lost phone.”

“Gee, thanks,” Triquet snaps. “Only worked on it for five hours to put that all together. Glad it could be so easily dismissed.”

“Doctor Daine, you’ve clearly been manipulated.” Pradeep points the phone at her in accusation. Then he swings it at Alonso. “And you have too, Doctor Alonso. According to you, Colonel Baitgie was the organizing force behind this entire project. Now we have to come to terms with the fact that our mission has goals we do not know, and is being influenced far more by outside forces than we ever feared. Why did the Chinese want this mission to happen? Or, upon hearing of it, what did they hope to gain?”

Alonso sighs. “Why can’t anything ever be as it seems? It is all feint and double-feint. All this duelling. Despicable people. Using the good and great work we do as weapons in their spy games. As you can imagine, after the last few years I’m no longer interested in working with the kind of people who trade in terror and blood. Tell your masters, Esquibel, that I won’t do it.”

Esquibel raises her hands, helpless. “I won’t either, Alonso. I swear. I knew nothing of this. I have always believed that I was directed by my superiors to cultivate a relationship with a ministry in Japan. And I only agreed to proceed with the espionage after Colonel Baitgie confirmed it with Langley.”

“Well, he told you he confirmed it…” Katrina adds.

“And you just believed him?” Jay wonders.

Esquibel lashes out at Jay. “What the hell kind of question is that? Of course I believed my superior officer. I trusted him with my life. That is how militaries work. What would you have me do? Not report an improper contact from a Japanese official? Or you think I was supposed to somehow report it independently? You think I have friends at the CIA? Me? Some anonymous lieutenant commander ship doctor from Nairobi? Until this moment I had no reason to distrust Colonel Baitgie at all.”

“Too religious,” Flavia sniffs. “The first time you described him, Alonso. You said this colonel is a nice guy but too religious. So I was suspicious of him ever since—”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Maahjabeen wheels on Flavia, ready to fight. “You are always using a person’s faith as—”

“No no no,” Alonso begs them. “Please, my dears. Let us keep on task. Esquibel. I believe you. I think I can speak for us all. You are a victim too. We are all victims here of the grand machinations of the great powers. But what did he say, when you spoke to him?”

“Who?”

“This allegedly Japanese operative. In the Ussiaxan village.”

“Ah. We never found him. No. Although our little expedition was otherwise a success. Now I am glad he was not there. Because there is far less reason for a Chinese handler to be patient with me. If I had rejected his demand for more data who knows what would have happened. This is a much more dangerous situation now. Not just for me, but for all of us.”

“What’s the possibility that this phone was somehow planted?” Katrina wonders. “I mean, let’s really think this through. There would be a lot of people, it sounds like, who would profit by dividing us and making us doubt each other. So what if they wanted us to find this phone? How would that have worked?”

“Oh, simple.” Maahjabeen has trouble keeping the edge out of her voice. “First they would have just had to tell the orcas to bring me and Pradeep to the north shore and then for them to get that soldier to die nine weeks ago—”

“I don’t know. Maybe they moved the soldier after he died,” Jay suggests. “If they really wanted you to find the phone…”

“Okay,” Pradeep interrupts, impatient. “But the orcas. They led us directly to him. I was there. Nobody controlled them. Nobody can. Listen to what you’re suggesting. It is impossible. I mean, I’ve heard that the Russians have a big naval dolphin program but isn’t that just for like mine-clearing and surveillance? Doctor Daine?”

Esquibel holds up her hands in total ignorance. “I have no idea about any naval dolphins. Or killer whales.”

“This is crazy…” Alonso holds his head in his hands. “Listen to us. We start with digital maps and weather systems and the next thing we know it’s Chinese spies and talking killer whales.”

“Well, any reasonable scenario about us being manipulated into taking this phone is unpalatable,” Pradeep explains, “because it all depends on the killer whales leading us to this man. Why did they do this? They swam directly for his cove, and when they arrived they called out for him for several minutes until he arrived. It was unmistakably intentional. And if it wasn’t done as a result of training at the hands of the Russians or Chinese or bloody Saudi Arabian military then it was initiated by someone else. And if there isn’t some private group out in the world training orcas to lead total strangers around islands in the middle of the Pacific then we’re only left with the inescapable option that the orcas thought of it themselves. Which is why I say that all reasonable scenarios are unpalatable, because none of us are ready to grant that much depth of thought and strategy to a pod of cetaceans.”

Pradeep looks around the circle. The only one challenging him with her gaze is Maahjabeen. “I know. Except you, babi. The orcas speak to you. Yes. But right now we are discussing reasonable scenarios. And your explanation as much as I saw it happen, even as I watched it happen, it was still a million light years from being a reasonable scenario.”

“This is what we mean,” Maahjabeen tells him, “of the grace of God. Unexplainable things happen. We cannot understand why, even if we studied Him for a million years. It is because His mind is so much greater than every human mind put together. Inshallah. Humble yourself before the infinity of the Lord, because God is great and He will do what He wants as He wants.”

“This is such bullshit.” Flavia stands. “Why would some stupid sky fairy care if a bunch of killer whales brought a couple—”

“We really shouldn’t get into theological arguments…” Alonso tries to mediate the peace once more.

Flavia cries out in outrage. “You will let that stand? She gets to spew her whole cult brain-twisting shit but I’m not even allowed to get out a single sentence in return? Fine. Good night, everyone…”

“Flavia…”

“Stone Age thinking. Now that I understand how mystical and superstitious and barbaric this team has chosen to be, I can tell I no longer have a place among the so-called researchers here—”

“Flavia, please. None of us here are defending organized religion except for your dear friend Maahjabeen. We just need to keep this meeting better on track. Sit down. I beg you. Eat a cookie. Listen to what Katrina has to say. Katrina, please share with us what you are holding in your lap?”

Katrina shrugs. “Well, Doctor Triquet has had themself a busy afternoon. They also helped me analyze this ancient reliquary that we stole from the Ussiaxan treasure house.”

“You stole…?” Miriam’s voice skirls upward into outrage before she recalls her lost witchiness. In truth, it sounds like something she would have done when she was Katrina’s age. She settles, chewing on her thumbnail instead, quietly approving of the recklessness.

“I mean, not stole. Not really. See, there was this bloke there,” Katrina continues. “He told us we could have it. He wanted to steal something too. A necklace. Some fancy old necklace with a locket on it. But then he just went outside and gave it to Sherman. Really weird. And then we snuck around the village and found the drone had been collected and brought to the village square so we decided I’d be the best one to go run in and grab it. Which I did.” She kicks at the sack filled with drone parts resting at her feet. “Super sketchy. Thought I was going to end up on the pointy end of a spear for sure. But no. This reliquary. Three hundred years old, yeh, Triquet?”

Triquet bows. “In my humble estimation. A homemade version of a type found in Poland, Bohemia, and the Balkans during the reign of the Ottoman Turks in the region.”

“Wait. Slow down. Now we are talking history? Oh, my poor head.” Alonso scrubs his scalp. “The Ottoman Empire? What could they possibly have to do with Lisica?”

Triquet takes the reliquary from Katrina and gently eases the lid open. With tweezers they sift through the papers within. “Well, not much. Except that’s where our founding father here was born. Tuzhit. Remember him? Real name Josip Dodik.” Triquet lifts a single sheet of parchment covered with a brown spidery scrawl. “He tells us himself. Born in the mountain village of Grušča on the day after Michaelmas in 1698, three days walk from Sarajevo. So modern-day Bosnia. Mystery solved. This is why the Lisicans have so many Slavic words that still—”

“Triquet. Please.” Alonso holds up his hands, begging them to stop. “I seriously can’t take in any more new information. What does all this mean? How did he even get here? This is halfway across the world from Europe.”

Triquet holds up the reliquary, displaying the lid. “You see this inlay here? Once I cleaned it up it became an icon. Pretty sure that’s a really crude profile portrait of Peter the Great. So that helps with the timeline, early 18th century. And you know what? It was Tsar Peter who commanded the Danish sea captain Vitus Bering to explore the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Alaska coast. Got a whole sea named after him for his trouble. And according to the remains of this little diary here, Josip Dodik was Bering’s own personal cook, a servant in his household he’d kept with him since they both fought for Russia in what he calls the Swedish War. This is his box. These are his keepsakes. He left quite a bit of his story here but from the look of things, his descendants can’t read them. Or they don’t care.”

“And what about the Eyat sisters? What’s the story there? Did he kidnap them? How did they end up here?”

“Well, that’s the part I’m still working on. As Katrina said, it’s been a busy day for poor Professor Triquet. Chinese spies and American murderers and Bosnian cooks. I’ve just scratched the surface on these documents, and translation is slow going, even with Katrina’s help. It’s—”

“What do you mean by American murderers?” Flavia wonders. “You mean Colonel Baitgie? He hasn’t murdered anyone that we know of, has he?”

“No, sweetie.” Triquet shakes their head, doleful. “I mean the death of Maureen Dowerd. It was her own people who did it. I think her jilted lover. Colonel Ingles.”

“What is it about Colonels?” Jay asks. “I mean, what the fuck, dude? He killed Maureen? I thought he brought her here.”

“And she left him for a Lisican lover, didn’t she?” Katrina adds. “The jilted military man, can’t take the shame of it. I can see it.”

“Everyone was just repressed to high heaven back then,” Triquet explains. “He probably thought God told him to kill her or—”

“Exactly!” Flavia nods. “Religious delusions kill more people—”

“Flavia!” Maahjabeen stands. “Don’t you get—!”

“Okay, stop. Stop.” Alonso heaves himself to his feet as well. “Just stop. This meeting is… I don’t even know how to resolve this meeting. We are moving in a million different directions and we only have a few days left. Now. Plexity is at a critical juncture. Flavia has been an absolute hero but we still need a good solid few days of collecting. Especially from underrepresented taxonomies and settings. Jay and Pradeep, we are really counting on you here. The two of you are responsible for fully half of the collection so far. As to these other issues…” Alonso shrugs. “It is deep. It is all too deep. Can we not maybe record the details we are discovering, write down our initial reactions and analysis, and then perhaps set it aside for further study back home? So we can spend these last few days doing actual science instead of… singing this opera.”

“We need a plan.” Esquibel shakes her head in despair. This entire mission is in tatters. “Some kind of defensible… I don’t know. What happens when Lady Boss hears we stole things from Ussiaxan? How soon does the war start?”

Katrina shrugs. “She doesn’t even need to know that much. As far as she can tell, we just attacked them with a bloody drone. It’s already go time, even without these latest crimes.”

“Ahh. I need a glass of wine.” Alonso shuffles away.

“Wait!” Esquibel fixes him in place with the command in her voice. “Seriously, Alonso. We need a real plan first. What are we going to do? Just wait for them to arrive?”

“You think I know?” Alonso is at his wits’ end. “I am as helpless here as you are. Ask Morska Vidra. Ask the orcas. Ask Jidadaa.”

They all turn to the girl, who watches in silence. Katrina nods at her. “How about it, Jidadaa? What do you say we should do now?”

“Jay lidass. He is the one. He must come with me to—”

“How many times I got to tell you I ain’t going to kill Wetchie-ghuy? For fuck’s sake, dude. Stop asking.”

“What does killing him get us? Let’s make this explicit, shall we?” Esquibel’s blunt question quiets all the whispered side conversations. Her tone makes it clear she will kill if she must.

Jidadaa regards Esquibel with dark eyes. “Wetchie-ghuy dead. His prophet poem die with him. Foxes are safe.”

“Oh, well as long as the foxes are safe.” Esquibel rolls her eyes. “Where can we hide, Jidadaa? How do we survive this? Who might help us? What ever happened to the golden mask people? The Thunderbirds? Can we get any more help from them?”

“They do help. They protect. You do not see.”

“Oh, are the golden childs still out there?” Miriam scans the trees upslope. “I thought that storm blew them all away.”

“No. Their poem. They chant. It is very strong. It is a good poem. If the poem of the Shidl Dít is the one—”

“Great yes got it,” Esquibel cuts through the halting answer with a rush of irritation. “Just chant a fucking poem. That’s obviously the way to go here.”

“Damn it, Esquibel,” Miriam exclaims. “It isn’t a poem. It’s a plan. You’re just getting hung up on the word. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A strong plan we all agree on? And we will all chant it until our plan beats all the other plans. That’s the proper military way, isn’t it?”

Esquibel takes a deep breath. “Fine. So, the Thunderbirds are operating their own plan. It is in general accordance with ours. Good to hear. We won’t kill a shaman, though, regardless of how obnoxious he is, just to safeguard your pets.”

Jidadaa’s eyes never leave Esquibel’s face. “Fox babies in three days. One two three.”

Esquibel frowns. “And the Chinese are on their way. Alonso, I hate to say it, but it might be time to go back into the tunnels.”

Maahjabeen groans. “No. I cannot…”

Katrina turns to Jidadaa. “Yeh. Is that it, sister? Is that what we’re supposed to do? Hide in the tunnels from the Ussiaxan?”

“Sister…” Jidadaa savors the word, as if she’s never heard it. And perhaps she hasn’t. “Yes. Keleptel village. Dig tunnels to hide.”

“Oh, that’s what the tunnels are for? Hiding from the warlike Ussiaxan whenever they cross the creek?” Miriam nods, a number of odd design choices that were made underground now making more sense. “Aye, you could make things proper deadly in there for anyone trying to get them out.”

“For how long?” Alonso demands. “What about Plexity?”

“Until we are safe,” Esquibel answers him.

The answer does nothing for him. Alonso groans in sadness and turns away, shouting at the darkening sky, “Ahh! I can’t…! Amy! Where are you? I miss you…!”

Ξ

“The skull is squarish and the lacrimal bones are short. The skull is squarish…” Amy repeats to herself, breathless, “and the lacrimal bones are short.”

The digital field guides on her phone have been indispensable out here. She’s basically memorized all they have to say on foxes, arctic foxes, and all the morph variants found throughout Canada. But what she heard crashing around in the brush wasn’t a fox. She knows what it was, she just can’t believe it. After classifying their spoor she confirms to her great excitement that she is in boar territory. After getting over the shock of finding such a dominant species so late in her time on this island she is now just trying to get a glimpse of them so she can more properly identify them.

Still, her skin prickles at taking this much risk. Getting gored by a boar out here is most likely a death sentence. Probably a massive puncture wound or gash followed by significant blood loss, then sepsis, then a long drawn-out delirium that ends in death. Yeah. Amy’s spent a bit too long alone in these woods now. Her mind is racing to all the worst-case scenarios, uncontrollable.

Amy stops and calms herself. She’s been careful since she stepped out of her little lean-to, but she needs to remind herself of caution. This is too important. Her life is not her own now. She belongs to the vixen. The creature has bespelled her. There’s really no other way to put it. These last few days have revealed an organic world whose existence Amy only ever suspected. Why, this is Plexity here, just without all the numbers. It is instinctual, pheremonal, a vibrant complexity tipping often to the point of chaos. And she has been able to sustain these epiphanies sometimes for what feels like hours. Often they are glimpses but at times they can be unbearable, like staring at the sun. The truths about the living universe cannot be disputed. This is religion. This is transcendence. Amy is utterly transformed. And then the boars arrived.

They woke her in the bluish light of pre-dawn, snorting and tearing at the earth. She heard many feet, then a splintering crash. Amy started upright and the sound of her movement startled the beasts and they fled. She listened to their raucous flight through the woods until she could hear them no more. Only then did Amy hear the subvocalized growl from the vixen. They would have found her and happily torn her to shreds.

Amy dressed quickly and stepped out into a morning dawning with a ragged bit of sunshine between heavy banners of fog. She knelt, confirming the cloven hooves and droppings.

After considering how they might have gotten to the island, Amy looked up entries on North American feral pigs and also Russian boars, specifically Sus scrofa sibiricus, with its dark brown hair and gray cheek patches. Multiple litters each year… Ye gods. How have they not overrun the entire island?

Then she went hunting.

“The skull is squarish and the lacrimal bones are short.” Now she hustles through the undergrowth, dropping from the conical point of loose soil atop which the vixen’s nest is hidden through fern and a broadleaf mugwort variant with red stems. She has no trouble following the hoof prints through mud and bracken. The boars have churned up an unmistakable track. And she will have no problem finding her way back. The land slopes down and the troop obviously followed it to a seasonal stream which is now gushing. But they hadn’t stopped here. Too close to the sound that spooked them in Amy’s lean-to. They’d continued on.

The slope slants down toward a dark cleft she can only spy at the narrowest angles down through leaf and shadow and landscape. “No, this isn’t spooky,” she whispers to herself. “Not at all.”

Amy enters a side canyon, where all the hooves churned up the base of a tree. What happened here? Well, they had obviously felt safe enough to return to their foraging, but what were they hoping to get from this hoary old Douglas fir? Boars don’t eat fir bark, do they? Who knows? They can probably eat anything.

The bark of the tree is scored heavily by their hooves beneath a dark gash. The gash seeps a river of discolored sap. This tree is diseased. And the boars could smell it. Amy grasps the ridges of the bark and hauls at it, cracking a panel of it away as wide and long as her torso. The entire underside is covered in a pale sheet of writhing maggots. They drop from the stained trunk into the mud.

Ah. This is what the pigs were after but were too short to reach. Amy holds it stupidly, knowing it’s a prize, but unable to figure out what to do with it. Her eyes fall to her feet and then she frowns. Wait. Some of these tracks are tiny. They have babies…

A reckless plan forms instantly in Amy’s mind and she chuckles at herself. “Ha. What a rogue and rapscallion are ye.” She always loved pirate stories. Now it is time for some of her own derring-do.

Encouraged that the maggots show no sign of abandoning the bark, she drags the curved piece behind her down slope.

She hears them before she sees them. The babies are squealing. It must be nursing hour. Just what she hoped. And the boars are out somewhere foraging on their own. The sows lie at the base of an oak tree, three of them lying on their sides hosting a score or more of suckling piglets.

“Well. No subtlety with pigs. Let’s get right to it.” Amy clears her throat and marches from the treeline into the clearing before their oak. She idly notices that the sedges have begun to yellow before the sows see her. They stumble to their feet, the babies dropping from their swollen udders, and stampede away, squealing.

“Quick now.” Amy doesn’t even take a look behind her. There’s no point. Either she makes it or not. She runs to the oak tree and pushes the rotten bark she carries up into the branches. Then she climbs the trunk to its first fork, a broad seat about three meters from the ground.

Amy lifts the bark and breaks an edge of it off, dropping the block of maggots and substrate squarely into the depression one of the sows had left. Now there is nothing to do but wait.

The first pig who returns is a juvenile male, perhaps a yearling or less. Bold, with a powerful nose, he crosses the clearing toward her at a suspicious diagonal. He smells her, doubtless, but he smells the maggots as well. And he is hungry.

She hears his satsified grunts when he finds them. What a goon. Amy giggles and he grunts, interrupting his meal to glare upward at her. “Yes, I said, what a goon.”

The boar is perfectly torn between fight and flight and food. She laughs at him again as he quivers with his warring instincts. Then food wins out and he bends down to finish his meal. The instant he is finished scraping the bark clean, he snorts and trots away.

Amy breaks off and drops another piece.

When he returns it is with one of the sows. His mother perhaps. They share the latest morsels and as they are finishing, Amy drops another chunk. Then another. Soon the sow has settled and her brood start to return.

After a while they acclimate to her, appreciating the mana from heaven she dispenses. They listen to her voice and do not startle when she shifts. When Amy is down to the last few fragments of her maggot pig-treats she eases herself down the trunk, making happy sounds, hoping that the adult boars don’t come back yet.

The juvenile boar and the sow watch her, more interested in what she holds than any threat she might present. Amy dispenses bits of maggot bark liberally, a descending goddess of gluttony, stepping among the feeding sucklings and the maggot-drunk boar and sow. She sits between them, still making happy humming noises. Then she slowly removes her shoe, and then her sock.

She feeds the sow the last fat bit of maggots and the tiny porcine eye shines gratefully at her. Amy sees this as a good enough signal to try. She presses her sock against the sow’s udder at the mouth of a feeding piglet, absorbing the milk. Then she does it again, getting it nice and moist.

Only then does Amy unfold the bandana packet she’s made against her heart and find the premature fox kit still squirming within. She did it. She found milk for the little thing before it died.