Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the second 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:

25 – Blows Him A Kiss

Maahjabeen lifts another armful of heavy branches and carries them across the beach to the lean-to she is rebuilding against the trunk of the fallen redwood. It had been Pradeep who had made it for her a few weeks ago, and then again after that sleeper wave, but the last storm had once again erased all sign of it.

Now, as a labor of love, she builds it again.

Catching her breath, she leans against the giant mass of the horizontal trunk behind her. The sun is breaking through, with silver streaks lighting the ocean in the far distance like spotlights tilted down from heaven. Imagine being a school of sardines out in the open ocean and all of a sudden God decides it is your time to be the star of the show. Maahjabeen is a firm believer in the growing marine biology discoveries about fish intelligence and social complexity. So she imagines they would react to the beneficent touch of the creator with glee. They might be dancing with the stars under the waves, for all she knows.

Maahjabeen giggles. She is in love, truly in love. This is what it is supposed to feel like. She is in wonder at the purity of Pradeep. Mind and body, he is unlike anyone she thinks can even exist in this world. And he is hers. All hers. She wraps her arms around herself with a sense of deep completion. After losing her mother and then her family and town and country and culture, she has been adrift, literally following the currents wherever they take her, ever since. She has had no home, no roots. And it has not been a thrilling adventure. It has really only felt like bleak survival. Because when there is nothing to fall back on, your thoughts return again and again to finding stability. These short oceanography contracts have kept her afloat (again, literally) but she can’t depend on finding them consistently over the years. She needs a larger plan. Before, she just couldn’t decide where to build her life. Now she knows: wherever Pradeep is.

Then she realizes she doesn’t know where Pradeep currently lives. This is important information. It can be a home base for her, a landing spot between her contracts all over the world. Maybe he could even come with her sometimes as another researcher.

Maahjabeen giggles again. She has never been like this. She comes from a family of reserved, educated women. Even their love they dispense in brief but intense dollops. But that is the Tunisian way. And Maahjabeen is now a citizen of the world, is she not? Her time in Japan, in Indonesia and Dar es Salaam and Belize has shown her how wildly different humans can be. Only some of them follow the prophet. Some follow other religions. And others appear to be entirely without God. What had dismayed her is that she couldn’t readily tell which was which. She’d thought that by looking at the hovels and high-rises of Hokkaido and Sumatra and Corozal she could discern the godly among them. But the atheist Japanese had the cleanest and fairest towns and villages of all and her brothers and sisters in Islam in Dar and in Jakarta had been some of the most despairing.

It has caused doubt in her. Not in her faith, which remains as deep and profound as it ever had, but rather in her cultural connection to her faith. She is still a devout Muslim. But she realizes she is no longer the Tunisian version of that. She can now see Allah everywhere, in every tall tree of this island and every wave that laps against the gray shore. She sees holiness in the faces of unbelievers and knows that God is omnipresent, regardless of whether they believe it or not. He watches over them all.

So in that sense, Pradeep has already joined the ummah just by his willingness to listen. She is already doing great work by revealing the Prophet’s words to him. Maahjabeen can rest assured that her intimacy with him is no sin. And besides, not a living soul will know what happened here. It will be their secret forever.

The god rays break through the clouds and their spotlights widen on the ocean’s shining surface, creating white gold luminescences that are painful to behold. She turns toward the southwest instead, to study the dark horizon. It is always a comfort to her, to see the infinite sea disappearing over the furthest edge of the world. This is where the Pacific has every other ocean beat. She has felt this same sweet solitude on the Indian and Atlantic Oceans for sure, but the scale that the Pacific provides is something else. God is here again. The scale of god, the power that comes with infinity. She suspects that God’s divinity specifically derives from His endlessness. Her mathematic brain has always thought so.

What she would give to be out on that open ocean, well-supplied and with a clear forecast for like five days. To be surrounded by nothing but water… It has been too long. She is not really made to live this long on land. She hopes that Pradeep understands that he is dating a mermaid.

This gets another chuckle out of her. What her lover’s amazing brain has reminded her, in their trips together in the kayaks, is that they aren’t skating over a shining surface of a two-dimensional world. It is the roof of an entire rich ecosystem that she is often unwilling to fully take into account. Perhaps it messes with her solitude, the idea that she is far from alone when she is on the water. Perhaps she has a bit of thalassophobia, a fear of the deep, that she has never properly reconciled. But how can you reconcile that terror? Look at those patches out there right now.

She scrambles atop the trunk to get a better view. Blue and green and gray fields exist on the surface of the nearby ocean. They indicate many things, one of them being the depth of the water beneath. The ocean floor could be like 3800 meters here and it wouldn’t surprise her. To fall… to be pulled down into inky, icy oblivion… La. She isn’t sure there is a healthy way to deal with the human need to avoid the deep.

Now. Back to work. How did Pradeep build this thing…? Oh, you idiot. He had twine. Maahjabeen can’t do much here without it. Well. It won’t be more than a moment to retrieve a roll. And maybe she can grab a bite while she’s in camp.

Maahjabeen scrambles onto the fallen log once more, this time facing camp. And that’s when she sees it: the plume of gray smoke streaming from a hole in the top of the cliffs directly above. The wind whips the smoke up and away before it reaches them. That is why she hasn’t smelled it.

But the island is on fire.

Ξ

“I knew it was Jay’s idea!” Esquibel has heard all she needs to hear. It is always Jay. He is the one problem with this whole mission.

“No, no…” Mandy waves her hand in defeat. “You can’t pin it on him. I’m the idiot who actually set the fire.”

“But why… Why would you do that?” Alonso is at a loss. A giant plume of smoke streams from the island like it’s the chimney of a log fucking cabin. Any ship within range will see them. If the skies continue to break up every satellite in this whole hemisphere will turn their cameras onto Lisica.

Amy puts a calming hand on Mandy’s arm. “More importantly, why would you do that without consulting us first?”

“I just—I’m so sorry! I just thought that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I guess I don’t have much experience with fires. But it seemed safe since it’s all contained in that one like chimney there. So I thought I could just build a quick fire at the base and… I don’t know. I guess I thought it would all go poof and then I’d have an easy way up to the platform on the cliff.”

“It must be like thousands of cubic meters of dry fuel.” Pradeep shakes his head in despair. “It could burn for, like, weeks. Not that it will. But it must be a massive amount of dry wood. We’re talking a four hundred meter shaft, minimum, with like a three meter cross-section. Let’s say the wood is only able to fill half that volume. That’s still… I mean, I can do some calculations… There are equations for how fast wood burns, I’m sure.”

“And how hot is it getting in there?” Amy shakes her head in despair. “It’s like a giant rocket stove. I wouldn’t want to be any of the critters who set up homes in there.”

“Oh my god I didn’t even think about them!” Mandy holds her face in her hands. This is a nightmare. She doesn’t even feel Esquibel’s comforting hand on her back. Now she has to bear the burden of dead wildlife. She ruined the entire field study. She probably ruined their relationship with the Lisicans. And now she has all this blood on her hands. Mandy’s never had to handle this amount of guilt. She can’t take it.

Pradeep has stepped away to the bunker. He returns, calling out, “That’s what I thought. You can feel a noticeable draft pulling air through the sub. Much stronger than before. Amy is right. With all that fuel it must be drawing the air up it and creating a kind of rocket effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was hot enough to melt steel in there.”

“Oh, god!” Mandy can’t bear any more. She tears herself away and flees, out of camp, away from this reality. But she stumbles in the sand and falls on her side, hands still covering her face. She is wracked by grief, only dimly aware that Esquibel and Amy kneel on either side, consoling her.

Alonso sighs, shaking his head. He wishes he had more fury. But instead he just feels a great weariness. This is how it happens. Not even halfway through the study. The military ships return and the island is taken away from them, just as Plexity is beginning to show its promise. Is this shock? Perhaps he’s in shock.

“Lonzo, we need to come up with a bit of a plan.” Amy encircles his wrist with her hand.

He can only manage a grunt.

She can divine his helplessness. After a compassionate smile and a hand pressed against his cheek, Amy turns toward the others. “Okay. Listen up, everyone. Safety protocol. As long as smoke is coming out of that hole, nobody is allowed in the tunnels. Actually, we probably want to close up the sub as tight as we can.”

“But what if it’s the others coming back?” Esquibel’s question, called out from Mandy’s side, stops them all. Even Mandy sits up.

Through her tears she bawls, “Oh, you’re right! What if they don’t want to be stuck in the interior and they try something dangerous! We need—Oh, Esquibel, you’ve got to call in the Air Force now. Or whoever. Please. We need help.”

But Esquibel only has a helpless shrug for Mandy. “I would if I could, Mands. You know I’d do anything for you.”

It is this evidence that finally convinces Pradeep that Esquibel really doesn’t have a secret link to the outside world. She would do anything for Mandy. “Shit. We really are alone here, aren’t we?”

“It is what Alonso and I have been telling you.” But it is not a point Esquibel needs to hammer home right now, not with how it’s making poor Mandy feel. Esquibel knows what the girl did is reckless but she does feel sympathy. She might have done the same thing in Mandy’s place. It was a reasonable course of action. Who can tell how long fires burn?

“Have we found any other route to the village? Amy? Anyone?” Pradeep tries to get back on track. “Could you see any trails when you were there? I have heard of a few, but…”

“Well, there’s the bad trail,” Amy lists, “and then another wide trail that heads down, I assume to their water source. Then there were a few game trails heading into the trees but I didn’t ever have time to see…”

“It’s possible there’s another way through,” Pradeep says. “But all the ways we know right now bottle-neck at the tunnel right next to the one on fire. So unless Triquet and the others somehow surprise us, they’re stuck there.”

Mandy wails and Amy comforts her with an arm over her shoulders. “Yeah, I think that’s clear, Prad. But maybe we can find a way to reach them. It won’t be weeks. Not with the fire burning that hot. I bet it’s done in another hour or two. We’ll see them again in the morning. I’m sure of it.” But the words sound hollow to them all, even to Amy herself. She eventually stops trying and pushes herself to her feet. “Well, I guess I’ll go close up the sub. Oh, don’t worry, Mandy. I won’t lock them out. I’ll make it so they can push the doors open. I just want to keep the smoke out.”

The impromptu meeting disperses as afternoon progresses into evening. Soon it is only Esquibel and Mandy left, one holding the other. Then Alonso calls out for Esquibel and she squeezes Mandy one last time before abandoning her. No. That is too harsh. She is just busy. With real work. Something Mandy cannot have.

Coming from the shadows, a voice growls, “Well I for one am glad you lit the tunnels on fire. I hope it collapses them and makes it impossible for anyone to go through them.” Flavia leans forward, her eyes burning. “Tonight I will sleep with more peace than I have in weeks.”

Ξ

“We will wait. We won’t do anything rash. We will only see what happens next. Jay…” Miriam puts a heavy hand on his forearm. He is filled with so many wild plans. “We aren’t going to search for the waterfall right now and we certainly aren’t going to launch anything off it.”

He frowns but nods, disappointed.

Miriam surveys the village. The Lisicans have stopped talking to them. They’ve stopped doing nearly all their normal daily work. The smoke has really rattled them. The researchers now stand off to the side, beside a bush and a rockfall in a neglected corner at the edge of the village beside the cliff the tunnel emerges from. It has been an hour, maybe more. They are doing all they can not to draw any more attention to themselves.

Morska Vidra emerges from a hut, blinking at the bright light. His face is thoughtful. With the tip of his thumb he selects several young villagers, talking to them in his sing-song. None of them look happy to be selected. Their heads hang down and their eyes are hooded, but they follow him.

Morska Vidra scrambles up a rockfall to a game trail in a cleft. He is headed toward the source of the smoke, but overland.

Jay can’t stay still any longer. “Fact-finding mission. We got to get in on this.” He slips away from the others and crosses the tunnel mouth to join them. “Heeey gang, mind if I tag along? I know a bunch more songs I could sing.”

“Jay!” Miriam’s voice is too loud, a dreadful whipcrack in this quiet little hamlet. Dozens of heads snap toward her. She lifts a hand in apology and her face goes red. She puts her hand over her mouth. Then she finally manages, “Jay, please get back here.”

But it’s too late. With a helpless shrug, Jay follows the last of the villagers into the cleft, obscured by overhanging boughs of cedar.

Miriam quivers with fury. Triquet ventures a light touch on her elbow but Miriam doesn’t even seem to register it. Triquet withdraws their hand.

“Well.” Katrina likes challenges for sure. But this is a bit much. Their only way out is gone. “And they’ve got to think we did it, somehow. Us or the others at the beach. They must be furious. I hope it doesn’t burn down anything sacred or whatever or we might get a taste of their penal code.”

“Well, Jay can take whatever punishment.” Miriam shakes her hands, trying to release the emotion roaring through her. “We can just watch. Now. We can’t just sit here and pretend to be invisible. We need to show them we can be of value.”

“I’ve got a first aid kit.” Triquet pulls off their backpack and takes out a small ziploc filled with medical supplies. “I don’t… I have no idea how to indicate to them how that might be useful though. Oh, why did Jay have to follow them? I was hoping he’d lose his mind and drop down into the tunnels and somehow save us all. Now I guess I’ll have to be the one to do it.”

“No.” Miriam and Katrina say it at the same time, both putting hands on Triquet. Miriam continues, “We have no idea how dangerous that is. And smoke inhalation is a real killer. You can’t. We just have to be patient.”

Triquet falls back into their embraces with a ragged sigh.

Jay has always prided himself on his climbing skills but these kids are flat-out amazing. First they’ve got top-notch ankle mobility, which he’s always struggled with as a basic bitch white boy. And their joints and hip flexors are as explosive as soccer midfielders. They hammer up the nearly vertical face, their toes grabbing little pockets in the dried clay here, kicking themselves upward like mountain goats.

Jay scrambles, his shoes unwieldy here. Finally he takes them off and crushes his toes getting them to follow in their barefoot tracks. They finally crest the cliff and Jay is surprised to see a wide hollow up here instead of the edge of the cliff dropping to the beach. But no. There’s yet a higher cliff beyond this one, rising up even more. And they’re headed toward it at a brisk pace. Jay starts running to keep up with them on the open land. He nearly reaches the Lisicans by the time they start ascending this cliff. They still haven’t acknowledged him in any way.

The cliff leads upward through a narrow maze of green limestone channels tufted by shrubs like a Doctor Seuss illustration. Jay pulls his way up through them, the soft skin of his feet already so tender. He hasn’t toughened them up in too long and now he’s paying the price. Well, the smoke’s getting worse too and this is what he’s here to see. Good thing he’s got a proper N95 mask already on.

They crest this cliff and here he is. On top of the entire fucking world. The seawinds whip at him from across the island to the north. The gray dome of clouds that conceals the island touches the sea in nearly every direction. He can see it all now, better than any drone. The island makes sense. “Ahh. Miriam’s gotta see this. Incredible.” He takes out his phone and gets a dozen shots before the others move on out of view. He hurries to join them.

They’ve dropped down the front face of this cliff, which sweeps outward in a smoke-filled bowl about the size of a basketball court. They get to the far edge of it, where the smoke is quite bad. Morska Vidra puts his feet over an edge and lowers himself down, face squeezed shut against the fumes. The others follow.

Finally Jay, heart pounding, crawls nearly blind to the spot and sits at the edge. He drops his legs over and feels a small ridge under his heel, no more than a couple centimeters wide. This is it? Then what? Man… Sometimes being heedless has its downsides for sure.

He slowly scoots down a fairly sheer face, sometimes hanging from the fabric of his shirt and shorts. But then he hears their voices below him and realizes they stand on a spine that is level here. He joins them, uncomfortably close on the small ridge.

This close to the fire, the air is suddenly scorching. Jay realizes it’s just on the other side of this ridge. And it’s roaring. The cliffs had hidden all this from them before but now they can hear it. It’s like a giant Roman fucking candle sending a huge jet of yellow flame straight up into the air. Cinders fall everywhere. They can’t get any closer.

Finally Jay realizes what he’s looking at. He understands what happened here. He remembers that it was his own words.

Now the Lisicans finally look at him. Shock, sadness, fear. He can’t bear their gazes. They don’t even realize how right they are to blame him for what they’re seeing. Jesus, dude. You’ve really got to learn to watch your fucking mouth. But never in a million years did I think she’d actually go and do it!

Ξ

Flavia hates waking up at night on this island, ever since those crabs took over the beach on one of the first nights. She’s never really gotten over that. Since then, if it’s dark, she does all she can not to open her eyes. But her alarm goes off all the same. Even before she is awake her hand moves to silence it.

Here in her cell, she starts to drift off again but a tiny inquisitive voice in the back of her head starts asking what that alarm was for. And now, until she can figure it out, she can’t get back to sleep. Flavia squints at her phone screen. It presents a reminder:

YOUR FOURTH WEEK STARTS TODAY.

Flavia drops her head back on her pillow. Right. Her ordeal here isn’t even halfway over. But at least she can go back to sleep now. Since most of the heavy-lifting with Plexity is already done maybe she can just sleep through all of the next day.

What is that sound? Ah, yes. The fire. It is like an old-fashioned boiler in the next flat, an uneven sputtering of white noise in the far distance. And the ground outside flickers with its firelight. It is still burning quite hot. What a foolish thing that was for Mandy to do.

How hot is the fire getting? Flavia is generally comforted by feedback loop transfer functions and the state-space equations that can describe them. Now she lets them trickle through her mind. But she doesn’t know the starting values of the fuel or what its ignition point is. She will have to guess, which mostly makes the exercise irrelevant. And now she isn’t falling back to sleep at all.

She hears a giggle. Strange. The only other ones in here tonight are Maahjabeen and Pradeep and neither of them are the giggling type. Perhaps Maahjabeen is having a silly childhood dream. That’s what it sounds like. Such a carefree giggle.

Flavia wishes she could feel so carefree. But her life has never been so easy. Not that she’s had to deal with any particular challenges. She comes from a privileged family with historical roots and a tradition of philosophy and science in their ranks. She was mildly bullied for being a nerd in school and mildly assaulted once by a couple boys, who learned to keep their hands to themselves after she knocked one’s teeth out and dislocated the other one’s knee. But apart from a few rattling moments like that, her life has been pretty much her own. She is the paragon of a modern Italian woman, in control of her body and her career and her daily life.

After Prozia Giulia left her a sizable inheritance and an old farm in the Po River Valley, Flavia had become independently… well, not wealthy, but secure. And her work brings in enough revenue that she can almost pretend she is a success. It is when her patents start to make money that she will truly build her empire. Then she will be carefree. Until that day, it is projects for others like this.

No. Not like this. Never again like this. If anyone ever asks her to work onsite again she will laugh in their faces. From now on, she will do all her work from the comfort of her couch or not at all. Flavia has learned her lesson.

Maahjabeen giggles again. Ha. It must be quite a sweet dream!

Ξ

Miriam picks at the wall of the cliff beside her with her smallest tool. She’s getting flakes of dried clay intermixed with a variety of sandstones. The cladding, again. This is what hides the interesting layers from her, even here. When oh when will she finally be able to discover the roots of this island? She needs a bloody sluice to tear the earth off this cliff so she can finally see what she wants!

Suppressing a grimace, she shifts to see what else she can reach. They really haven’t moved since they’ve gotten here. Katrina and Triquet still stand with her in the corner of the village, unwilling to make a peep. It’s quite clear that their team is responsible for the fire and the villagers are extremely upset with them. It is a sign of their civility that they have been so restrained in their response.

Jay eventually returns with the others. His face is streaked with dirt and soot and he is uncharacteristically silent, eyes downcast. Whatever he saw up there has disturbed him greatly. Katrina tries to ask, then cajole answers from him. But he only shakes his head and shoves his hands into his pockets.

“Well, this is ridiculous.” Miriam looks to Triquet and Katrina for support. “We need whatever information you’ve got, Jay. Did you see the fire?”

Jay nods yes, his face even more unhappy.

“It’s not the camp, is it? Please God tell me it isn’t camp.”

“No, no…” This rouses Jay enough to speak. “Everyone’s safe.”

“Then where is the fire?” Triquet snaps fingers under Jay’s nose. “Hey I know you’re upset and you’re not like playing coy here but we need some real answers now. Dude. What’s on fire? Are we in trouble? When will it go out so we can get home?”

Jay groans. “It might be days. We gotta… We gotta, like find some food I guess. It’s one of the tunnels. The vertical one filled with branches and logs. And now it’s burning.”

“Ohh.” Triquet nods. “Yeah, that makes sense. But how did a fire get started…?”

Jay only crosses his arms and shakes his head no. He ain’t no snitch. And even though it was his idea, he’ll definitely have some choice words for Mandy himself, in private.

As the day progresses into afternoon, the wind shifts and billows of smoke come rolling through the tunnel mouth to cover the village. Now Miriam and the others have to move, scurrying with the Lisicans out of the village down the main path, deeper into the valley. The smoke, heavier than air, rolls after them.

The path is two people wide and the bare tree roots and soil soon give way to rounded river stones beneath their feet. Miriam kneels to scoop up a few. Quartz. Ha. This is an old riverbed and there must be a seam of quartz up-canyon. Here’s another pink quartz shot through with pyrite. Nearly everything else is sandstone of various hardness. She stands, pockets the samples, and hurries after the others, smoke chasing her.

Miriam is quite glad to have a properly-fitting mask, but her eyes are still streaming in the dense smoke. Her breath labors through the filter and her chest aches. Her heart is beating too fast.

The trail flattens out into a wide river valley. It follows a narrow stream, with a worn bank where the villagers must get their water. Here, they’re far enough from the rim of cliffs that the wind blows across, pushing the smoke off to the west. The villagers cross deep into the valley to get as far from the smoke as they can, finally standing along the tall bank of a larger creek in a long line.

This flight has revived Jay and he’s back to problem-solving mode. Where will they cross this little river here? It’s deep and flowing fast, the water dark blue and brown, reflected in the nauseous sky. The first flecks of ash are sprinkling its surface.

Jay and his crew look up and down the bank. There is no bridge, no ford, no fallen log. As far as they can tell, there is no way across. The Lisicans stand waiting, anxious but fleeing no farther, their backs to the river.

“Uh, won’t we be better off like, over there?” Jay can’t help but say it aloud to the closest Lisican, a relatively tall man who comes up to his shoulder. Jay points at the far side of the river. Then he corrects himself and points again using the tip of his thumb. But the man won’t even turn around to look.

“Who’s that?” Katrina hasn’t said much these last few hours. Usually in a crisis she likes to chatter or sing a song but here, in masks and smoke, she can’t lift her own spirits, much less those of anyone else. But now she sees a figure on the far bank, a teen girl in a blue feather cape, who stands at a distance and calls out.

“Eeeyyyyy-Yee!” The girl’s voice ends in a piercing crack. “Laak lilḵa Dunaax̱oo?”

The woman who first lectured Katrina at the entrance of the hut now separates herself from the others and takes fifteen or twenty steps away from the river before she turns around. She responds to the girl with a long loud chant that carries across the river, pointing at the fire, then at the tall strangers in their midst.

The girl considers the speech for a long moment, then turns and vanishes. The woman on this bank hurries back to join the others, waving a hand in front of her own face and coughing. The villagers all fall to talking to each other. Still, none of them will turn to look across the river.

“Anyone else,” Triquet drawls, “starting to think we shouldn’t be looking this direction? Some kind of taboo, I guess.”

“Who knows?” Katrina shrugs. “We may be exempt. Who even knows what’s going on here? Christ. It’s nothing but one bloody incomprehensible thing after the other. All I know is we haven’t brought them a single moment of joy since we got here. They must be so sick of us.”

“Maybe we… uh…” Jay looks over the heads of the Lisicans up and down the bank to find a more suitable place to stand, away from the villagers who hate them so much. But stands of reeds and clumps of vegetation block his view each way. “Let me just check downstream here.” Jay breaks formation and steps away from the river, crossing before the last clutch of villagers on their left to investigate what lies beyond a surprisingly-tall stand of catchfly.

A gap in the vegetation on the bank is infilled with tule reeds. No real place for them here. Pushing through the reeds leads to a marsh with sucking mud. And if he goes any further away from the river in search of solid ground he’ll be right back in the smoke.

In defeat, Jay returns to the others, where the air remains clear.

Katrina has used the time he’s been gone to make a plan with Triquet. After the woman addressed the girl on the far bank, she had returned to her place at the riverside, next to the old crone Katrina had been trying to meet in her hut. Of course she’s been evacuated too. Now this might be their only chance to speak with her. But Triquet isn’t convinced.

“Give the old thing a chance to catch her breath first, girlfriend. She ain’t going nowhere.” Triquet still carries the folded display in the internal sleeve of their backpack where a water pouch should go. But they make no move yet to retrieve it.

When Jay returns, he taps them each on the arms and gestures with his chin at the far bank. They look over their shoulders to see the members of another entire village standing outside the edge of the woods there, regarding them.

Their leader is a tall woman with tight gray curls carrying what looks like a spear with a cross-brace. She begins speaking but Jay can’t follow. His mind’s awhirl with what that cross-brace means. A spear like that is only used in big-game hunting, like elk or bison. If your prey has the potential of lunging and goring you then you put a cross-brace on your spear so it won’t plunge further than a certain depth. It keeps you away from antlers and tusks. She wears a hide cape and skirt. Further proof these people hunt big game. There’s large mammals on this island!

Katrina is discreetly recording the woman’s speech. She speaks softly into her phone during a silence. “This is the other like chief, I guess. Like the lady boss. That’s what I’ll call her. Now Lady Boss is pointing at the trees and the cliffs and the river. Listen! She’s saying the same word Morska Vidra used! Tuzhit! Tuzhit! Tuzhit everywhere!”

Triquet narrates what happens next. “Now our own Lady Boss, the crone’s daughter? She’s stepping away from the river to reply. There’s some kind of holy significance perhaps? A significant cultural element of both their villages, this river? That if they get too close they can’t look at it? Good fences make good neighbors?”

“We’ll call our Lady Boss, uh, the Mayor? I think she’s repeating what she told the girl.” They listen to her speech again, and when she indicates the tall strangers in their midst, Jay for one feels compelled to bow in the direction of the new tribe.

That doesn’t go over well. Lady Boss lifts her spear and shouts in a dreadful guttural voice at them, her consonants crashing together and her eyes flashing. They haven’t seen this kind of aggression from anyone in this village. “Whoa. That ain’t good.” Jay averts his eyes like the others.

Lady Boss makes a decision. She directs some of her villagers to go stand on their own bank of the river. Katrina glances back to see that a good twenty of their tribe line it in opposition, their own backs to the river. “Well, this is ridiculous.”

“Norms must be observed,” Miriam tells Katrina, squeezing her hand for patience. “Especially during a crisis. That’s what they’re for.” Miriam takes a long glance herself. Lady Boss and the rest of her village have left, leaving only the score of those on the far bank. “Even if we have no fucking clue what they mean.”

Triquet shares a glum look with Katrina, then Jay. “Anyone else getting hungry?”

“Oh, damn,” Jay groans, “you had to mention it.”

Ξ

“This is my processing site here.” Pradeep leads Amy to a small clearing in the grove, near Maureen Dowerd’s grave. He has excavated a long trench of turf, topsoil, and clay, removing the long narrow samples of earth to lie in rows, where they’ve been marked with small pins adorned with white flags. “The flags mark the boundaries of each medium, gravel, clay, etc. We’ll need Miriam to help us analyze what each of the minerals are. But we get to categorize any life forms we find in each layer.”

Amy crouches beside the samples and studies them, marveling that there can be so much life in such places. “We need to isolate strains, and there might be millions. The soil alone probably contains… who knows?”

Pradeep falls into lecture mode. “Recent papers estimate five thousand bacterial species. But that’s from a soil sample in Bergen, Norway. Lisica might have somewhat more or less, but it’s definitely a very different environment. But here’s the magic of the military-industrial complex. The Dyson readers make short work of the samples. Watch…” And he loads a couple milligrams of loose soil into its tray, which withdraws into the body of the unit. Pradeep’s phone buzzes. He consults it, then shares its display with Amy. A steady stream of eubacterial identifications scroll down the screen. Most cannot be identified by name, which may mean they’re unique and undiscovered.

“Sweet Jesus,” she laughs. “Just identifying the first strain… Instantaneous here but god, just doing that took the entire second semester of my sophomore year. Now it’s happening in the blink of an eye in batches by the thousand. I’m so old.”

Pradeep laughs. “My generation of scientists will be so meta. Or specialists so narrowly-focused they only speak a language like three other people do. Nobody in-between, for sure. So now back to work. The important part here is to keep all the samples straight and annotate the context of each sample with the Plexity keywords. I’ve got it set up like an assembly-line. And I’ve only got a few hours of work here left. So if you start on this end, and take a tiny scoop, no more than a milligram or two, then we can work together toward the bottom…” His stomach growls loudly enough to interrupt him and they both laugh.

“When was the last time you had a proper meal?” Amy frowns at him, knowing she won’t like the answer.

“Yes. Last night. You’re right. I’ll grab a snack when we’re done. I’ve just got another project that—”

“Why don’t you go grab a bowl and spoon out some of the rice on the stove. It’s still warm. There’s curry powder in the little blue bin if you want. But hot food! Now! And plenty of it!”

But Pradeep hesitates. “Yes. Okay. I just want to make sure we’re clear here. Do you get the collection protocol?”

“What do you think I’ve been doing the last two weeks? Just not on this scale. But yes! Go! Eat!”

Satisfied that the work will continue without him, Pradeep smiles his gratitude to Amy and scurries back to camp. Now that his hunger has announced itself it claws at him, interrupting his every train of thought. Biology, even his own, has its demands.

The rice and curry isn’t enough. He finds a packet of powdered eggs and reconstitutes them with a bit of oil and water. There. A foam of yellow protein. That will keep him going. He sits with a bowl near Alonso, Flavia, and Esquibel, who all work on laptops in silence. Alonso peers over his reading glasses with a frown and addresses Pradeep. “How goes the processing facility?”

“Grand. I’ve got Amy working it right now while I grab a bite. The species identification software in those Dyson readers is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen. Or perhaps it’s part of the microfluidics process itself. Probably both. Anyway. Now that I know readers like these exist, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do fieldwork again without them.”

“It’s excellent data. Mm, that smells good. I’m getting hungry.”

“Don’t move, Alonso.” Pradeep stands. “I left an extra serving in the pot. Here. And would you like a glass of wine with that?”

Alonso holds up his hand to forestall Pradeep. “No wine. Not this early. And no more drugs. Not for a good long time, at least. Just food. Thank you so much, Pradeep. You are a prince.”

Pradeep recalls how Alonso looked at him with such ardor while he was rolling on Molly. Pradeep blushes and looks down, hoping Alonso has no memory of the event. That’s how those party drugs work, isn’t it? People black out and need to be told what they did when they lost all control. Pradeep finds the concept unimaginable. His anxiety would never let him do such a thing.

After finishing his own bowl, Pradeep washes it and moves on to his next project. He really should have started this hours ago but it didn’t occur to him until he was knee-deep in the soil samples and nobody else seems to feel such urgency about their lost colleagues.

But still, he should have done this sooner. Pradeep hauls out the case that contains the drone and the headset and joysticks Katrina uses to fly it. He has never worked with such an advanced model. The old DJI mini he used before didn’t even come with a headset, just a flatscreen monitor and grainy resolution.

“Pradeep. What are you up to…?” Pradeep can’t locate the source of the voice. How odd. He takes off the headset and looks around. Who was it who spoke? They sounded so… forlorn.

“Just, uh, working with the drone,” Pradeep calls out in a neutral tone. “Thinking I might get it up and over the cliff. Send a note to the village. I don’t know. Maybe it’s crazy.”

“You can’t take the drone!” It’s Mandy. She leans out of the bug netting that had shadowed her. She looks dreadful, her hair hanging in lank strands, dark circles under her eyes. “I mean, we need it for the weather station. What if you lose it? Then I won’t have anything.” She lets the last word fall, realizing how lame she sounds. What has happened to her? How has she become such a loser? She can hardly show her face in camp anymore.

Pradeep sits back, recognizing the screech in her voice. Mandy is ruled by her emotions at the moment, her spirit nearly broken by the mistakes she’s made. He blinks at her. Consolation is hard for him. Not that he doesn’t feel for Mandy. He just doesn’t know how to put his care into words without triggering his own anxiety. Then what a fine pair they’d be, huddled in two opposite corners of her tent, curled fetal, facing away from each other. No, he has to be more helpful than that somehow. “Uh, it’s okay. There’s a second battery, you know.”

But now Mandy is crying, utterly miserable. Poor girl. Pradeep wonders how he might respond if it was Maahjabeen in tears. He stands and crosses to her platform. Pradeep sits awkwardly on the edge. He pats Mandy’s shoulder.

She sobs more loudly and pushes her face into his shoulder. She just wants to hide. That’s all she wants now.

Pradeep puts an arm around her, worried that he might smell too bad, his clothes, his armpits, his breath. “There, there.”

He looks up, across the camp, to find Esquibel watching them with a crooked smile, entertained by his predicament. Pradeep makes a face at her, in sympathy of Mandy.

Esquibel, to his surprise, smiles warmly and blows him a kiss.