Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us on 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!

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15 – Against Their Will

Jay follows Pradeep into the undergrowth. This was Jay’s idea and he meant to be the one showing Pradeep, but the damn sprained ankle still slows him down.

Pradeep, on hands and knees, looks over his shoulder. “Left?”

“Yeah, I mean it’s the only way really.” Jay curses himself for not investigating that left tunnel earlier. He focused on the discoveries in the nest to the right, overlooking the pool. If he’d been thorough then, he’d have been the one who discovered the cliff entrance aboveground. And then maybe he could have been the one who found Flavia. Who knows?

Pradeep removes his bulky backpack and pushes it ahead of himself through the dry duff. It quickly grows gloomy and dark. He pulls his headlamp’s band over his forehead and switches it on. The low tunnel through the branches curves away to the left. It is a passage for much smaller people. Pradeep figures he might be the tallest person on this island and his overly-wide shoulders can’t seem to find the proper angle to slip through. So he ends up forcing it in tight spots, bracing the tough leafless limbs with arms and legs as he wrestles his way through.

“How’s it going up there, partner?” Jay’s cheery voice is right behind him. The wiry Californian moves like a weasel in the woods. He once told Pradeep that from the ages of nine to twelve he slept inside a house only eighteen times. All his other nights were spent in a tent or under the stars. Pradeep, who grew up in highrise apartments in Hyderabad and Pondicherry, can’t imagine a childhood without violent weather and immense crowds and buzzing insects. While Pradeep was nearly drowned but also often sustained by the ocean of life in which he spent the first seventeen years of his life, Jay had experienced something very much like Lisica, just with more sunshine. Lucky devil.

But was he really crushed and drowned by life on the flanks of the Eastern Ghats? His father Rajiv was a postmaster general for a large division of Hyderabad. His Tamil wife Nanditha stayed at home with Anisha and Pradeep, distrustful of the community she had married into. His mother had made their home a fortress and filled her children with anxieties about cleanliness and crime and dishonor, to the point that she had a breakdown when Pradeep was twelve, followed by his sister’s utter neurotic collapse in a parking garage downtown two months later, caught on video and shared on social media and everything. She’d even been institutionalized for a time. Ah, yes, the golden years… Pradeep trudges through the bracken, sharp branches and thorns snagging at him, hands stinging with their bite, his forebrain absently listing off Latin names for all the species around him while his hindbrain is filled with old memories.

“So my uncle grew some of the fattest sativa crops of the nineties in Big Sur.” Jay doesn’t mind the slow going. He’s able to better protect his bum hand. But as he crawls that elbow on his shirt gets all torn up instead, bearing his weight. When Pradeep stops once again Jay pulls a synthetic neck gaiter from his pocket and winds it five times around his sleeve, then pushes it up into position. That should help for a bit. “He had a secret approach like this through the scrub that the Feds never found. It started as a game trail and he just widened it in certain spots that couldn’t be seen from planes or satellites. Man, I remember the first time he took me there. So fucking cool. It was like stepping into magic land.”

Pradeep stops in a small junction big enough for him to sit up in. “You mean an illegal grow operation? Wasn’t that very dangerous for a child?”

“Oh totally. He had a big ol’ revolver on one hip and a big ol’ blade on the other. Said he’d fought off a bunch of Mexican Mafia back in the day. And then boom! We came out onto this field that was just so amazing. Immense and perfectly hidden. He’d hung camo parachutes under the trees like we did here. Like over three thousand plants, the tallest were over seven meters. See, I didn’t understand at that age how fully destructive an outdoor grow was. The diverted streams and the fertilizer runoff and the booby traps in the woods. I just thought he was a genius.” Jay peers down the two paths ahead. “He eventually spent ten years in Mule Creek Penitentiary and today he’s a bitter ex-con with a foot they had to amputate from diabetes. Now, which way to the cliffs? And where does this other one lead?”

Pradeep shakes his head briskly to clear it of Jay’s wild story. Then he orients himself. “Cliffs must still be to the right, yes? We are constrained on that side by the pool. So there can’t be another path there. It would lead right into the water. The path to the left? I don’t know.” By all rights Pradeep should be heaving now with claustrophobic panic. And it does flutter like a white moth against the window of his mind but he will not let the panic in. He has taken tremendous steps here on Lisica, as the crises have mounted and the unknowns have increased. Yet his rational mind keeps reminding him that despite all the dangers he remains relatively unscathed. The immense dreadful possibilities that normally grip him by the throat have less power here. Perhaps there are just fewer factors and the unknowns come in manageable sizes, unlike the urban hell of Hyderabad or even the bustle of Pittsburgh or Houston where he’s spent so much of his academic life. Perhaps he is just finally growing up. But he never thought he would willingly crawl through a bank of vegetation to wedge himself inside a cliff. Yet even the most wildly dangerous unknown can in time become a safe known. That is his new mantra.

And besides, Jay told him Triquet brought back news of a colony of bioluminescent fungi in a rocky chamber near the exit. Pradeep could ask for nothing more.

“You are correct. Look. Their tracks come from the right.” Jay leads now, up the right tunnel to the cliff face. At a small skirt of fallen black stone, the manzanita suddenly stops and a few tracks through the mud lead to a fold in the vegetation ahead. Rounding into a hidden cut, Jay ducks into the mouth of the tunnel that leads into the cliff. He giggles. “Oh, man. This is fucking wild. It was right here all along.” The way everyone had been describing the cave tunnels he thought they would be the tightest mud chutes. But he can stand straight in here. And only half of it is earth. The other half is solid stone. This is a legit cave. He could like live in here. There’s even a nice flat platform near the back, dry and clear, for a bed. And then there’s another path in the rear leading further in. He ducks into it.

Aha. This must be what they meant. Jay turns his headlamp on. Yeah… that’s pretty dire. The rocky ceiling lowers to a height he can’t see from this angle. But he can see the tracks Miriam and Triquet and Amy made in the mud. They obviously came crawling out from this hole yesterday. Jay kneels and prepares to squirm his way forward. Then he realizes Pradeep isn’t yet with him. He pauses. “How’s it going back there, partner?”

“Oh.” Pradeep’s voice in the chamber behind him is muffled and a bit surprised. “I didn’t realize you were moving on. Didn’t you see this? I want to study it first.”

Jay frowns, temperamentally incapable of slowing down, and reluctantly retraces his steps to Pradeep’s side. His taller partner is still at the mouth of the chamber, staring up at its ceiling.

Jay sighs in wonder. “Ah, wow…!” It is the night sky, drawn in ash sticks, hanging over their heads like the dome of a planetarium. Countless stars, made of some bright white bits they can’t identify, sparkle down at them. The moon is a pale orb made of mother of pearl. “Oh, shit. Look at the moon. I think it’s an abalone shell. Oh my fucking god, if there are abalone here we will eat like kings. I haven’t seen any yet but… Have you ever had any?”

“Abalone?” Pradeep shakes his head no. “Isn’t that like a large scallop? No.”

“So much more than a large scallop, my man. Best seafood on the planet bar none. And I will fight anyone who disagrees.”

“Hm. Better than uni?”

“Dude, this is like a steak. Better than any lobster or crab or fish or anything. But you need like a crowbar to get them off the rocks. They’re so mighty. And their shells are beautiful. But you got to tenderize them or they’re like leather. Beat them into submission then fry them in butter… Bro. Jesus, I’m like drooling, having a serious Pavlovian response just thinking about it.”

“We don’t have butter.”

“Yeah, definitely a major oversight.”

“You know what else is a major oversight?” Pradeep still studies the artwork. The ash is drawn in varying shades, the Milky Way a lighter band through the center. This is advanced art, with a distinct style. “We neglected to bring an actual anthropologist skilled in first contact. None of us know what to do with these discoveries. We aren’t trained.”

Finally Pradeep drops his gaze to see Jay waiting for him at the low mouth of the next tunnel. “Yeah,” Jay agrees. “I mean, we know not to compromise the natives with disease or exploit their asses, right? That’d be fucking perfect, wouldn’t it? They drop off eleven scientists on March twenty-second and pick up eleven slave masters on May nineteenth.”

Pradeep mutters something he regrets as soon as it passes his lips.

Jay has already dropped down into position. He pauses and looks back over his shoulder. “What’s that?”

Pradeep grimaces and drops to his knees behind Jay. The white moth beats more frantically against the glass. “They dropped off eleven, but unless we can find Flavia they’re only picking up ten.”

Ξ

Katrina misses nothing about modern life. Well, nothing she didn’t bring with her, that is. Don’t be taking her music and drugs away. And sure, losing the internet is a huge bummer but she’s managing just fine. It turns out that after a couple weeks in the middle of nowhere she doesn’t care about the Marvel Universe after all and the wise and wonderful social media personalities she follows seem far less knowledgeable about the world. Their insights sound false and shrill in her head now, the ambitious political bravery they espouse only fit for the unhealthy world they inhabit. It doesn’t matter that we / the people / can never be divided if there simply aren’t any people. Or, more properly, they won’t get divided in the first place if none of the handful of people on this isolated speck of land are sociopaths. That’s the thing, innit? Without the sociopaths we don’t need rules and laws and police and prisons. It’s always those few sly ones trying to find the loopholes and advantages for themselves who ruin it for everyone else. But if all the members of the village are just willing to work together like normal humans, then they can just carry on with their projects and daily lives, understanding that it’s to everyone’s benefit that they just treat each other bloody decently. How hard is that?

She makes her own exploration of Tenure Grove this morning. It is uncharacteristically humid and the air is heavy, with idle birds cheeping in the trees and stillness all about. It’s a bit spooky, if Katrina is being honest with herself. But Mandy told her about the nook that makes twisters and she’s still never visited Maureen’s grave. There’s all kinds of wonders out here.

Just the trees themselves are outrageous. Katrina stands at the base of one of the elder giants, its red bark gone black over the millennia, rilled deeply and striped with nearly fluorescent lichen. She presses her hand against the tough fibrous bark, trying to make contact with the living being within. But the bark is a thick shell she can’t penetrate. Then she looks up. The trunk shoots straight upward for nearly a hundred meters before it even thinks about spreading its branches. She actually can’t see much here at the base. The trunk is so big it dominates her view. Katrina steps back, and fights her way through the brush to encircle it. This one tree is just too big for her to see all at once. It’s a single living organism and it’s broader than her house. There are twenty story buildings downtown that are shorter. And it’s just a tree. Crazy.

Maybe she can count them. Get an inventory. The bio team seems pretty overwhelmed with all the collecting they have to do. She could definitely give them a hand. Perhaps she should start at the edge to her left and systematically go through from one side to the other. Yes, that would be best.

And then her mind starts to wander, as it regularly does. What if she plotted the redwoods on a map? Wouldn’t that make everyone happy? More data and all that. Then maybe she could take it to Mandy and get more into this transpiration jazz she won’t shut up about. Trees call the rain to them. How cool is that? Well okay, atmospheric scientist. You want to play this game? Let’s break it down tree by tree, how much moisture they’re exhaling, and build a flow dynamic with your weather data. See if we can model this whole bad boy: the ocean currents; the weather; the cyclones in the nooks; and even the trees calling rain. We can create visualizations of gases rising from the island in clusters and how they interact with the air currents sweeping in.

Hmm. Depending on how many nodes she put into the model, the complexity of it could easily exceed the computing power of the machines on the island, but she will deal with that eventuality when she comes to it. They are all getting into much more data-intensive work and the CPUs of Lisica are about to suffer. Anyway, she’s got ideas about optimizing their FLOPS. But that’s for later.

So wait. What qualifies as a tree? Are these little green saplings like redwood babies or are they some other kind of pine? And will the saplings have any affect on the humidity? Nominal amounts? Also, there appear to be some pretty tall pine and fir trees here that aren’t redwoods. Do they transpire at the same rate? Uh oh. Looks like she’ll need to brush up on North American dendrology before she anoints herself any kind of field biologist. She should probably talk to Amy about how to best go about it before just throwing herself in.

Katrina makes a face. But that is not her way. And besides, Amy is out of camp, as are Jay and Pradeep. Here. She’ll just take a picture of every tree in the grove and annotate where it is. Then if she doesn’t recognize it she can identify and categorize it later. How many trees can there be? Like, what, a thousand at most?

No, there’s nothing she misses about modern life. She misses her dad and Pavel, no doubt, but she also doesn’t mind this break from them. Life is intense back in Sydney with all their cares and woes. God, if she could just bring Pavel here. He would heal so fast. She can already see a transformation starting in Alonso, an easing of the pain. Her brother always loved big trees. And a good mystery. This place would accelerate his rehabilitation.

She has three hundred-eighty pictures in her new album when she realizes she’s only moved through a tiny fraction of the grove. Ah feck. There are a lot more trees in a grove than she thought, and the grove is bigger than it looks when you really start to study it. Maybe she’ll just stick with the large trees, the real giants who often grow in these tight rings. She can just take pictures of each of them, or as much as she can fit in a single frame. And maybe the cut-off will be if the trunk is wider than a meter. That should bring her targets down to a manageable amount, shouldn’t it?

Katrina finds herself inside one of the redwood fairy rings staring at Maureen Dowerd’s grave. Right. The mystery. A bird trills in a shrubby tree beside her. She listens, then hears the distant crash of the surf. Suddenly she is unbearably lonely, the immense isolation of Lisica bearing down on her with full force. It’s inescapably true, this infinitesimal chip of land floating in the forbidding ocean is an existentialist crisis for the taking whenever she wants. But she’s always put on a brave face about confronting the howling void so far. No reason to let it get to her now.

Had the ennui gotten to Maureen here? Did she kill herself? It seemed to fit the facts they knew. Could it have driven her over the edge and kept her body from being returned? Wasn’t there much more of a taboo in postwar America about suicide? Or wouldn’t they have come up with a harmless euphemism? Died in her sleep or some such. Maybe she blew her brains out and it was impossible to mask the hole in the skull or something. Maybe they had to hide the body here.

Katrina takes a step back and her foot sinks in the duff. It’s so spongy and soft. She studies the wood and concrete grave marker with a frown. Something isn’t right. The marker stands barely above the level of the collected detritus. How has it not been totally covered over the years? Triquet said Maureen must have died like over six decades ago, way more than enough time for her remains to be buried here forever. So how had Jay found it still sticking out into the air like this? It’s almost like someone’s been watching over the grave, tending it…

In a dizzying instant, Katrina’s existential anxiety flips. She doesn’t feel alone at all any more. As a matter of fact she has the distinct impression she is being watched. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle. An unbearable impulse to bolt fills her.

Nothing has changed. The air remains still. The bird still hops in the bushy tree beside her. But she can’t stay here a moment longer.

Katrina scrambles from the fairy ring, the middle of her back itching, anticipating the blow of an indigenous arrow or spear. Because that’s who it has to be, right? Lurking in the brush nearby or something, watching her with dark eyes.

The island is inhabited. The island is inhabited.

These words echo in her mind over and over as she retreats to the safety and loud bustle of camp.

Ξ

A yelp of pain from the bunker breaks Alonso’s concentration. He looks up with a frown. Another sharp yelp and a gasp follow. Ah. Maahjabeen. Poor girl. The good doctor and Mandy must be working on her shoulders and back.

Now. Where was he? Right. He’s back at Plexity, working at the widest frame of reference that can be useful, placing the bounds of the data set at several kilometers from the physical boundaries of the island, both in the water surrounding it and the air above. Beyond those boundaries, it can be justified that Lisica ceases to be a unique geographic locale per se. Outside influences begin to matter as much as local ones and the surrounding open ocean becomes a transition zone. But where exactly does that occur?

Ai mi. How will he ever translate this to larger biomes? This is the question that forces him to work at such a scale this morning. In the future, when he tries to apply Plexity to the Colombian Cordillera or the American Midwest there will be no clear simple boundaries like Lisica has. There isn’t an undifferentiated ocean around them, there are nodes and clusters of life all over, in every direction. Every interaction just leads to other interactions further afield. And yet, isolating one from another means shearing it clean of the very entanglements he needs to study. He knows deep in his bones that the biological interactivity of Plexity is his life’s work and that precious insights into the nature of the universe await him. If he can only find the proper way to actually represent it in ways computers and their coders can understand. That is the challenge.

Where is Flavia? She can help untangle… Ah. He chuckles at himself. There’s an old man moment if he’s ever had one. She is still gone, maybe for good. Another black mark against him. Or maybe his forgetfulness of her crisis isn’t due to age but instead his torture. Maybe he just can’t keep dark realities in his head any more. It is a coping mechanism, the way he was able to ignore what they were doing to his body in the gulag by fixating on the abstract details of Plexity.

Well, then, Katrina. Where is she? He needs someone who can understand his predicament and offer an original viewpoint. Ah. She is walking into camp right now. He opens his mouth to say her name just as she calls out to Pradeep, who is emerging from the underbrush covered in mud, his eyes wide.

“I couldn’t—I couldn’t…” The poor boy is hyperventilating, holding his hands to his face.

Katrina grabs him, consoling him. “I’ve got you, Pradeep. You’re safe. You’re perfectly safe here. We can take care of you.”

“Jay…” Pradeep shivers. “He wouldn’t stop. Miriam said we have to have two underground at all times and I tried to stay but when I told him I had to go he insisted…” He shivers again.

“Can’t believe you went down there. What a brave boy.” She hugs him, fouling her clothes with his mud.

The condescension and pity do him in. He drops his shoulders, unable to return the hug. He groans. “Oh, god. Don’t talk to me like a child. Please, Katrina. I do have some dignity left.”

She steps back, befuddled. Okay, he wants help but he doesn’t want help. Or maybe he just needs someone to push against.

But he isn’t comfortable under her gaze. “I should go wash up. Has anyone seen Amy?” Pradeep doesn’t wait for an answer. He disappears in the bunker, escaping her.

Well. That was awkward. “Katrina.” She turns to find Alonso sitting in his camp chair on his platform. He watches her like some brooding lumpy golem worrying over the unfairness of life. She supposes that’s how she would feel too if someone made it their part-time job to break every bone in her feet. Remembering how carefully she’d learned to approach Pavel these last few months, she finds a smile for Alonso and walks over to where he sits.

“Do you know where Amy is? Pradeep and I are both looking.”

“She is underground with Miriam and Triquet. I hope they get back for lunch. It would be good to have another full meeting.”

“Well. Full if they bring Flavia back.”

“That is the thing.” He gestures at his laptop like it is a brilliant but wayward child. “I need to talk with her about Plexity. She chose the exact wrong time to disappear.” Then he lapses, realizing how peevish that sounds. “I was wondering if you could maybe hash out some of these concepts with me. It’s too much to keep in my brain all at once.”

“Sure thing. I love hash.” Katrina sits beside Alonso hugging her knees as he collects his thoughts, scrolling through his disordered notes of bullet points and logic trees. She loves how his mind works and she’s glad to be here just witnessing the living legend gather all his abstract evanescences into clarified concepts.

Finally, Alonso says, “The island is a computer.”

Katrina blinks. “Okay. Like an information processing… entity.”

“Precisely. Based on biological and geophysical principles. Every interaction of sun and insect and leaf that it processes lead to further complexities. The issue is, and always has been, where does the computer end? I thought an island in the middle of the ocean, hidden from the sun and with every current heading away from it, would be the ultimate test bed for Plexity, inoculated from all outside effects. But now that I actually have to define in certain terms precisely where Lisica is and where it is not… Eh. I find that I can’t do it yet. Because every interaction is still colored by universal constants of diffuse sunlight and, who knows, zephyrs in the upper atmosphere that carry pollution from China. And sure, I might be able to eventually build models that exclude the pollution but then it wouldn’t be Plexity. This is all the butterfly problem over and over again. Everything on Earth is connected.”

“And you can’t even study Earth itself as an isolated test bed.” Katrina scales her perspective upward, finding it doesn’t help. “The planet is bombarded by gamma rays and solar wind and, what is it, something like fifty tons of meteors that shower the surface every day? Everything influences everything, even at galactic scales.”

“Yes, exactly. But please. You are the young fresh genius. You are supposed to be the one who tells me how I am thinking about this all wrong and how you can solve this incalculable problem.”

“Oh. Okay.” Katrina nods once, decisively, and declares, “Got it. You’re thinking about this all wrong. I can solve this…”

Alonso laughs, finishing the sentence, “…incalculable problem.”

“Oh, no, it’s calculable. It just…” She cocks her head, ideas rushing through it. “Huh. You’ve really got me thinking about this in a new way. Hold on a sec.” Katrina falls silent for a moment. “Yeh, the thing is, I’m not sure you’ll end up with a system that functions the way you want or gives you the results you want, but yeh. It’s really a matter of switching your frame of reference.”

“I knew I was getting old and behind the times.” Alonso sighs, realizing the truth of his words. There is a fluidity to these kids who were raised in a sea of digital data. They can manipulate it without a thought, sculpt it like artists. Where for him and everyone his age, data will always remain an aggregate—granular and discrete and somewhat brittle. No matter how brilliant he is with it, he was not born to it. “So how do I switch such a thing?”

“Your problem, Alonso, is that you can’t escape your Cartesian perspective. With your little camp here and your Dyson readers and your trained collectors and agents, you’ve fixed yourself in this place and time and made it a subjective experience.”

“Of course I have. That is the whole point.”

“Well that’s what I’m saying. You’re limited by it and you find it frustrating to the point of defeat. But the only way you can fully accept this deep interconnectedness is by completely abandoning any subjective lens. You can’t be stuck on this island. Then you’re like an astronomer trying to learn the age and size of the universe from a single viewpoint on Earth, which is what they’ve tried to do for six hundred years and it’s literally impossible. What you need to do is liberate your viewpoint to be location-agnostic—”

“Yes yes.” Alonso waves an impatient hand. “But that is what the post-collection data analysis will do. It allows the end user to make whatever use they will of it, including silencing actual geographic locations. Look. Here. I have this function I’m building here. You can check a box and mute each element of the data set to filter…”

She sits back, unimpressed. “Yeh, I guess I’m talking about it on a much wider scale though. Like philosophical or cosmological. Either you accept a kind of Buddhist everywhere-and-nowhere-at-once omniscience or at some point you have to draw an edge to your map and accept the limitations and distortions it brings. You can’t have both.”

“But how can I have omniscience?” Alonso throws up his hands. “I am not a god looking down at anything. I am just a man. A fallible man crawling around near-sighted on the ground. I don’t have an Olympian view. Hell, I can hardly stand up. Look at Pradeep. He only studies the smallest of the small. But it will be his patient collecting of all these wildly disparate elements that will make Plexity sing. Yet only if I can give him a proper concert hall. So. Where would you put its walls?”

Katrina stares compassionately at him, not as a scientist but as a wounded old man. These are fallacies… but how much of this can he hear right now? How much does he need to finally let go of his preconceptions and how much of it is him holding onto what got him through the gulag? Before she can calculate an answer, among all the hard factors and the soft, they are interrupted by the approach of Maahjabeen and Mandy.

“Eh? Yes?” Alonso is annoyed by their arrival. He had just gotten Katrina to where she might actually give him a useful answer. Her sophomore-level philosophy was starting to get on his nerves. Of course all science is connected to the world around it. And of course all science must wall itself off to get any proper results. Except Plexity. That is the whole dream.

“What if Flavia is right about harmonics?” Katrina mutters as Mandy follows Maahjabeen up the big platform’s ramp.

Alonso stares at Katrina’s back, realizing there is a deep clue in what she says. But he can’t figure out where it fits in his notes. And before he can follow her line of reasoning any further, Maahjabeen demands his attention.

“Alonso, I have been talking this morning with Mandy here and Doctor Daine. We have a proposal for you.”

Alonso sighs, forcing himself to pivot, recognizing that he needs to take off his research hat and put on his managerial hat for a moment. “I see. Well, what is it, Miss Charrad. How can I help?”

Maahjabeen and Mandy share a tight-lipped apprehensive glance long enough for Alonso to grow puzzled. “You should let Mandy work on your feet.”

Alonso looks at the two of them, something hot and poisonous sliding beneath his skin, a sensation he hoped to never feel again.

“Ah. No. Thank you. I should focus on my work. And maybe worry about some more reconstructive surgery when I get back to the mainland. I will wait for the experts to…”

“It’s a good idea.” Katrina says this in the same low refractory tone she mentioned Flavia and harmonics. It stops Alonso.

He shares a nervous laugh and pushes on Katrina’s arm with a poor attempt at humor. “I don’t need you ganging up on me.”

“Why not?” The challenge comes from Maahjabeen. “Katrina is an expert, after all. She’s trained in dealing with torture survivors, has she not? And Mandy is also an expert. Her adjustments are saving my shoulders and back. And I am an expert because it is my body and I can feel the improvements she is making.”

Alonso becomes overwhelmingly sad. He hangs his head down and closes his laptop. Experts, are they? And what does that make him? An expert in self-destruction? “I will think about this. How is that? Is that enough? It is not something… I can…” And then he shuts down entirely. The three young women just watch as his mind drains of thought. He only stares back, unable to form words. His head sinks deeper on his chest. Maybe they will just go away.

Katrina puts a hand on his shoulder. She recognizes the pit into which he has fallen. “That’s a good plan. There’s no hurry for—”

But before she can finish, there is a commotion from the bunker. Triquet bursts out of its door, slamming it back with a crack. They hurry through with a cackle, clapping their hands, covered in mud like some mad prophet, and head for the big platform across camp to share the good news.“We found Flavia!”

Alonso’s head jerks up. The young women cry out in relief and Mandy starts clapping as well. His eyes clear. Of course. There is someone in even more desperate straits than himself. Put it away, Alonso. Focus on everyone else. “Where?” his voice is rough, coming from the deepest place. “Where was she?”

“Well,” Triquet is breathless, fetching up against the side of the platform. “We still don’t actually have her yet. It’s the natives. They took her. Or she went with them. We’re still figuring it out. There’s more than one group of them. See, we found a tunnel all the way through the cliffs to the interior valleys of the island—”

And then everyone starts talking and exclaiming at once.

Ξ

Flavia doesn’t know much about how a situation like this is supposed to happen but she knows that the first danger is that they might give each other diseases. So since she emerged from the tunnel in pursuit of the crying child she has worn her scarf across her face like a breathing mask. At first it spooked the Lisicans, which she has started calling them. She needed to remove the scarf to prove to them she wasn’t like some scary underground ghost returning from the dead. She didn’t understand a word of their shrieking alarms and urgent warnings when she emerged from the cave mouth. Who knows what they thought of her except that she must be some kind of monster? Most of the villagers scattered.

One bold youngster kept trying to touch her arm but she avoided him, explaining loudly about diseases. And then before they could make their minds up about her she’d heard the child cry out in the distance again demanded their help. But they’d only shrunk back even more. So she went on without them.

That child’s cry was so sad and piteous. It wrung at her heart and she couldn’t do a thing but drop everything and pursue it. What a… hormonal response. It shocked her. Flavia didn’t think she’d ever be a mother. When she was younger she always dreamed of a big family on a big farm but then with the way the world ended up, she settled for a big dog in a small apartment instead. But Flavia still has the maternal instincts and they dragged her forward into the darkness last night, through the village and up a narrow rocky trail deep into the heart of the island.

Now she sits on a stone platform an hour after dawn overlooking a deep valley. The shawl that was draped over her shoulders when she arrived here keeps her warm. It is some animal’s hide, gray patches stitched together. She slept in it here the night before. Poor sleep. Tossing and turning on the cold stone floor in the hut behind her. And the only food they’ve offered her is some horrible dried bird and fish with some parboiled tubers. If she wasn’t so hungry it would be nearly impossible to choke it down.

She had still never found the child. Its kidnapper had always remained maddeningly out of reach somewhere ahead of her. As she struggled to overtake them, the most terrible visions went through her head of the cruel torments the poor thing suffered. It tore at her heart.

She climbed the trails for hours yesterday, winding through these narrow valleys beside rushing streams. At one point she became very thirsty and overcame her reluctance to drink the cold water. If it made her sick, so be it. She was in too deep now.

Always the child cried out ahead, like someone was dragging them by the hair. That was the image Flavia kept seeing in her head, again and again. At one point, the sun broke through the cloud cover and startled her from her dogged pursuit. She looked around herself to find she scaled a narrow ridge that fell away into shadow on both sides. The child ahead screamed and sobbed but Flavia had to stop and catch her breath, legs shaking, wondering at the slanted depths that dropped the bottoms of the canyons into darkness.

She climbed as the shadows tilted. Then the sun disappeared and the light slowly faded. Then she heard the child with less and less frequency, and the cries sounded more hopeless. As night fell, the child abandoned her completely.

Flavia had finally come back to herself once the cries no longer jangled her nerves every thirty seconds. She stood lost in darkness. What was she supposed to do now? Whatever track she’d been following had faded, and she didn’t even know how she could get back to where she’d started. She would need to find a place to sleep. Maybe food? How had she lost her head so completely? This was so unlike her.

And where had Triquet and Maahjabeen gone? When had they stopped following her? Early on? Or were they somewhere nearby?

A shadow had approached her out of the darkness then, a small old man in a cape and pointed hat. He’d murmured words to her and she had answered, her voice shaking. He didn’t understand English so she switched to Italian. Easier for her anyway, and certainly more expressive to someone who didn’t speak it. She’d give the man more clues with her gestures and expressions than she could in English. But his face was a wrinkled mask and his words were mostly a monotone. She couldn’t see him well in the gloom. He led her to a hut and the sleeping platform within before all light faded from the sky. He had placed the fur shawl over her as she had fallen asleep, her last thought that it all smelled so bad.

Flavia had woken to find the food in a small pile on a large green leaf with a clay cup. The water tasted better than the food did. But when she emerged from the hut to find a whole little clan of them waiting for her, she smiled her gratitude and acknowledged them all with a nod. There were four Lisicans here. They all looked alike, small with long dark curls. Constant chatter surrounded her.

After her meal they had left her to her own devices and she had remained on the platform, looking down at the valley below. This was some kind of vista point up here. Perhaps it had some spiritual significance. That’s how it felt. Like these were the hermits who lived on the peaks to collect visions. But usually hermits didn’t have families. Well. Someone would someday learn their gabble and get the whole story. But that person would not be Flavia.

“I’m a mathematician.” She tried to explain herself in Italian to a sturdy dour woman perhaps her own age, but a head shorter. “A researcher. I am not what you call a people person. You would have better luck with… well, almost anyone else.”

The woman spoke, telling Flavia something of significance. She held up a finger to make a point and Flavia tried to divine any meaning she could. Then a recognizable word flew past. “Ingless? English? Yes, I already tried speaking English to you.” She switches languages but the woman shows no understanding. The man reappears, drinking from his own clay cup. His face is still a mask. She can’t tell if he is glad he saved her last night or not.

The woman speaks more, telling a long tale. She says Ingless a few times more and each time Flavia says, “Yes, English,” with diminishing hope. Maybe it is just the only English word she knows. Flavia begins to feel more and more unhappy with her predicament. She isn’t a captive here, and she won’t starve or die from exposure, but she’d very much prefer to go back to the beach with her colleagues, and (as soon as possible) off this island entirely.

Finally the woman finishes, grabbing Flavia’s hand and pressing their two palms together. Flavia resists the urge to pull away, only saying once they pull apart that the woman should wash her hand before doing anything else.

The woman nods and retreats to the man’s shoulder.

His turn. He steps forward and offers Flavia his clay cup. She smiles but shakes her head no. She mimes coughing and feeling sick, passing her hand across her forehead. They only stare at her. Do they not fall ill on this island? It wouldn’t surprise Flavia. Who would ever come by to spread their germs?

The man sets aside the cup and holds up a piece of sinew or hide he has twisted into a loop. He holds it out for Flavia and utters the word, “Koox̱.” She tries to take the cuff but he pulls it away. He offers it to her again and she tries to take it again but once more he pulls the loop away and repeats the word koox̱. They stare at each other. Finally the woman beside him holds her own hand up and the man drops the loop over it, cinching it at her wrist. Then he undoes the loop and offers it once more to Flavia.

The woman holds her hand up, beckoning for Flavia to do the same. “You want my hand?” But Flavia doesn’t like the sense of ownership the loop around the wrist appeared to give the man over the woman. She wants no part of that. “No. No, thank you…”

With a bow and a smile she steps back.

The man only watches her. He sets the loop aside and speaks to the woman. She responds with a long string of suggestions. He finally waves her away and approaches Flavia once more. He says something that sounds like he’s swearing an oath and then he reaches into his mouth. With a twist and a tug he removes one of his own teeth. Flavia can’t help but exclaim. The yellow enamel narrows to a dark root. This isn’t a living tooth. But he carried it in his mouth regardless? Disgusting. He holds it out to Flavia.

She shrinks back. “Oh, now what am I supposed to do? This is horrible.” All Flavia wants is to get away from these bizarre people. She realizes it’s now or never. If she waits too long it will get dark and she will get lost. But if she can only retrace her steps she should be fine. “Well…” She sticks with English. Italian had gotten her nowhere. “It has been very nice to meet you. And thank you for taking in a stranger who was lost and cold. But it is time for me to go back to my own people now. How do you say goodbye…?” She shrugs, the language barrier insurmountable, and turns away to locate the path to the south.

As Flavia does so she hears the child crying behind her again. She whirls back, her heart strings tugged just as strongly as before.

It is the man. The plaintive wails issue from his mouth. He looks at Flavia with sly expectation as the dreadful truth dawns on her. It was him all along, leading her here. His uncanny imitation of a crying child sounds exactly like a toddler who is being dragged cruelly away, against their will.