Chapter 60 – Coming Home
February 17, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the FINAL CHAPTER of 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!
As to what comes next, please watch this space for upcoming links to an Audible/Kindle version of Lisica as well as a podcast version. Also, my next project will begin here soon!
Audio for this episode:
60 – Coming Home
“Look,” Mandy calls out. “The clouds are breaking up.”
Amy had been about to give up. Her eyes are dazzled and she doesn’t trust herself on the heights up here at the top of the island. She turns back to Mandy, shielding her eyes from the blanket of brilliant clouds below them with an upraised palm. “They are? How can you tell?”
“I can see water. Let’s just give it another few minutes.”
The sky is a perfect dome of clear blue above, the morning sun blazing on the eastern horizon. “I forgot after all these weeks…” Amy shakes her head, carefully skirting the open pit of the shaft and making her way back to the crown of the ridge, “how strong the sun could be. We can’t even look at the clouds it shines on!”
“I grew up in Hawai’i.” Mandy smiles in memory of her sun-drenched childhood. “I can’t ever forget how hot it gets. Or how bright. Or how humid. But I’ve never seen… this.”
Only three peaks pierce the white blanket, theirs and two to the northwest and northeast, a triangle of perfect isolation. Apart from these tiny slivers of dark rock, the whole rest of the world is white below and blue above.
“This is too much.” Amy still can’t process the overwhelming sensation. “How can we expect to see anyone from up here?”
Mandy squints and looks back over the clouds on the ocean. “Hold on. Maybe the clouds over the southern shore will vanish so we can catch sight of a ship.” She rubs her wounded shoulder, bothered by the pain. “I do hope we only see a nice comfy research vessel or something. Or maybe one of those cruisers that launch the Navy helicopters. Get us home quick.”
“We’re probably on a slow boat home. For like a week or more. At least, that’s what I’m preparing myself for… It’s going to be hard to go from all this wonderful life here to a cold little metal box.”
Mandy peeks over the edge of the cliff again. The fogbank is indeed breaking up, shredding into long banners of white and gray. “And right on cue.” Mandy points a finger down, at a small dark gray ship cruising in from the island’s west coast. “There they are.”
“Oh my god. No way.” Amy squints at it. The ship is a destroyer from several generations before. Diesel smoke coughs from a stack of vertical pipes. Her heart sinks. “Russian. Got to be. Hardly looks seaworthy. Well, now we’ve got to warn the others. Come on.”
Yet Mandy delays, wanting confirmation. “I don’t see any flag.”
Amy grimaces. “Maybe they took it down. Maybe they’re not supposed to be here and they know it.”
“Yeah. We have to tell the others.” But Amy is already ahead of her on the trail back to the village. Mandy has to hurry to keep up, but her wound only slows her down.
They descend as fast as they safely can, Amy’s unnamed fox kit squirming in her pocket from all the activity. She is starting to get claws like needles, and they’re starting to poke through every layer of cloth, including her sports bra.
Amy drops the final length of nearly vertical trail back into the village. Her plan is just to dart through the square and enter the tunnel, but the way is currently blocked. A crowd of angry villagers surround someone in the square, yelling at them.
The person they have trapped tries to escape. The figure heaves against their held up arms and Amy recognizes Daadaxáats from the descriptions. The shaman is an ageless, sexless creature with a wide face set in a fierce grimace and bone fetishes hanging from their gray curls. In one hand they clutch a kit fox, in their other they ward the villagers away with a stick and feather totem. The people fall back from it, none daring to challenge the shaman.
It is clear to Amy that Daadaxáats has somehow stolen one of the village’s kits and is now trying to escape with it. Fury boiling over, she charges in and snatches the totem from their grip. “You evil… horrible…” Amy has no words for the hatred in her heart.
It is such an unexpected act that the shaman stops, dumbstruck, as do all the villagers. They all look at Amy with outrage and fear.
“Go on. Get the baby back,” Amy orders them while tearing the feathers from the cross-sticks of the totem. “Daadaxáats can’t hurt you any more. Yeah, I said your name. You didn’t like that, did you?” Amy’s voice curls into scorn. “Daadaxáats. Daadaxáats.”
But the villagers aren’t listening to her any more. Amy is just adding her voice to their growing clamor. Dozens of them fully encircle Daadaxáats, arguing about the criminal’s fate. There is no escape for the shaman.
They reach a consensus and the Mayor calls out a declaration from her place in the crowd. Then they all regard Daadaxáats.
Without a word, the shaman surrenders the mewing kit. Gentle hands take it back.
“Oh, thank god.” Mandy stands at the base of the cliff path at the edge of the village, watching the scene appalled. “Amy,” she calls out, rubbing her shoulder again. “Come on. We should go.”
But two new sounds suddenly echo from different points in the village. The first is a rustle of dried leaves behind the huts to the north. It is the fox mama and papa on their daily rounds, here to feed the kits of the village. The second is the snap of a small branch underfoot on the trail leading down to the creek. It is the Chinese spy, face smeared with dirt, crouched at the trailhead.
He sees the foxes. The foxes see him. Faster than an eyeblink the foxes turn and vanish under the fern. The spy lunges forward, still collared and leashed like a dog. The exiled Lady Boss holds the other end of several meters of rope. Her fast feet have no trouble keeping his pace. They dive together into the underbrush.
With collective cries of outrage the villagers chase the exiles into the bushes, some running wide to encircle and intercept them.
In a gap between thickets, the Lady Boss stands. She calls out something fearsome and waves the Chinese spy’s gun. She fires it at a random angle toward the clifftops. The noise and recoil startles her and she nearly drops it. But she recovers, sneering at them.
Spooked by the gunshot, the villagers all go still once more. The only remaining movement in the thickets is most likely the foxes, hurrying away. The Lady Boss drops back down into the ferns to chase them.
Crack. Another gunshot. “No,” Amy groans. “Not the foxes…”
After a long moment the Chinese spy drags himself clear from the edge of the ferns, blood streaking his face. He still wears the collar and leash but nobody holds the other end any more. A free man again, he brandishes his pistol, pointing it at all the glaring eyes hidden in the undergrowth. He warns the villagers off in his own language, stumbling back, and then once he’s assured there is no threat he slowly limps upslope, toward the northwest, only looking back twice.
A strangled sound rises from within the bushes. The villagers converge on it, carrying out Lady Boss, who has been shot in the jaw. The lower half of her face is a bloody mess and several teeth skew wetly from the gore. But her eyes are open; she still lives.
“Oh my god. Oh my god,” Mandy repeats. “I should go get Esquibel. They don’t know gunshots…”
Amy nods at the villagers. “No, but for my money, the Mayor is the best healer here. Ask Alonso.”
Preparing her front porch to receive the woman, the Mayor sends Xeik’w off to collect the necessary tools and supplies. Amy and Mandy can only stand in silence as the Mayor treats the wound of her old nemesis. Lady Boss cries out when her jaw is touched, and it shocks Mandy back into her urgent mission. “I have to go. We have to…” Mandy can see that Amy is far more invested in this drama of the foxes than she is. “Uh. Kay. How about you stay? And make sure it all gets put right, I guess.”
Amy nods. “Oh, shit. Right. That destroyer. Yeah, you go. But I just need to make sure… Ah, there.” Movement at the edge of the village is the two foxes stealing between the huts. The four kits are brought to where the mama sets up on Yesiniy’s porch. Amy brings her own. All five kits suckle at once, wriggling closer.
A rough hand closes on Amy’s shoulder. She turns. But Mandy is gone. It is Morska Vidra, watching the nursing kits with luminous eyes. He looks different, much younger than she’s ever seen him and for once Amy thinks they might be the same age. He says something to her, mimicking the gunshots, and how he ran to the village once he heard them. Then he indicates the foxes with his thumb tip, trying to communicate something profound. Lisica this and Lisica that. All she can do is nod and try to commit certain repeated words to memory. But her mind isn’t working right.
Only now does the adrenaline finally drain from her blood and tremors rattle in the emptiness. Amy’s teeth chatter and for a moment she wonders if she is about to go into shock. Morska Vidra frowns and drapes an arm across her shoulder, drawing her close.
Even as Amy’s empty head rings like a bell she still knows how profound this gesture is. It is what she has been seeking this entire time. Acceptance from the Lisicans. Belonging.
The Mayor prepares some of the broad leaves with paste. Xeik’w is doing what oral surgery they can, to the cries of their patient and the murmuring advice of the villagers on the porch.
Amy turns back to the suckling kits. “The babies are getting so fat. You know?” She mimes herself as fat. “Plump as pigs. They look so healthy!” Morska Vidra laughs. He is like the proud grandfather, the patron of this entire fox clan. Contentment radiates from him like stones in the sun.
Ξ
Triquet fights the wheel of the hatch that divides the sub from the stairs leading up to the bunker. They swab it with another dollop of rancid motor oil and try again. Just by shifting the wheel back and forth a tiny bit, the oil gets deeper in the gears and… Movement! Easier than they feared it would be. Now they can close the hatch and spin the wheel shut so this bulkhead will be waterproof, unsinkable, and impassable to the coming Russians.
But Triquet needs an extra hand. “Jay. Are you down here?”
“Radio room, boss!” Jay’s voice emerges faintly from further within the sub. “Just sealing up the last cracks!”
“So is that everyone? Nobody is up top any more?”
“Yeah.” Jay emerges at the far end of the dimly lit ward room. “Pradeep and Maahjabeen are in the sea cave. Amy’s still in the village. We got everyone else. Even Jidadaa.”
“Good.” Triquet closes the hatch and spins the wheel. Then they disassemble the nearest bunkbed and prop its cross-strut under the hatch wheel’s spoke, preventing anyone from turning it. They pat the hatch in satisfaction. “Like six centimeters of solid steel. There’s nothing gets through that. Whew. So relieved.”
Triquet and Jay pass through the hatch behind them, finding Esquibel, Miriam, and Katrina lounging in the second ward room. They enter the narrow hall and Jay shows off the work he’s done to block the tunnel in the radio room with large pieces of steel furniture. In the captain’s cabin, Alonso and Flavia sit side by side on the bed, working on their laptops. Triquet and Jay nod and smile before continuing past.
Esquibel follows them, peeking her head into the captain’s cabin. “What? No Mandy? I thought she… Ehh… Where is she now?”
“Oh!” Esquibel hears Mandy’s voice from ahead. “It’s Xaanach! The young shaman! We’ve been looking for you!”
Entering the control room, Esquibel finds a small crowd. Mandy and Jidadaa are here, facing the open bulkhead that leads to the tunnels the boys got lost in. Xaanach has silently emerged from this darkness. The frail girl stands in the slanting shadows, staring at Triquet and Jay, Mandy and Jidadaa.
As Jay works to seal this tunnel, Jidadaa instantly pelts her with a litany of questions and statements. Xaanach just glowers. There is something of a shaman gaze on this island and she has perfected it, a brooding, lowered-brow hoarding of power. A tiny kit picks its way around her neck through her ratty hair. She answers Jidadaa as best she can, but with little warmth. There is no sisterhood between these outcasts.
Finally, Jidadaa steps back and begs Xaanach for patience. She translates what she has learned: “Yes, Xaanach got baby ten. And baby eleven went to Kula.”
“Your own mom?” Mandy cries. “Oh, that’s great.”
“What she needs. Someone to live for, yeah?” Jay asks.
Jidadaa nods. “Now she is one of the people again.” But her face is a mask. Whatever joy they expect to light her face is not there.
Mandy asks her friends, “It’s great, right?” She makes a cringing face, afraid she said the wrong thing about Kula.
Jidadaa turns to Jay. “Lidass bring change. Change for everyone. And now lidass leaves. His job is done.”
Jay frowns. “Aw, does this mean I don’t get to come back? Or maybe I can come back some day, but in like a different season? Like the golden childs?”
She ignores the question and tells them instead, “Xaanach say she bring ke’w’wits for the pain.”
Hearing the word, Xaanach opens a pighide sack and carefully removes what looks like a bird’s mud nest, hardened into a rough sphere with a dark hole at the top. From cracks it leaks a clear sticky fluid, running down her forearms. She laughs, drizzling the fluid into Jidadaa’s cupped hands, who laps at it. “Honey. So good.” She holds out her hands under Jay’s face and he gamely licks the honey from her palms. It is so light, and not very sweet. But somehow revivifying, like he just pounded a whole Gatorade.
“Yum. Aw, man. She’s making a mess. Does anyone have like a container? It’s getting everywhere.”
“Oh, my gosh, that’s so good!” Mandy rubs a sticky dollop of honey from her chin. “I’ve never had honey taste like that.”
“Ke’w’wits,” Jidadaa explains, catching more of the spilling honey in her hands and lapping at it. “Good medicine.”
“Got to be like some local bees,” Jay explains, “and their local pollinators. Every honey is different, depending on its flowers.”
They prevail on Triquet and Esquibel to try it. They all have sticky faces now. Good medicine indeed. They collectively feel its effects and their cares slough from them with sighs and laughter.
Jidadaa picks at Mandy’s collar. “Your shoulder.”
Mandy stops laughing. “Oh, like, slap some directly on it?”
Esquibel nods. “There is reasoning for this. Honey has been used as an antibacterial when nothing else is available. I’d want to test it first, but all my gear is packed. Maybe I can test it on the ship and we can apply it if it is clean. Will that work, Jidadaa?”
But Jidadaa ignores Esquibel. “Take shirt off.”
Esquibel reaches out and snares Jidadaa’s hand. “Excuse me. Weren’t you listening? I need to test it first.”
“You have pain too?” Jidadaa asks Esquibel. “Somewhere?”
“Don’t we all. Scraped my elbow just following you lot in here.” Esquibel holds it up, showing the abrasion, and before she can pull it away, Jidadaa has smeared it with honey. “Oi! I told you! Bloody hell. Now you’re going to get it infected. All because you couldn’t wait for—!” Then she stops, trying to inspect her own elbow. “It’s stopped hurting. Almost entirely. My god. Such strong anaesthetic properties. So quick.”
“Really?” Mandy pulls at her shirt. “Cause I could sure use a break from all this pain. It works? It’s okay?”
“No. Not all honey is antibiotic. And we don’t even know if that is what this is. We haven’t seen if they’re bees or—or earthworms.” Mandy picks at the medical tape to peel back the bandage even as Esquibel tries to prevent Jidadaa from applying the honey.
Jidadaa slips through Esquibel’s grasp and claps a gob of honey directly onto the wound. Mandy gasps. Esquibel shouts in outrage, pulling Jidadaa back. But her hand still clamps Mandy’s shoulder.
After a long moment, Mandy sighs, a long shuddering exhalation that carries away much that has been held. She lifts her head. Jidadaa does too. “Thank you,” Mandy mutters, grasping Jidadaa’s hand at her shoulder. “Wow. Thank you so much.”
Jidadaa carefully peels away her hand. The wound is a dark red scab surrounded by inflamed skin. She says something of concern to Xaanach, who takes her own turn peering at it. Then she makes a decision, kneeling with the mud hive at Mandy’s feet.
Xaanach croons into the dark opening of the hive. She cajoles the creatures within, begging favors.
“What is she doing now?” Esquibel demands. “Jidadaa?”
“What even is that in there?” Jay asks, leaning over the child. He can detect movement, but can’t tell what it is. “Something larval maybe? Like I can catch sight of something… wriggling?”
“Ew,” Mandy gags. “Not bees? Oh, no. What did we just eat?”
“What is she saying to it?” Esquibel demands of Jidadaa.
“Beg ke’w’wits to heal Mandy.”
“And is ke’w’wits like… insects, or…?” Jay leans in even closer.
“Whoa.” Esquibel pulls on him. “Get back, Jay. Now.”
“It’s smoking?” Triquet is shocked. This is the last thing they expected. “Why is it smoking? Is it going to blow up?”
The hive now emits a thin stream of brown smoke, sickly sweet and herbal. Xaanach leans over it in primeval ceremony, hair hanging lank in the shadows. She cackles at the hive and lifts it. The mud ball now trails a thicker, darker fluid from its cracks.
“How…?” Triquet goggles. “How did that…?”
“How did she do that?” Esquibel demands again. “Xaanach? How did you make it burn?”
Jidadaa nods sagely. “Ke’w’wits agree. Heal Mandy.”
Xaanach collects a gob of this darker resin onto a little dried leaf. She mimes touching it, then pulling her hand back as if from a fire.
“Burns,” Jidadaa agrees. “Don’t touch. Healing burn.”
Esquibel steps between Xaanach and Mandy. “Stop right there. If you think I’m letting you put what is clearly a contaminated substance on Mandy’s open wound, then you’ve got—”
“Esquibel. Please.” Mandy palpates her own shoulder. “It’s already feeling better. Please let her.”
“You can’t put folk remedies on a gunshot wound and expect…”
“Esquibel.” Something in Triquet’s tone quiets her. They roll up their sleeve, revealing their osprey bite. “Remember?” Their scar is almost entirely gone. Now there is just a faint line where the skin indents along the incision. “The burny sticky stuff. Now we know where it comes from.”
“Do we?” Esquibel is so tired. She can’t find the anger to defend the rational world one more time. All this woolly-headed thinking. She gestures at the hive. “Do we really know anything? We know what that… thing is now? And what Xaanach will be putting on her? Mandy, this is like a nine year-old girl. And it is your health and well-being. Nothing is more precious.”
“If you’re worried,” Mandy shrugs, “I can take some antibiotics. But can you please get out of the way now so we can try this?”
With deep misgivings, Esquibel steps back. Ultimately, there is only so much a doctor can make a patient do.
Xaanach smears the tarry substance on Mandy’s wound. “Ooo!” she calls out. “Yes, it sure does burn. Triquet, did yours burn?”
“Yes, doll.” Triquet squeezes her hand. “But I don’t remember this part. I was out for the first hour or…”
“Wow. This really really burns.” Mandy clasps her shoulder and falls back against Jidadaa. “Like, a lot. Ow.”
“Let’s get her on a bed.” With Jay and Triquet’s help Esquibel carries Mandy back to the captain’s cabin in concerned silence.
Ξ
Paddling on the open water together, perhaps for the last time, Maahjabeen is filled with contentment. Here she is doubly home, floating in the embrace of the ocean with her own true love. She promises herself to savor each moment, etch every sensation and emotion upon her heart, so that when she is old she can think back on this day and remember paradise.
Esquibel had found them in the sea cave, and asked them to go out and scout the southern coast of the island before reporting back. They had been more than happy to oblige. Any reason to get back out onto the rolling swells of the gray ocean.
Pradeep turns and smiles at her, his teeth so brilliant, his eyes so kind. “Pull up here, babi. Let’s not come flying around the point.”
But it is hard to stay in place among all these cross-currents. Firewater and Aziz float too close to the cliff and when the waves pummel its base, the water is sent back with an echo of its force, catching the edge of the wider westerly ocean current, which tears into momentary gyres and riptides and whirlpools.
They back-paddle furiously to stay hidden from any ships that might be anchored outside the lagoon, and eventually tune their boats to the water’s chaos, easing forward a bit until they do see the dark gray hull of the Russian destroyer anchored three hundred meters from the lagoon’s outer breaks. It is so close they can see the apron of rust that leaks from its bow. Sailors in dark jumpsuits lounge on the deck. None have seen them. Yet.
“Back!” Pradeep hisses. But as he maneuvers he spots another ship here. White atop with a Navy blue hull, anchored even closer to the mouth of the lagoon. Its broad bow and suites of instruments indicate it is a large research vessel, perhaps for the Arctic. Pradeep stops struggling and lets Firewater coast into view. No point in trying to hide now. This ship flies the American flag.
“Ahoy, kayaks,” a flat voice broadcasts over its loudspeaker. “Paddle away from the surfline. Your lives are in danger.”
Maahjabeen scowls. “They don’t think we haven’t been out here in these same conditions for eight weeks? Ha!” To prove her point she lunges forward into the worst of it, the deadly maze of upswells and surf sets that wind between the seastacks. They finally release her and she darts across the last of the open water to join the American ship. Maahjabeen peers up at it from a safe distance. After a moment a silhouetted head appears.
“Damn, you people are crazy!” The familiar hoarse voice of a sailor who spends his life shouting at sea fills Maahjabeen with a kind of tender regret. It really is happening. Their ride back home is here. “Gave you an order to stand off the cliffs, ma’am. I expect you to follow it. If you’re going to get on my ship…”
“Yes, yes.” She waves his threat away. “When I am on your ship I will follow your orders, captain. But I am not yet on your ship.”
Pradeep glides up beside her, giving a brilliant smile of apology to the captain. “Ah! Thank you for the very thoughtful warning, sir. We have just… been practicing. No harm done, yes? But I must ask… How do we know that the Russians there are, uh, safe?”
In response, the captain’s head disappears from over the rail.
For a full minute or more they wait for him to re-emerge but he never does. “Eh. I am getting cold,” Maahjabeen complains. “And he is not inviting us aboard so… we paddle into the lagoon?”
“Surely, my love. Should be easier from this direction. Just surf the tops on in. Be like an orca, yes?”
Maahjabeen shares a dark smile with him, realizing in a flash that studying the orcas will be her life’s work, living among them and charting their paths through the sea. From the Alaska coast to California she will track them like the lineage of her family tree.
The waves roll them through the mouth of the lagoon onto the sand. There are already three beached zodiacs here, one Russian and two American. Pradeep shakes his head in worry. “Well, now it’s going to be much harder to get back to the cave to report back. And what will we even say? What in the world are we supposed to make of this… truce? Why are they both here? Does this make the Russians trustworthy or the Americans fully untrustworthy?”
“The Americans were already fully untrustworthy. Especially Baitgie, yes?” Maahjabeen lifts herself from Aziz’s hatch. She drags the blue hull clear of the lagoon’s small waves.
Pradeep nods unhappily at Maahjabeen, pulling Firewater clear and following her to the redwood trunk that bisects the beach and faces the site of their former camp. From atop the log they can see that the clearing is now filled with Russian marines in tactical gear and American specialists in light blue jumpsuits.
“Sir!” One of the specialists spots Maahjabeen and Pradeep atop the trunk. “Two targets!” The marines turn and glare at the couple but make no further moves. It is the Americans who hurry toward them, carrying tablets and medical kits.
“Targets…?” Maahjabeen calls out. “I don’t like being called a target, thank you very much! And we are not used to—!”
“Apologies. My apologies.” An American Navy officer hurries ahead of the others. “Just our military terminology. No, you are not targets. Let me assure you. We’re just happy to find you.” He is a small, wiry man in his fifties. His smile seems genuine. “Hello. I’m Kit Sidler. Commander Sidler. I’m in charge of this mission.”
With a squeeze of Pradeep’s hand, Maahjabeen gives her lover a smile filled with bravado. “Come on, Mahbub. It is time. Let us meet this new adventure together.”
Ξ
“Banging. And scraping. I hear banging and scraping.” Triquet ducks through the hatch leading into the first ward room. Where they had braced the hatch shut, a continuing series of metal-on-metal impacts can be heard. “Great. Well I guess we have our answer. The Russians are definitely here.”
Flavia lies on the bunk, playing solitaire on her computer. She takes her earbuds out. “Eh? You said something, dear Triquet?” Then she frowns. “What is that banging? Are the bad guys trying to bash their way in?”
“Wait. Listen. It’s very deliberate.” The bangs are regularly spaced, followed by a quicker trio, ending with a long scrape.
“Ehh, I know this. This is morse code.” Flavia opens a new window on her laptop, suddenly excited. “I love morse code. Let me just open a dictionary here and… now… What do you hear?”
“What is that banging?” Miriam ducks through the hatch with Mandy and Esquibel in tow. Alonso limps in after with Katrina. They all ask the same question and the room fills with noise.
“It is just that we need it to be quiet!” Flavia shouts over them. “Because this is morse code. Now. What do we hear, Triquet?”
“Dot, dot, dot scrape scrape dot, dot dot scrape…”
“E… e… p… i… t…” Flavia writes down.
“Dot scrape scrape dot, dot scrape dot, dot scrape, scrape dot dot.”
“P… r… a… d…”
“Prad!” Jay starts. “Eepitsprad! Pradeepits! Its Pradeep!” he babbles, reaching for the strut that braces the hatch closed.
Esquibel cautions him. “Or what if it’s a trap? There are ways to force a hostile to tell you their name, you know.”
Alonso shrugs, “We don’t really have much of a choice, do we? They know we are here. It is only a matter of time now. What can we do? Retreat to the interior? Live on the run? No. This is when we open the door, my friends, and face what is coming to us.”
Miriam casts a wondering glance at Alonso. He has more to lose than any of them if it is the Russians. But he has achieved a kind of serenity in these final hours. She is thrilled at his transformation. He is vital again, eyes sharp. His aspect is august and grand, like a bronze bust in a university library. She has never loved him more.
Esquibel steps away from the door with a sigh. Jay yanks out the strut, spins the wheel open, and hauls the hatch wide. “Yes!” He claps forearms with someone and pulls them through. It is indeed Pradeep, with Maahjabeen right behind. Jay embraces them both. “Fucking brilliant thought, dude, with the morse code.”
“It was her idea.” Pradeep defers to Maahjabeen.
She shrugs. “But we knew it was easier to spell out his name.”
The laughter that fills the room is the release of tension.
“So it is safe? We can come out?” Esquibel tries to peer past them up the dark stairs.
“Well…” Pradeep frowns, unhappy. “Uhh…”
“Yes or no?” Esquibel snaps. “Are the Americans here?”
“Well, yes.”
“And the Russians? Any sign of them?”
Pradeep and Maahjabeen only look at Esquibel sidelong.
“What is happening?” Alonso wonders. “Why are we not getting any straight answers from you two?”
“Maahjabeen?” Esquibel repeats in irritation, “Please. Any sign of the Russians? Or any threats?”
“You must forgive us,” Maahjabeen answers drily. “It is a habit we just picked up, not giving answers about the Russians. Seems to be how everyone handles the situation here.”
“What situation? What are you talking about?” Miriam asks.
Pradeep laughs bitterly. “Okay. Sorry. I’ll stop wasting time and just jump a few steps forward, here. See if my new theory here has any weight. Esquibel, why did you want us off the beach?”
Pradeep’s new tack is such a sudden turn that the ward room hushes. Esquibel frowns. “Well, at first it is because you were building your platforms outside the treeline and the satellites could see. But once you corrected the plan for the camp, I had no other issue with—”
“No, not then,” Pradeep interrupts her. “I mean weeks later when the golden man told us the Russians were on their way. You didn’t want us to meet them. You didn’t want them to meet us. You wanted us to fear them and hide from them. Why?”
“I… I…” Esquibel can’t handle how Pradeep’s brain works, coming at her from all these random angles at once. “I mean, it just made more sense for us to be underground when threats appeared. Safer. We’ve had these arguments over and over…”
“But they aren’t a threat. They are partners with the Americans and the Canadians and the Japanese and a few others, aren’t they? Commander Sidler confirmed all the others but not the Russians. Nobody will say a word about them. Why is that?”
“Pradeep… It’s classified…” Esquibel groans, dropping her face into her hands. “Part of our final briefing. I can’t… under penalty of court-martial… say anything more about this. Please!” Esquibel begs the ward room but she has lost them all once again.
“Che cazzo!” Flavia has no words for how despicable she finds Esquibel. “You knew this? You made me terrified of the Russians. I have not slept for two weeks! And it was all some lie? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”
“That is what I can’t share. I am so sorry.” Esquibel can’t stand the waves of hostility pouring from all of them. She has become too close. They really are family now. Tears spill down her face.
“You’ve just been manipulating all of us, this whole time… Lying to us…” Miriam scowls at Esquibel. “I knew we could never trust the military. I knew it!”
“No, no… It is just the requirement Russia had for them to be part of the mission. They insisted that their part in the operation be stricken from the record. Nobody knows why. It is Russia’s—!”
“Lieutenant Commander.” At the base of the stairs outside the hatch is the shadow of Commander Sidler. His voice is cold steel. “You are not sharing privileged mission data with civilians, are you?” At his shoulder is his Russian equivalent, an older Marine officer with a silver buzzcut and a purple nose.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m very sorry.” Esquibel grips her own hands, squeezing them together. The tears are so hot, streaming from her burning eyes. She lifts her clasped hands in supplication. “But I can’t… I can’t do this any more. I can’t sustain the…”
“Lieutenant Commander Daine!” Sidler stands straight and raps out her title. “You will shut it down. All the way down. Or you will find yourself in the brig for the trip home. Am I clear?”
“I am just…” Esquibel’s mouth works silently. “Very sorry. This has been so… see, my own dear Mandy has been shot…”
“Shot? Someone got shot? Reyna. Get a medic in here.” Sidler studies the researchers with their dirty faces and wild eyes and torn clothes. “What the hell happened to you people?”
A young medic with tightly braided hair enters in her sky-blue jumpsuit, carrying a pack. “Who got shot, Commander?”
“Doctor Daine?”
“It is Mandy. But she is fine.” Esquibel indicates her, wiping away tears. “She has been in my care from the first and I am…”
“Let me just take a look, ma’am.” The medic kneels beside Mandy and helps her with her shirt. Then she peels back the bandage and regards the tarry patch covering the wound. “Uhh, what is that, Doctor Daine?”
“A local treatment. A poultice. It is fine!”
The medic frowns at this lack of protocol and picks at the edge of the black resin. “Doc, you know as well as I do that there are a whole host of reasons why…” The black bits fall away in her hand.
Mandy gasps in wonder. Beneath the poultice, her skin is whole.
“Okay. Where’s this bullet hole?” The medic looks at Esquibel as if she might be mad.
It is that look that does it for Esquibel. This is the same look she has been giving Maahjabeen and all the other mystics. And now it is her turn. She is one of them. She saw Xaanach beg the mud nest to combust. She saw the ichor that it excreted. And now she has seen the miracle it has accomplished. Twice. In a wound she had cleaned herself. How impossible. But yet, the impossible exists after all. “Commander Sidler.” Esquibel is filled with a sudden certainty and clarity that she hasn’t felt in years. She stands at attention. “You shall be the first to hear. I am resigning my commission. Effective immediately. I will stay for your debriefing or whatever, but I am no longer an associate member of the U.S. Navy or a Lieutenant Commander in the Kenyan Navy. I am done.”
Sidler listens to her decree with a kind of flat contempt. When she is done he lifts an irritated hand and shoos Esquibel away. “Resignation not accepted. Damn. Can’t wait to make some sense from this nonsense. Okay first, we need to count heads and get check-ups. We’ll sort out all the drama later. Just happy to find you. Y’all been hiding out pretty good these last few weeks.”
“Oh!” Katrina suddenly cries out. “It’s true! We aren’t all here! Still missing one! I’ll be right back. Give me… an hour.”
Ξ
They all cluster on the beach, coordinating the removal of their gear. Alonso has tried to give the half-empty wine barrel to a number of sailors but it is the Russian commander who takes him up on the offer, recognizing Chateau Ausone with a wide smile.
Pradeep helps Maahjabeen prepare the kayaks for transport. Jay stuffs a last wad of dirty clothes in his backpack then takes himself for a walk so he can smoke a final joint in peace. Flavia hovers over the specialists who carry her gear, reminding them how expensive and fragile everything is. She is eager to get going. Her dog Boris awaits, as do her many other projects. Miriam has learned that Commander Sidler has a layman’s interest in geology and she is giving him a brief overview of the island, pointing animatedly at the cliffs and listing silicates.
Triquet stands outside the crowd, wearing a shimmering sequin gown, lurid facepaint, a feather boa, and workboots. They are back to their outsider status, although they notice that one of the butch medics is giving them friendlier smiles than the others get. Well well well. There may be an ally here on the long journey home.
Mandy helps Esquibel with her crates and bins of medical gear. Her arm is functional again, with just a faded soreness to indicate it was ever injured. Esquibel thinks less of her resigned commission than the promise of this honey treatment. Oh, yes, she will be back. And she will have Xaanach teach her, to tease out the mystery of this miracle cure. If Esquibel can isolate the active compounds in the dark resin she’ll change the world. She’ll be rich, she’ll win the Nobel Prize. Her future will be secure. If she can only come back.
“Alonso.” Katrina calls out from atop the log. It takes several tries before he hears her over the clamor of the move.
With newly-powerful strides he crosses the beach to her. “Ah! Katrina. There you are. It is time to load your things.”
“Amy needs a chat first. She’s in the bunker.” Katrina jumps from the log, calling out, “Hey! Careful there, mate! That laptop is the only one I have!”
Alonso finds Amy in the shadowed bunker, nuzzling her kit. “Ah, there she is. How’d it go, Ames? Did you say all your goodbyes?”
But Amy’s eyes are bright, filled with tears.
Alonso pulls her into a bear hug. “Oh, it’s alright. You did well. Finally got back on their good side in the end. Proud of you…” But his smile fades. A growing disquiet fills him.
“Oh, Lonzo.” She kisses him. “You can tell, can’t you? I’m not going back. I’m staying here. On Lisica. I’m so sorry.”
Alonso blinks. “But the ships are leaving. I don’t understand.”
“With Morska Vidra. He and I… It turns out we’re both kind of outcasts and we… Well… We’re going to raise the foxes together. Just him and me in his little hut. We’ll be so happy.”
“Oh, no… Amy… This isn’t the proper time to make that kind…”
“I’m sorry, Alonso. But there is no proper time. It’s now. Or never. We are only guessing that they’ll let us come back but I… I can’t leave. This is all I ever wanted from my life. Here on Lisica. Please. Tell them not to look for me. I’m already gone.”
“But Amy—!” Now Alonso bursts into tears, hugging her again with fierce possession. “I can’t! I’m responsible for you and I…!”
Yet she is already extricating herself from his embrace, a smile of great peace on her face. “I hope it doesn’t get you in trouble but… I have to go now. I do. Please visit again soon!” Amy steps back and retreats to the trap door and the stairs leading down.
Alonso is in shock. Amy is gone? But leaving her is impossible. He can’t. He’s responsible for her. And what will he tell the Commander? They will just start some stupid search for her and none of them will get to leave for a week.
But Amy is really gone. The bunker is empty. And they are already calling for Alonso again on the beach. Like a sleepwalker he returns to them, his face haggard and eyes lost.
Miriam hurries to him. “What is it, Zo? Where’s Amy?”
All he can do is shake his head, helpless.
“Doctor Alonso?” Commander Sidler calls out. “Time to get in the boats. Still missing one, I think? A…” He consults his tablet. “Let’s see… A Doctor Amy Kubota?”
“Here I am!” They all turn to the fallen log. Jidadaa has jumped atop it. She holds a pigskin satchel and wears a new t-shirt from Kula’s collection. Her face is excited, her smile wide and brave. “I am here! Yes, I am the Amy.”
“Good.” Sidler turns away. “Well that’s everyone then. Let’s get a move on, folks. Civilization awaits.”
“Wait… no… but…” Katrina stammers. A specialist takes her bag from her slack grasp. “I mean, where is…?” She looks at Alonso, who silences her with a stern glare. All the others watch this tense exchange, their faces filled with confusion.
But they all decide not to say a word. They file dutifully aboard the American zodiacs, Aziz and Firewater towed behind. None of them speak. They are each too disturbed by the loss of Amy and the addition of Jidadaa. They take their seats in the boats as the outboard motors rev, their propellers cutting through the green waters of the lagoon.
“Look,” Jay points at the cliffs, where a giant bird sails across the face, its black wings spread wide. “Laysan Albatross. Phoebastria immutabilis. We haven’t seen any since we got here. This must be its summer nesting site. Amy would…” He falls silent. Then his face crumples into tears and he sobs.
Esquibel wraps an arm around Jay and pulls him close. She kisses his forehead. “There there, little brother. I’ve got you. Everything will be alright. Just like Amy and those big birds up there, Jay, we are all coming home.”
Chapter 59 – All The Love But None Of The Attention
February 10, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
59 – All The Love But None Of The Attention
Triquet climbs the narrow stairs through the open trapdoor up into the bunker. The structure is forlorn in the shadows, showing no sign of the life it held for so many weeks. They emerge into a gray morning. Their second to last here. The camp where they had so many parties and arguments is now covered with new detritus. The stump that cradled the barrel of wine is just a stump again.
They cross to the beach and survey the length of it. Such a tiny little world they inhabited. But it had everything they needed. Ennui fills them. Oh, great. They’re going to bawl like a baby when this is over, aren’t they? How odd. They’ve never had such a reaction to a field trip ending. Usually it was some measure of relief and excitement to get back to the lab so they could analyze their finds. And there is some of that here as well. Excellent finds. But this has been one of the most special and significant episodes of their whole life and they will never forget any of these people.
Ah. There they are. At the edge of Tenure Grove. Arguing, as always. Triquet approaches, holding their treasure up like a bible.
“But what we’re saying is that this isn’t going to have any kind of island-wide effect.” Jay, for once, has a dispute with Pradeep. “Bro, there’s like no conceivable network that connects these trees to the trees in the interior, which is the whole—”
“And I am saying the same thing,” Pradeep interrupts with impatience. “That is why we do it here first. To see if there is any effect on the grove before we unleash it on the entire island.”
“But what we are also saying,” Amy adds, “is that we don’t have enough time to meaningfully monitor our effects. We will be gone by the time this forest can express any kind of reaction. So this is a waste of time here. We can’t tilt the conversation of the island in the time we have left, and certainly not from here. I appreciate your desire to be methodical, but either we do this or we don’t.”
“Then I say we don’t,” Pradeep declares. “It is too dangerous. The communication networks of forests are hardly understood. We might be doing grave damage and we would never even know.”
“It’s a bloody good idea, though,” Katrina sighs. “You got to admit. Once we learn the languages of plants and forests we’ll be able to talk to them no problem. Oh, what a world that will be! ‘What kind of apples are you growing here, mate? You mind if I climb up and sit in your branches?’ Anyway, I wrote a bit of a, well, a piano concerto. I tweaked it so it has overtones in the ultrasonic range, well as much as my shitty phone speaker can emit, to see if I can get close to what the trees hear. Jay said that’s their range. I was going to play as you did your work on the trees.”
“That is very sweet,” Pradeep allows, “but I’m afraid the study showed the trees only make the noise when they are under stress. The more noise, the more stress. So we need to make sure your music doesn’t sound like alarm bells to them.”
“Yeh. Right.” Katrina quirks her mouth in thought. “I’ll just have to play it like super soothing, I guess. Legato. Legato.”
“Maybe this is not a terrible idea.” Alonso places a hand against the spongy bark of the redwood which towers over him. “Maybe we cannot change the, the tenor of the whole island, but at least this grove, our special grove where only we lived, can get our blessing. And who knows? Maybe some of us will come back some day and see the results of our work. Ehh. Then we will tell the others. How would those results manifest, Amy?”
“Just Tenure Grove…?” Amy steps a couple more paces into its shadows. “Yes. That’s a lovely idea, Alonso. Let’s just leave the best of us here in this beautiful spot. Who knows? Maybe things will grow more lush, more inter-related. I think of it as harmony…”
To illustrate, Katrina plays the opening chord on her phone’s piano app. It is like glass breaking, in a bittersweet, minor key.
Amy nods. “Yes, exactly. Those five days with the vixen… I could feel it. I can still feel it, what that level of connection to the living world is like. I hope I never lose it. It’s like speaking to god…”
“Yes,” Maahjabeen agrees. “For as the Prophet said to his companions, ‘If the Hour of Resurrection is about to come, and one of you is holding a palm shoot, let him take advantage of even one second before the Hour has come to plant it.’ In Islam we love trees and respect our environment.”
“So how do we do this?” Alonso asks. “Maahjabeen will pray. Katrina will play her very nice music. What can the rest of us do?”
Pradeep lifts a tray filled with open dishes of cloudy liquids and a cartoonishly-large syringe. “These are mostly alkaloids for the mycorrhizae, for their signaling channels. There’s some salts as well. I just drew on what I know about them so far. It’s all about increasing signal strength. I don’t want to tell them what to say, I only want to increase their ability to say… whatever they want.”
“Right on.” Jay pats his shoulder. “Mister free speech over here. I was thinking of a couple things, myself. You know, trees talk with pheromones through the air so I was trying to think of ways to share mine. You know, like, if I’m thinking beautiful thoughts. Get into those alpha waves. Then once I have a good groove going, release some stank, talk to my brothers and sisters here. But I want to shoot it right into their veins and this outer bark is so thick I don’t know how to reach the cambium. I mean… I was just going to like hug big fella here, but… then I thought… maybe I should like dig a shallow pit and crouch down in it. You know, let the feelers of its roots pick up my vibe.” He lifts a foldable spade.
“No no no,” Pradeep answers. “No digging. That will invariably cause stress, don’t you think?”
“Yeah…” Jay’s face falls. “Probably right. Maybe I can get up in the canopy and sing like a bird.”
Esquibel cannot help herself. She bursts out laughing. Flavia does too. Even Miriam joins them. “I’m sorry,” she gasps. “It’s just the idea of Jay dressed as a songbird, crouched on a branch up there, whistling…” Esquibel laughs again, until nearly all of them are.
“Nah, dude. I was going to rap.” But that just makes them laugh even harder. Jay’s earnestness dissolves before all this mirth.
“It’s just all so silly…” Esquibel finally manages. “I was trying to be respectful, but we have strayed so far from established science with this claptrap that I couldn’t…”
“I am so glad you did,” Flavia tells her. “Because I was about to. There is a difference between experimentalism and—and voodoo.”
“Yes, yes. The unbelievers have had their say.” Pradeep smiles modestly, readying his syringe. “Cynicism is easy. Of course there is only a tiny chance that these efforts have any affect at all. But we don’t actually know. Like Alonso said, I want us all to promise that if any of us come back here, we must do every possible test on this tree and this grove to see if our work has done anything at all.”
He shoves the cylinder of the syringe into the earth and pushes its plunger. Katrina plays more of her shattering, ear-piercing piano concerto. Jay yelps in alarm, realizing it’s happening now, and embraces the tree. His face is muffled so they can’t make out his words, only that they follow a beat.
Esquibel and Flavia laugh again. Alonso peers upward, fighting the stiffness in his back and neck, trying to see a hundred meters to the top. The trunk vanishes into the dark green canopy, and wind flutters its limbs. “I would like to think,” he says, placing a hand against the wall of bark, “that we will leave this place as friends.”
“And I’d like to offer,” Triquet finally says, having waited for the proper moment, “the words of Lieutenant DeVry, who left a bit of a journal I just found. Remember him? He was the delinquent one always fraternizing with the locals? We thought he was like chasing skirts but it turns out he was actually quite the sensitive soul. He was fascinated by the Lisicans. But he never really understood them. ‘They remain closed to me and won’t ever speak directly to me. But they have finally become animated in my presence. The parents are very tender and warm toward their children and they love a good squabble. What led their ancestors to this godforsaken rock I have no idea. But since it has been peopled, at least we are lucky that they are a gentle folk. Suspicious, but gentle.’ At the end of his journal, he complains several times about being prevented from seeing them any more. He says, ‘by the end of my time here I enjoy the company of the natives more than my own race, even though they still don’t speak with me! Perhaps it is because they don’t speak with me. Ha ha. I’ve never been comfortable as the center of attention. I like to stand aside and observe. The villagers let me. Boren never does.’ That’s the Staff Sergeant. Doesn’t sound like old Clifton DeVry got along very well with him.”
Katrina concludes her concerto and Jay releases the redwood. Amy brushes a spider from his hair.
Mandy looks up at the waving tops of the tree, thinking how Jay first proposed to turn it into a tower for her weather station. She’d thought he was a real meathead then. Now she has much more tender thoughts for him. He smiles at her, abashed. But she reaches out and snares his hand to squeeze it. “That was so sweet. Now don’t forget. You and I aren’t done. We’ve still got more scar tissue to pull apart when we get back home. You promised to visit.”
He beams, squeezing her hand back. “No doubt, sister.”
“And now,” Esquibel declares, “ceremony complete, let us get back underground, or at least away from where approaching ships might spy us. Remember. The American boats aren’t the only ones who promised to come back tomorrow.”
Ξ
Alonso rests a hand on the wine barrel and tilts it. “About halfway empty. We drank perhaps one hundred fifty bottles. In eight weeks. Fifty-six days. That is nearly three bottles per day, a good amount. I am proud of us. Our appetites. But now, my liver needs a bit of a break.” He peers at Amy, who is putting the last of her things in her duffel. They are in the sub’s ward room that is closest to the surface, where they have removed all the furniture so they have enough room to organize and pack all their gear. “Perhaps the rest of it, we can leave with the sailors who are coming. Or maybe someone else wants it. But I will never drink a Château Ausone again without thinking of this place. And all you lovely people.”
He shares his smile with Amy and Mandy, the only other person in here. She is struggling to pack with one good arm. Amy finally notices her difficulties. “Oh, dear. Let me help you.”
“Thanks.” Mandy steps back with a sigh, clutching her shoulder. “All this movement. Starting to hurt.”
Amy nods, sympathetic. “Sorry. I should have realized… Just got caught up in my own mess and didn’t look up for…” She falls silent as she works on folding Mandy’s t-shirts.
“Where is Esquibel?” Alonso wonders. “Perhaps she can help?”
Mandy and Amy both glower at Alonso.
“Ah.” He recalls the status of their relationship. “My apologies. It is too sad that things have ended as they have. I remember when we first got here and how happy you made each other. Now, we haven’t heard the good doctor laugh like that in too long.”
“Alonso. Mandy doesn’t want to hear…”
Mandy sighs. “No, it’s fine. It’s actually like good to talk about it. I haven’t had anyone… She doesn’t have anyone to… I mean, break ups can be so lonely. And I don’t even know if that’s what this is. I mean…” She shrugs, helpless. “I don’t know where we stand. I can’t blame her for—I mean… I can’t look at anything Esquibel did and say she should have done something different. She had her orders.”
“And she followed them as well as she could.” Alonso agrees. “We always like to have a dream, this fantasy that there exists a place somewhere that is truly cut off from the troubles of the rest of the world. But such a place does not exist. Even here. We are all one planet, and no matter how far we travel we bring the sins and crimes of the world wherever we go.”
“The sisters pushed the father of their children into the sea.” Amy doesn’t know if she necessarily agrees, but this is what his words made her think. “And yet they didn’t consider it a sin.”
“I don’t know.” Mandy sits back against a bin, shoulders slumped in defeat. “Getting shot… It’s like it knocked the wind out of me and the wind never came back. Maybe it will with time. I just thought, I mean, even a few days ago I still thought that we’d go back and I’d be in Topanga and every once in a while Esquibel would come to port in Long Beach or San Diego or whatever and we could have a lovely weekend or week, but now I don’t know. Now I think that we…”
“We are just too different.” Esquibel slips through the hatch between ward rooms, her hands full of folded sheets. “My path is far too dangerous for a wonderful, beautiful person such as you, Mandy.” She says it factually, her voice flat, her eyes downcast. “I love you too much to put you through that.”
Mandy eyes Esquibel speculatively. “Oh, you do? You’ve made that choice, have you? You know, I think that might be my biggest trouble with our relationship after all. Esquibel, you never once let me decide. You never told me about your secret life, and then when you did you said you could never change and that I can’t be near you. Now you’re breaking up with me before I even get to say whether that’s what I want or not. And that’s fucked up.”
Esquibel looks at Mandy with astonishment. “Meaning… what? You don’t want to break up with me?”
“I don’t know.” Mandy flails her good arm outward. “All I’m saying is that the real problem isn’t that you’re a spy, or that I’m in danger, the real problem is that you never let me decide for myself! Okay? We have to make this decision together, or there really is no hope for us.”
Esquibel smiles, shy. “So you think there might still be hope? Oh, Mandy! Yes. You are right. I am a control freak. Just like you. But even worse. And I am so sorry. I thought if I just kept you safe and comfortable you could ask for nothing more. But I never made sure that is actually what you wanted. I just… I just came here with things inside me that I thought could never be negotiated. Like, upon pain of death. And that—that hardness in me, it has only pushed you away from me. Now I don’t deserve you.”
“Stop. You’re doing it again. Why don’t you let me make that decision?” Mandy asks. “You know I love you. I know you love me. Let’s work together to see if we can find a way through this?”
“My god, Mandy,” Amy murmurs in admiration, “listen to you. Who taught you to be so wise?”
Mandy shrugs, then winces. “I guess that Chinese spy. And his gun. I learned from them that life is short. And it can be so easily stolen. That’s what I now know. So there’s no more time for regrets. Come here, Skeebee.”
With a sob of relief, Esquibel kneels and puts her head in Mandy’s lap. Hot tears flow from her tightly-squeezed eyes. A sound she’s never made comes from deep in her throat.
Mandy pets Esquibel as she quivers and gasps, watching in silent wonder as her lover finally unlocks. How long has it been since she has let her guard down and unclenched these held muscles? Has she ever? Esquibel trembles in her lap, clutching Mandy’s legs like she’s drowning. What has it been like for her, working on ships year in and year out, tending the wounded sailors of a different nation? How solitary has her life been?
“What’s that sound? Is there trouble?” Triquet appears in the hatch, then Miriam and Maahjabeen.
“No trouble,” Alonso reassures them. “Just forgiveness.” He wipes his own tears away. “And sometimes it can be messy.”
Ξ
Their last dinner is cold, the remains of torn sheets of seaweed and dried banana chips. This would have been an unpalatable dish when they first arrived but their tastes have been forcibly changed by the environment. Now it satisfies them.
They sit on and lie against their stacks of gear, silent in the dim ward room. All of them are present, drowsing after a full day of effort. Jay chews the nori like gum, studying Katrina across from him. She has aged dramatically in the eight weeks here. Not just in the weathering of her fair skin but the look in her eye, her poise. Nobody would mistake her for a sixteen year-old any more. “Yo, dude. We should have one last concert. Don’t you think?”
Katrina shrugs, flips a hand. “All packed up. And I ain’t…”
“No no no, you’re right,” Jay agrees.
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a concert.” Alonso closes his eyes and tilts his head back. In a moody baritone, he sings the melody of Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings. His voice echoes in the metal chamber. Eyes closed, they all absorb the waves of sound washing over them.
A metallic clunk interrupts him, from deeper within the sub. Eyes open. The room waits in quivering silence.
“Got damn Chinese spy still out here.” Jay rises, looking for a weapon. “And he’s still got his orders. Just cause he’s somebody’s slave doesn’t mean…”
Esquibel has already fetched her satchel. She waves an urgent hand at the room. “Turn off the lights, Triquet. Everybody back against the walls.”
In a quiet rush, they all comply with her orders.
A slender figure steps into the hatch. “No more music…?” It is Jidadaa. She blinks into the darkness of the ward room.
“Oh, sweet!” Katrina cries out. “It’s Jidadaa! Aww. Wasn’t sure we got to see you again, love. Come here!”
“But the music?” Jidadaa asks. “Where is it?”
“Ah. You mean some of this?” Alonso laughs, self-deprecating, and begins again. This time Bach’s first Cello Suite. He waves his hand back and forth in the air like a fish’s fin in the water as the notes rise from him. Jidadaa kneels down on the deck, entranced. “Yes, lovely, is it not? Ahh. Just imagine hearing Bach for the first time. I envy you, young lady. Everything we have been talking about here, about the rhythm of nature and Her harmonies, has already been fully given voice by Johann Sebastian Bach. From hundreds of years ago. What do you think, Jidadaa? Eh?”
“More.”
“Yes, it sounds of the truth, doesn’t it? The secrets of life?”
“But, wait.” Esquibel leans forward. “Before you continue, Alonso. First, a few questions for Jidadaa. Are you alone?”
Jidadaa looks steadily at her. “I have Kula.”
“No. Just right now. Is anyone with you tonight?”
“No.” But as she says it, she nods her head yes.
“Eh.” Katrina reaches out. “No is a shake of the head this way.” She demonstrates.
Jidadaa laughs. “New to me. English words with my body.”
“So you are alone right now?”
“Jidadaa last saw the people this morning.” Her tone suddenly shifts. “This is a story about the ecchic oviki.”
Triquet finally gets the light back on. “This is?”
“The house of Thunderbird rests along the path to the house of Inchwi, god of winter east wind. That is what they say.” Jidadaa turns and unerringly points aboveground toward their secret village in the trees. “They say the god sends the cold wind to drive their enemies away. But the Shidl Dít say the wind make them strong. Their skin thick. Their blood hot. I do not say it. I do not believe. But I feel the wind. I sleep with them last night.”
“Oh, up on those platforms?” Katrina longs to console the lonely girl, to encircle her in her arms. But she knows she cannot touch her. “They sway so much it’s like a ship at sea.”
“And how are our old friends the golden childs?” Alonso asks.
But Jidadaa is too literal for this question. “Only people of the pollen in the spring. That season is past. No more golden childs. Now they are people of start of summer. People of the green sea.”
Alonso nods. “Understood. Are they well? I hope they know how much we appreciate all they have done for us.”
“It is a happy village. Three fox babies for them, young people and old. Great blessing. Old curse is lifted. The Shidl Dít say the prophet poem that the island has chosen is mostly their own.”
“Oh!” Katrina squawks. “It happened? The doom has passed and we’re now in the new era?”
“For most. Then I go to Ussiaxan. Not happy. Shouting. The people only have one fox and the girl, she is not strong. Village split. Many want to join with Keleptel. They have four fox now. Many want to find mama fox. To them she is new god. Shaman tell them to find her.”
“But isn’t the shaman their slave?” Flavia frowns. Then she holds up a hand. “No. I will never understand. Do not explain.”
“So, wait. When we first got here there were only three foxes,” Pradeep inventories. “Morska Vidra’s, the old one with the exiled shaman on the north coast, and the vixen. Where did the vixen come from? The Shidl Dít?”
“Yes.” But Jidadaa shakes her head no. Then when she sees Katrina correct her she laughs and imitates the nod.
“And then ten babies?”
“Eleven.” Amy lifts her own kit, now sleek and full, with colorless fur shading toward silver. The vixen still feeds her kits, appearing twice a day on an endless circuit around the island accompanied by her mate. “And I think I can finally safely say this one is a female.”
“Three with the Thunderbird. Four with the Mayor’s village. One with the bad guys. Aren’t there two missing?”
“Other íx̱tʼ on island.”
“Aye,” Miriam agrees. “Other íx̱tʼ. Whoever they are. The mysteries never cease. We could stay here our whole lives and never really learn the way Lisica works, could we?”
“Wait…” Amy holds up a hand like a student. “That’s what Xaanach called out, isn’t it? When she killed Wetchie-ghuy. She repeated that phrase again and again. What was it?”
“Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!” Katrina mimics the girl’s triumphant cry from the clifftops. “The first part is Slavic. Like, ‘Now I’m the…!’ And the last part is íx̱tʼ. What Jidadaa just said. What is íx̱tʼ? Shaman?”
“Yes…?” Jidadaa tentatively nods in agreement. “Wetchie-ghuy was íx̱tʼ. Daadaxáats is íx̱tʼ. Aan Eyagídi was íx̱tʼ before—”
“Yeh. That’s it!” Katrina puts the puzzle together. “Now I’ve got it. She said, ‘I’m the shaman now!’ So Xaanach killed Wetchie-ghuy and became the shaman in his place. Bloody circle of life, mate. I thought that may have been it. Does that mean she got one of the missing foxes?”
Jidadaa frowns. “I look and look. No Xaanach. No more fox kit. This is a story of ecchic oviki.”
“Oh, right. What is that?” Katrina starts recording video on her phone. “Ecchic Oviki. Or who…?”
“Sacred stone. On the path to Northwest forest god. That is what they say. I climb there, follow its poem. From ecchic oviki, see like bird over Agleygle valley place. See all island of the south gods.”
Katrina tries to square this with the relational framework she has puzzled out in their language. “So the story is about the place from where you searched for… Xaanach? The baby fox? It isn’t about your search or her hiding from you or even about the vixen. It’s about the rock. And, what? How it like bears witness?”
But Jidadaa frowns at these questions. They are evidently the wrong ones. She makes a flushing gesture with her hands, pushing them away from herself. “The current ran from me, too fast.”
“I see.” But neither Katrina nor any of the others do see.
Finally Jidadaa collapses with a sigh, leaning against Katrina’s legs. “No find her. My heart hurt. So I come to you, under the grounds. Then I hear music.”
Alonso offers, “Yes. Would you like more music? Perhaps a little Brahms lullaby to put us all to sleep? What do you think? Nice and gentle…” And he begins to sing it.
Jidadaa nods happily one last time then slumps, the simple lyricism of the lullaby affecting her deeply. She rests her head against Katrina’s knees and sighs again.
Katrina hasn’t moved since the unexpected contact. She is too surprised. But as Jidadaa settles against her, she reaches out and touches Jidadaa’s hair. The girl does not startle. So Katrina runs her fingers gently through the tangles. After a while, she begins picking at them, grooming her like the fellow primate she is.
Jidadaa is the first to fall asleep.
Ξ
In the dark, Flavia pulls herself through the tight squeeze of the lower tunnel to win through to the culvert beyond. She takes out her phone and turns on its light, looking in despair at her clothes. These are her favorite top and pants and she’d hoped to travel in them but now they are filthy, and will only get more so when she returns. But she needs to empty her bladder too much to care.
“Ah! Blinded!” Mandy’s head emerges from the tunnel, her black hair streaked in mud, and gets a face full of Flavia’s light. She shuts her eyes with a grimace and drags herself from the tunnel.
“Eh, sorry.” Flavia whips the light away, to the water racing in the culvert below. “I think, maybe, we should just pee in here.”
“I’m not going down that slope. Looks slick. Might fall in. And then what?”
“Yes, you are right. Better somewhere in the cave…” With an aggravated sigh she leads Mandy to the rusted steel door and they step through.
“Who is that?” It is a male voice. Pradeep.
Flavia startles, then laughs. “Oh, great. Just looking for privacy. Didn’t find it. Sorry. I have to go!”
Maahjabeen sits up, clutching her pillow to her bare chest. “Go? Go where, Flavia? What time is it?”
“Ehh…” Flavia can’t hold it any more. “Go to the bathroom!” And she hurries in the other direction from the sleeping pair, toward the rotting pier and curtain falls in the back corner.
“Me too!” Mandy ducks into the cave and hurries after Flavia, squatting like her at the edge of the fall’s wide but shallow pool, adding their own fluids to the Lisica freshwater and the ocean’s salt. For the sake of decency, Flavia turns the light off and they finish in darkness.
“Creepy.” Flavia stands and sorts her clothing. She turns the light back on and joins Mandy, who is waiting a few paces away. “I thought something would jump out of the water and bite me on the ass! The whole time!”
“Oh, god!” Mandy cries. “So glad I didn’t think of that.”
“You didn’t? How? What were you thinking of?”
“I was just thinking how nice it was. The dog pile we were all in. Me and Skeebee and Jidadaa and Katrina and Jay. But I don’t think you were in there? I didn’t… like, feel your skin.”
“Ehhh. I was in another pile of skin. Triquet and Alonso and Miriam and Amy. Like the sea lions on the rocks. Best sleep I’ve had in weeks. I never knew I liked sleeping in a pile!”
“Huh. Maybe it’s like,” Mandy approaches the door, her voice dropping as they near Maahjabeen and Pradeep, “it’s the ancient way of doing it. How we slept for like millions of years. Everyone spooning each other every night. Young and old, cousins and strangers. The only way to beat the cold, right? Imagine, like, you got into a fight with someone during the day. But you still had to sleep with them at night. That’s like super healing, you know?”
“Or,” Pradeep’s voice emerges from the dark, “one of you is held to be in the wrong by the larger group so you are shunned and you must sleep on your own. Those would be some pretty strong social contracts. Risk death of exposure for not conforming.”
“Like the world is not full of homeless people now,” Flavia says. “Or maybe the group splits. Some agree with you and some agree with the other one. And this is how we get the first like individual houses. From some prehistoric drama in the bedroom.”
Maahjabeen’s sleepy voice mumbles, “What are we talking about here? I am trying to sleep.”
“Ah. Sorry.” Flavia tiptoes by to the door. “Group sleeping. How it must have been the status quo forever, until we got too emotional or something.”
“Yes, come here.” Maahjabeen doesn’t even open her eyes. Flavia can only see that she holds out her arms to her. Without hesitation, Flavia goes to her, embracing the woman she still privately considers a living goddess.
“Aww, so sweet.” Mandy joins them, taking the edge of the mat behind, enclosing Flavia and Maahjabeen between her and Pradeep.
“Sisters,” Maahjabeen grunts, kissing Flavia once and petting Mandy with a heavy hand, before falling right back to sleep. Flavia is not far behind. She begins to snore.
Minutes pass. Pradeep coughs.
Mandy whispers, “I can’t believe this is our last night. I hardly got to know any of you. And at the same time…”
“One big Cuban family,” Pradeep whispers back. “I’ve hardly ever known a group of people better.”
“You and Maahjabeen just have to stay together.” Mandy reaches across the two sleeping bodies to clutch his arm. “Oh, please promise you will. You two give me like so much faith in humanity.”
“Yes, we are working that out. Money will probably be the main concern, as well as visas and all that nonsense. But Monterey has a huge oceanic sciences and kayaking community. We’ll be able to find something fitting there for Maahjabeen, especially with Amy and all her contacts.”
“You know, LA is only like five hours away. If you guys would ever… like come by for a dinner or something?”
“Really?” Pradeep’s hand clasps hers. She feels something deep within him release. “You know, you people are so good for my anxiety. I never knew I could be so… liked.”
“Loved,” Mandy amends.
He squeezes her hand. “Yes, Mandy. Loved.”
Ξ
“Good lord, dude, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at there.” Jay laughs and approaches the giant log on the lagoon’s beach, behind which Esquibel stands in her purple jacket, peering out at the gray haze of dawn. “You looked like another log, just like vertically resting against…” He reaches her and rests his sternum against the cool, wet wood. Jay studies the horizon. “So what are you doing?”
“The Russians…” Esquibel doesn’t take her eyes from the water. “They said they would be back in two weeks. As of midnight, it has been two weeks. They could arrive at any moment, yes?”
“Uh… yes. Right. Dawn raid. Total Call of Duty commando-style. Too bad we can’t lay down trip wires and C4. Right?”
“This isn’t a video game.” Esquibel sighs. She has been standing here for an hour and the chill has penetrated to her bones. With a hiss, she rubs heat into her legs and claps her arms. “And you aren’t a soldier.”
Jay grabs her hands and blows heat into them. Esquibel scowls and begins to pull them away but the sensation is too nice. “Ehh. What are you doing out here, Jay? Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Scouting the perimeter, yo. Like a sheepdog. You know me. Damn, sister. Your hands are like ice.” Without asking permission he wraps her from behind in a bear hug and breathes hot air into the back of her neck.
Esquibel squirms. “You can’t just grab me!” Then she relaxes into his embrace. His hot breath cuts straight into her bones, warming them. She sighs. “You really haven’t learned a thing about consent, this whole time? Surrounded by women?”
Jay pulls back, shocked and hurt. “Oh! Did I do it again? Fuck. So sorry, dude. I just thought…”
Esquibel shivers again. She draws his head back down. “Just don’t ever do it again. But now. Just blow.”
“Aye aye, Captain. And you keep watch.”
Esquibel does so, glaring at the blue smear of a horizon with hostility. She hasn’t had a man this close to her in years, and never so gladly. This must be what it is like to have a brother. Esquibel was never really exposed to the masculine world in her home. The home was for the women, and her father was out drinking every night until late. She would only ever see him in the morning, contrite with a hangover, sipping coffee and demanding quiet. Friends had told her of their own brothers, and how much grief they gave their sisters. So growing up, she had never wanted anyone but her mother and herself. But now, it makes her wonder what it would have been like to have a little brother who loved her.
“Good Heavens, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at there.” Triquet approaches through the mist, their face pinched in a frown. For this chilly morning they’ve brought out the vintage ski bunny coat with the ermine hood fringe. It’s so warm there hasn’t been too much opportunity to wear it here. But Triquet is determined to finally make its weight and bulk worth all the effort they’ve put into hauling it around for eight weeks by wearing it on the open water when they get picked up. “Well, if it isn’t the most unlikely couple I could imagine here. Pardon my interruption.”
“She’s just cold.” Jay breathes another lungful into Esquibel’s neck. “I ain’t macking on her.”
“Looking for the Russians?” Triquet shifts closer and wraps their own arms around Jay and Esquibel.
“Someone must.”
“You know Mandy’s plan? To be up on the cliffs where her weather station was? Scouting from the highest point, but from a spot where she can’t be seen. I think Amy’s going with her. But I don’t know what kind of luck they’ll have in this fog.”
“Well if they don’t get up and start soon, their plan won’t be of any use at all.”
“They’re already up and heading out. What, you think I woke up of my own accord at five in the morning?” Triquet laughs. “Amy was my blanket.”
“Good. And perhaps we should have a string of runners through the tunnels, to shout it out and relay the news faster than they could carry it. Everyone else is staying in the sub, yes?”
“As far as I know. Mandy said she left Flavia and the lovebirds in the sea cave. They were still asleep.”
“We should all stay together now. Remember,” Esquibel speaks softly in the gathering fog, “the Russians have always used that west beach entrance before. So they may be there this time. Or they are waiting for the dead scientist, and when he doesn’t arrive there they will sail back over here again. That is my thought.”
“It’s a good thought,” Triquet nods.
“I wish we knew,” Esquibel continues, “what killed that scientist. If it was intentional or not. But no one is talking.”
“They say the dead tell no tales but I wish I’d been there with you,” Triquet says. “ I’m sure I could have gleaned something from his gear and his context. They don’t call us forensic scientists for nothing. God, what a bloody place. He’s dead. Wetchie-ghuy. Those two Chinese soldiers we found.”
“The bodies in the bunker on the west beach,” Jay pauses in his warming breaths to add. “The ones Maahjabeen told us about.”
“Maureen Dowerd,” Triquet continues. “And look at you, with your broken hand and twisted ankle.”
“And the spear blade along his ribs.” Esquibel shakes her head in despair. “The report I will write… My god. They will bring me up on charges. Not for the espionage work, but because I did such a poor job protecting the health and safety of you lot.”
“Pradeep and Maahjabeen getting poisoned…” Jay lists. “Katrina had that night of exposure. And Flavia did a couple times. Then Maahjabeen almost getting lost in that storm. And Mandy getting shot. Shit, we’ve really been through the wringer out here.”
“Not to mention what Alonso arrived with.” Triquet grimaces, then confesses, “Then there was my miraculous healing from the bird bite and those unhygienic tattoo dots between my toes… And I haven’t been able to take a deep breath since March.”
“What? You? Why?” Esquibel shakes Jay off so she can inspect Triquet, who only waves her away.
“No, Doc, I’m fine. It was just that dive through the waterfall after I got lost inside the cliff. It hit me hard. Hyperextended my spine or something. Never really got over it.”
“You should have let me look at it,” Esquibel admonishes them. “I’m sure Mandy could have helped.”
“And that is why,” Triquet purrs, “I never mentioned it. I heard all the screams of the tortured. No thank you. Motrin and jacuzzi for me. I’ll be right as rain. As much as I’ll miss all of you and this beautiful place…”
“Motrin and jacuzzi,” Jay echoes. “Yeah, that’s hard to beat.”
“Look, it’s Alonso.” Esquibel peers over Triquet’s shoulder to see the man’s width resolve out of the fog.
“Aha! I found you. I woke up alone and I wondered where everyone was. For a moment…” Alonso shakes himself and wipes the sleep out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I was afraid I’d been left here. The boat had come and gone.”
“Oh, lord.” Triquet laughs. “Could you imagine? How sadistic we’d have to be, to leave one of us here.”
“Not just anyone.” Esquibel laughs as well. “To leave Alonso.”
“No, but I awoke from the most lovely dream. And then that panic almost made me forget it but I…” Alonso shakes his head, a fleeting sadness washing through him. He sees they are waiting, expectant, so he tells them. “It was morning. Bright and sunny. Not like this. And the ship was here. But the tide was very low. So we started packing it and we had so many things, a mountain of things that needed to be piled on the boats and taken out. And I was very busy. We all were. Then the tide went out. Like far far out. And the lagoon became very shallow. Like it didn’t even cover my feet. So then we were able to work very fast, moving back and forth across the water right up to the hull of the ship. And I would pop the things in the hatch and go back for more. And I worked so hard everyone else got tired and collapsed on the beach so I…” Tears suddenly spring into Alonso’s eyes and his throat closes. “I began to run. And I was so fast. And it didn’t hurt at all. But everyone was so tired so I just picked you all up like my children, carrying you one or even two at a time through the water. And I was so strong. And I had so much energy. And my legs didn’t hurt. Not at all…” Then he can’t speak any more. He buries his head in Triquet’s embrace. Jay pats his back.
“Our big Cuban papa.”
“Doctor Alonso,” Esquibel stands at attention and speaks with formality. “I do not know if you would ever want to work with me again, but I would very much work with you again, sir. You were in a difficult position, between the military and your scientists. And you handled the situation as well as anyone could. I have learned from you, how to be a leader and how to…” She shrugs eloquently, “as inappropriate as it may sound, you and your incredible wife and your crazy graduate students have taught me how to love. Better than I ever have. And because of that, I will miss you.”
“Aww, Esquibel…” Jay goes in for the hug.
She wards him away. “You, not so much.”
Alonso laughs and pulls Jay into an embrace with Triquet. “No, don’t listen to her, Jay. We love you so much. You are our mascot. You are the littlest brother. In every family, it is the same. You get all the love but none of the attention.”
Chapter 58 – Saving The Baby
February 3, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
58 – Saving The Baby
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Alonso confesses, his legs ready to give out from the pain. It clouds his mind, making it hard to think or make decisions or be brave. And the hillside ahead only goes more steeply down, each footfall an increasing stab of agony. “I am sorry, everyone. Here is where I reach the end of my limit.”
“Then here is where we pop you onto the travois.”
“Mirrie, I already told you…”
“Stop, Alonso. Just stop.” Miriam puts a calming hand on his hunched shoulder. “Look. It’s too far to turn back, eh? So if we’ve got to carry you, it might as well be forward as back.”
“I cannot abide the idea of being a literal burden. You know—”
“Zo. Darling. Sweetest?”
“Yes, mi amor?”
“Shut the fuck up and get on the travois.”
Once he finally does so, they follow their earlier tracks down the slope of loose soil under the trees, pine camp behind them. Miriam leads a large knot of the crew, six in all, back to the canyon and the lake. Back in the sub, she’d promised an evening swim. Everyone but Flavia, Mandy, and Esquibel had enthusiastically grabbed towels and followed. Now Amy and Jay range eagerly ahead, finding better paths on the hillside. Maahjabeen descends with Triquet and Miriam toward the stream at the bottom, as Pradeep and Katrina drag Alonso awkwardly downhill. He grunts at every impact and won’t stop complaining, loudly and bitterly, in Spanish.
“Why don’t you sing us something, love?” Miriam asks with forced cheer as she takes her turn at Katrina’s travois pole.
But the way she looks at him only makes Alonso feel more like a child. “No!” he shouts back, petulant. “No lo haré!”
They finally reach the banks of the stream. Alonso rolls out of his conveyance and scoots down the steep bank until he can soak his legs in the cold water. He groans with pleasure and falls back against the rocky shoal behind him. Time passes. He listens to their efforts to dismantle the travois of nylon straps and branches. The warmth of the day fills him. He nearly falls asleep. Then someone blocks the bright sky and he squints up at them. “Yes?”
“We have built a raft for you.”
“Now this is getting ridiculous…”
“Not a word, you ungrateful sod. We have three extra inflatable sleeping pads from storage. Never needed them. Two get used today. Everyone’s been working hard for you while you’ve dozed.”
“Yes, yes… How very kind.” Alonso heaves himself to his feet and stares at the long black avenue of the stream, curving into a canyon dark with woods. There stand Pradeep and Katrina, knee-deep in the shallows, proud to show dad what they made for him. The gesture touches him and he holds up a hand, resolving to act with more grace, regardless of what happens or how much it hurts.
They have bound the mats loosely into an X. He drops himself in the middle. The water is nearly shocking at first, but the streambed is dark, warming the water, and it is getting later in the season. Soon he finds the current refreshing. Amy tows him, wading hip deep upstream. Now he can sing. “Don’t cry for me, Argentina…!” But the ballad isn’t suitable and he lets the echoes fade to silence.
They enter the canyon, wading through the rushing stream. His bottom bumps against the rounded riverstones. Alonso hasn’t ever seen a forest like this. The grove at the beach was just a fringe of trees compared to this deep wilderness. The nooks and crannies of this canyon have never felt the tread of human feet. So this is the pure unspoiled natural world environmentalists rhapsodize about. It is hypnotically beautiful, with glowing mushrooms and hanging lichen and flitting birds and bugs. The winding side canyons they pass are chock full of redwoods and ferns. Their amount of organic wealth defies reason. The higher orders of emergent processes that he and Flavia spoke so persuasively about are writ large here, with such a degree of fineness in the clouds of buzzing gnats and haze of pollen dusting the leaves, that it scales up out of his ability to sense it. Now this is where actual magic is, where we can tell that even after we’ve reached the limits of our measurements, there is still something immeasurable beyond.
The eight people speak in a hush, as if in a cathedral. The water sounds fill the canyon instead, and the intermittent cries of raptors overhead. The sky cracks open just as Alonso looks up through the trees, and a banner of blue appears between the gray clouds. Rays fall on the stream, making its pale-green waters luminous. “Mira.” Alonso tugs on the strap Pradeep hauls on. “The sky. What do the locals think when the blue sky shows up like that, eh? You said you think their sky is a surface. So what is this? Their egg is cracking?”
“No, the idea, as far as I can tell,” Pradeep answers, “isn’t that there’s anything beyond the clouds. They are a ceiling. A dome. Therefore, the blue we see is only a dash of paint against that surface. Their cosmos is enclosed, according to what Jidadaa has told me, although she has nothing but scorn for Lisican beliefs. But what must they think on the rare occasion they see the blinding sun? Where does that light and heat come from? God has gotten angry, very angry indeed.”
“Or the phases of the moon?” Triquet asks, wading at Alonso’s floating shoulder. “Do they even recognize it as the same body when it’s all over the sky in different shapes and colors when they can catch a glimpse of it at all? Can they track the craters and think, ah yes… a planetoid lit from various angles! I doubt it. They’re all just in this big like room of island and water, however many kilometers wide, with a perpetual gray ceiling and people appearing every once in a while from what she called the line between the sea and the sky. How many kilometers is it? Someone do the math. On a clear day how far is the horizon away?”
“Well,” Alonso reasons, “first we must know the curvature of the earth. And then the height of their point of view. I think, standing on the beach, we could see no more than a kilometer or two.”
“Yes,” Maahjabeen adds, “even standing on that fallen log on the beach, you could double the distance. These cliffs, ehh. How high did we say? Four hundred meters? We have seen from the top. It is very far. Maybe a hundred kilometers or more.”
“I’m getting a radius of like 34, 35, if I’m calculating it right.” With one hand, Katrina consults her phone for the equation while she trails her other fingers in the stream, tapping its surface like a keyboard. “Distance = 1.226 x the square root of the height.”
“So that is the extent of your whole world. Seventy kilometers in diameter on a clear day. What is that, like a couple hundred square kilometers?” Triquet muses. “A tiny little universe indeed.”
“And only like twenty of those square kilometers are land. It is nearly all open ocean. But even so, these still aren’t any kind of seafaring people.” Maahjabeen luxuriates in this water, pushing against the strong current. keeping herself in the deeps up to her waist. It is so much warmer than the ocean. And just kinder to her in nearly every way. She has very little experience with fresh water. There wan’t much in Tunisia so she spent all her time on the beach and in the sea. “The Lisicans were always completely closed off from the ocean by the surf and currents just like we were so they could never learn to build boats. Just net fish in the lagoon. So, to people like them, the ocean must be as impassable and mysterious as the sky. What do they think happens beneath its waves? They must see whales and all the marine life break the surface. How do they…? I mean, do they know fish live down there? They must. Their ancestors were a whaling people, yes? Didn’t they teach their children how the world works before disappearing in here?”
“Who knows?” Katrina muses. “They didn’t bring music. I thought music was essential to being human. So that means all kinds of things can be lost or forgotten. Even the sea and the sky.”
They finally fetch up at the base of the deadfall that blocks the canyon, damming the rest of it upstream into the lake. But it is a serious climb, perhaps thirty meters up at a steep angle, on slick black logs poking out every which way. Alonso regards it, baleful. This is impossible. He gives up before he even thinks to try.
“I think the best route is over here,” Jay calls out from the far left of the dam. “Got to hug this side on the way up to avoid a big hole in the center. You don’t want to drop down into like dark rushing water and never be heard from again.”
“Yes,” Alonso declares loudly, “I think I will be just fine here. You can all go on. Please do not worry about me.”
“But we can’t leave our big papa behind!” Katrina pats his head and smiles down at him with love. “We’ll figure something out.”
The others have already started clambering up the wreckage. Miriam turns her back to the dam and sits, scooting upward, using her arms. “Look, Zo. You can do it like this.”
“It is too far, Mirrie.”
“Oh my god, listen to you.” Amy laughs at him in disbelief. “Can you believe this is Alonso, Mir? Our Alonso? Boy used to swing through the trees like Tarzan now you ask him to scooch a bit—”
“And he bawls like a baby.” Miriam joins in her laughter. Alonso scowls at them both. They don’t know how depleted he is.
“Be nice.” Katrina comes to his defense. “Good days and bad days. I learned with Pavel. Probably for a very long time.”
But the older women aren’t chastened. They both sit backwards and scoot their bums up the broken terrain, laughing as they go.
“Fine.” Alonso sits up in his floating mats and grabs the nearest broken branch. He hauls himself to his feet and wades toward the dam. He even manages to take a dozen steps upward before the cold wears off and the pain returns. Then he turns and sits as they did and scoots himself ignominiously backward up the fallen logs. Each move provokes a grunt, but he does find a rhythm, recalling once again the strength that remains in his arms and shoulders. Soon he is the only one left on the face of the dam, the only sounds a trickle of water and his echoing sounds of effort.
His gaze drops. Below, one of the Thunderbird clan stand at the edge of the stream, watching him. Seeing the youth makes Alonso’s breath catch in his throat. He had been lost in his misery, thinking he was alone. But there are few more powerful forces in the human heart than vanity. What a pathetic figure he is. They’ve surely never seen anything like him before, a pale gray man bloated with all the ills of the modern world, unable to climb a pile of logs.
Pride deeply stung, Alonso stands. Ignoring the shattering pain, he marches stiff-legged over the last logs to clear the top edge and behold the lake for the first time.
A patch of sun shines on it. Ancient primeval trees crowd its banks on both sides. The sunlight is luminous, blue and green and gold. All his toil is forgotten. This lake is a paradise. The pain and the humiliation have been worth it, indeed.
The others follow Pradeep, stringing along to the left at the base of the canyon wall where a fringe of lakeshore provides a narrow path further in. Except for Katrina. She’s already in the water, paddling happily beside them like a dog.
Alonso sighs in pleasure and rolls into the lake at his feet.
Their waterproof packs provide both Dyson readers and lunch. At the pocket beach ringed by willows, they find the gravel sharp but the logs plentiful. They set up a porch and benches and a camp chair for Alonso. But he refuses to get out of the water yet.
Maahjabeen does too. Now that she’s in the lake she relishes it. Fresh water has so many different properties from salt. She is less buoyant here and has to work harder to stay afloat. But the water is cool and crisp. So fresh. And she can drink directly from the lake. The best water she’s ever tasted. No, she will never get out. They will have to drag her kicking and screaming from this lake. From now on she is no longer a proud and noble orca, she is an eel slithering about in the mud. And it couldn’t feel better.
Her crew on the shore are busy setting up their day camp. Look at them. Her very own Pradeep, busy and serious as always. Amy, who has gently removed the weak little kit fox from where she kept it, in the chest zipper pocket of her windshirt. She now crouches at the shore, digging up grubs or any other nutrients she can get in its mouth. Katrina, standing unabashedly naked in a spot of warm sun, wringing her hair out. Miriam kneeling at the edge of the treeline, rearranging her backpack for geological work. Triquet in a sarong, picking their way barefoot to the shore, collecting flowers. Jay, scrambling restlessly further in. They are her family. They really are. It did happen. All those she cares about right now in the world are here, in this sacred little valley hidden away from the rest of the world. Sure, add Esquibel and Mandy and Maahjabeen’s Italian sister Flavia and she will be complete. This lake shall be her private little ocean, this canyon her temple to God.
Alonso floats beside her. His trailing hand accidentally snags a strand of her hair that has snuck out from under her wet scarf. “Oh, I am very sorry, Miss Charrad.”
“It is no problem,” she turns her body in the water to face him, “Papa.” And she favors him with a dimpled smile.
Alonso beams with satisfaction, like he just completed a jigsaw puzzle. Maahjabeen had surely been the last holdout, hadn’t she? They had all embraced the family, except for her. But now she has found her own way in, through the love she shares with Pradeep.
“I never want this to end,” she continues. “You are all too dear.”
“Here we have found our heaven,” he agrees.
And then they hear a distant cry, from above the canyon’s rim somewhere, a ragged scream of outrage and pain. It stops them all. Everyone stands and those in the water paddle over to a fallen log so they can stand too, hip deep. The cry comes again, from a voice they don’t know. It is human, certainly, but that is all they can tell.
“Dear lord. Impossible to say…” Miriam studies one rim then the other, “where that originates. Which side…”
“Yeah,” Jay agrees. “First I thought it was from the far side up there. Then our side. Now… I don’t know.”
They wait for another cry. They wait and wait. But it never comes. Five then ten minutes pass.
“Starting to feel foolish here…” Triquet mutters. “Who even was that? And what do we do now, people?”
“Are we sure that was human?” Amy asks. “I’ve heard some calls from rutting elk that didn’t sound too different.”
“Seen any elk on Lisica?” Miriam asks.
“Well, no, but…” Amy shakes her head, none of the catalog of life she has found here appropriate for that tortured sound. “I don’t know. Maybe it is human. But they can’t be looking for us. Right?”
“Maybe they are,” Pradeep shrugs, “but they just can’t find us. Maybe that is their frustration at losing our trail in the stream.”
“Well, I am getting cold,” Alonso decides. “Let us all keep doing what we were doing. Get to work. All we can do is keep our ears open. But I don’t think we should go anywhere. Doing anything rash like moving back to pine camp now will only expose—”
The cry reaches them again, like a white noise wolf’s howl from over the horizon. Its pain and rage is horrible to hear. Whoever it is must be tearing their throat to shreds.
“Yes,” Maahjabeen agrees, climbing up the submerged log until she can grab one of its upraised roots. She holds a hand out for Alonso to join her. “Let us carry on. You are right. Nothing else to do. But Jay, please don’t go any farther. Stay close.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Jay’s spidey sense is totally tingling. That sound is evil, like straight up dangerous. He had been about to skirt around an outcrop to see what the next inlet held but now he returns to the safety of their little pocket beach. Leaning down, he hauls first Alonso then Maahjabeen from the water.
Katrina dresses as they dry off. Jay locates a nice stout branch that would make a good club. Amy begins preparing lunch.
Alonso sits and listens, their watchdog. He leans back and scouts the broken edges of the canyon rims above, their dark shadowed slopes against the sailing clouds. Bits of sky still break through and patches of sun race across the redwood treetops of the far canyon wall. He hears nothing. Idly, he removes his laptop from a dry bag and arranges his workstation with the external hard drive and a pair of batteries. Might as well get some Plexity tasks done.
Miriam finishes ordering her kit and hauls her pack on, facing the wall of the canyon behind them. She only needs to go a few steps before she touches a formation of pale epidosite hiding behind a fern. Finally she might get to see the island’s interior ophiolites in all their glory. It is just further confirmation in her model of uplift and the remnants of the Kula plate beneath. “The Late Cretaceous,” she muses to herself, “was a happening place.”
Maahjabeen joins Pradeep in preparing the Dyson readers for lake organism collection. They have five with them and a couple aren’t charged. They plug those in and Jay takes one, leaving the two others for Pradeep and Maahjabeen. Pradeep crouches at the shoreline, looking under rocks for pale annelids and Belostomatidae waterbugs and Pacifastacus crayfish. She re-enters the water with a sigh, wading out into its velvety embrace. Now it doesn’t feel cold at all. She takes one sample of the lake’s surface water at the edge, then others at meter increments heading into deeper water.
AAAAACCCCCCHHHHH!
The cry echoes through the canyon again, this time closer and if anything even more wild and urgent. Triquet flinches, weaving the flowers into a garland, and scowls at the sky. Maahjabeen ducks her head under, instantly resolving to get water column samples from a place she can’t hear that awful scream. Reveling in the silence, she opens her eyes underwater. It is still and deep green, only turbid and dark below her feet. With her fuzzy vision she looks at her glowing hand and the white reader. Pressing a pair of buttons, she takes a sample at the depth of one meter, then two.
She surfaces just as another scream erupts from above. Yes, it is indisputably human now, there is a slur of inaudible words in the gaps between. Maahjabeen swims over to Pradeep. He looks up at the cliff tops with an anxious frown. No. She will not let him slip into the clutches of his panic. She will hold him tight.
Now there is no break in the screams. The unseen figure circles above somehow like a raptor, their cries splitting the air again and again. The crew share worried glances and draw close.
“There!” Jay shouts, pointing down canyon toward the top of the cliffs. They can all see the huddled figure atop the highest stone, lifting his face from where he found something at his feet all the way up to the sky. But he uncharacteristically sways, this barrel-shaped Lisican, and lifts his arms in triumph. With a final scream he steps confidently out into space, arms windmilling.
They all cry out in shock, watching him plummet over a hundred meters to the ground. His last scream is cut short by impact.
Alonso stifles a sob. Triquet cries out, burying their face in Miriam’s embrace. Maahjabeen can’t move. Her mind is blank. Pradeep whips an arm around her and turns them away.
“No way.” Jay edges back toward the dam. His breath comes in fast shallow gasps. “No fucking way. That just happened.” He can’t process the gruesome event. He doesn’t even want to. But his feet move him to the dam regardless. The man landed past it alongside the stream below on the same side of the canyon they occupy.
Pradeep joins him, as do Katrina, Miriam, and Amy. In silence they make their way down the slope of fallen logs back to the stream. It is the oxbow where they had stopped during their first exploration of the canyon that they halt again. “Yes,” Pradeep estimates. “It was directly up there…”
Jay finds the body a surprising distance from the cliff, in a field of rubble. The man lies still, on his side in a pool of blood and gore, quite dead. “Yooo. Oh my fucking god. It’s Wetchie-ghuy.”
Miriam joins him, clapping a hand over her mouth at the gruesome sight. One of his eyes burst from his skull on impact. His jaw is shattered and blood still leaks from his skull.
“Dear god.” Pradeep grips Miriam’s arm as nausea sweeps through him. Even his trained clinical detachment is challenged by this much carnage. He retches.
Amy stays back, looking up to the clifftop. “There’s still someone up there. Waving.” She waves back.
A tiny voice reaches them, repeating the same phrase again and again: “Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ! Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!”
“It’s Xaanach.” Amy shades her eyes with her hand. “She’s got something in her hand. Like a paper. Oh! She dropped it!”
The small parcel flutters down to them with the weight of a leaf. It lands in the stream and Jay has to chase it down like a retriever. He returns with his prize, holding it up wordlessly for the others.
It is a small ziploc with a pair of pills and chalky residue in it.
“What am I looking at?” Amy asks.
“Oh my days,” Miriam sighs, recognizing it.
Jay’s voice is flat. “This is the bag of drugs Katrina brought. It was like pretty full when Jidadaa stole it.”
“And then it somehow ended up with Xaanach and…?” Pradeep falls silent, staring up at the cliff top, dark thoughts gathering.
“He lost our rap battle and took off. I didn’t see him again ‘til now…” Jay shakes his head in horror, his own part in this tragedy becoming clear. “I mean, fuck. This is seriously hardcore. Way way too messed up for me. They fed dude the whole freaking bag. “Tripping balls. That was like forty hits of acid and a whole handful of MDMA. He didn’t even know where he was. Or what he was doing when he fell off the cliff. Never even knew he died.”
“Oh, he knew… He knew what he was doing.” Pradeep backs away from Wetchie-ghuy’s corpse to the water’s edge. He can’t take his eyes from the clifftop. “See, that’s where Xaanach left my blood. On top of that rock. Then she filled him with drugs and led him here. That’s my blood on the rock.” His voice trembles, the anxiety clawing at him, impossible to deny. “This wasn’t accidental. He was hunting me.”
“And Xaanach killed him,” Amy tells him, in an attempt to allay his fears, to soothe his trembling limbs and startled eyes. “He’s gone now, Pradeep. He can’t hurt any of us any longer.”
Xaanach sees him from above. She lifts her own ring finger, the same one as Pradeep’s where she drew his blood. Xaanach laughs and calls out to him again in triumph, repeating the same phrase as before. “Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!”
Ξ
Mandy finds she can move her arm again. It hurts, and it makes her ill thinking how torn and ruptured the fibers of muscle and flesh are, but she can move.
She sits up in the clean room. Esquibel has rebuilt it around her. Pine camp is quiet. It is amazing how exhausted she is from getting shot. Hollywood’s got it all wrong. It’s such an emotional event. There is somehow so much grief in it, like she’s lost a part of herself that she’ll never get back. Like her soul was just punched right out of her frame. And that makes her so tired. But now a bit of her energy has returned. Enough to get her moving.
She finds her sandals and shuffles out the slit door. Esquibel is at the stove, cursing a teapot. Flavia sits in Alonso’s camp chair on her laptop. She looks up in surprise when Mandy appears. “Eh, the soldier rises. She is ready again for battle!”
Mandy smiles at her weakly and waves with her right hand. She moves toward Esquibel, who watches her critically, with a doctor’s assessing eye. “How are you, Mandy?”
“Uhh… great. Fantastic.” A tear leaks from the corner of her eye and she wipes it away. “Hungry.”
“Ah. Well.” Esquibel sets the teapot down and steps away from the table. “That is one thing Flavia and I found we do not do well. Perhaps you can show me how to turn on this stove. And then I can try to make you a—”
“You don’t know how to turn on the stove? It’s been eight weeks.” Mandy doesn’t mean to sound so critical. Or maybe she does. She doesn’t know how she feels about Esquibel anymore.
“We all have our specialties, no?” Flavia calls out.
“You know how I feel about kitchens,” Esquibel says.
Mandy just shakes her head. Cooking is too essential. It’s like saying you don’t know how to bathe yourself or brush your teeth. She turns the stove on but even before she hits the electric ignition she can tell from its silence that its canister is empty. In a bin at her feet she finds a pile of them, the empties mixed with the few full ones left. “Could you please…” Bending hurts. Talking hurts. She nods at the bin. “A full one.”
Esquibel frowns at the bin. “How can I tell which are full?”
“They’re heavier. And they have caps. Please, Esquibel! Stop being so useless right now!”
Esquibel looks at her with a level gaze. “No one has ever called me useless before.” She bends down and grabs a canister, placing it silently on the table before retreating to the clean room.
But Mandy doesn’t have the ability to care. She is bruised, inside and out. She just wants some tea, then some soup, then—
“Phone.” As if by magic, Mandy’s lost phone appears in the air before her, gripped by a slender brown hand. She squeals and jerks back, hurting her shoulder and nearly losing her balance.
Jidadaa stands beside her, a simple smile on her face. She laughs at the physical comedy. “Mandy phone.”
Mandy gathers herself and snares the filthy phone. Its pink shell is cracked and the battery is nearly dead. “Why did you…? What did you do to it?”
“Vid-yo for you. See?” Jidadaa reaches for the phone again but Mandy wards her away.
“Video?” Mandy opens her phone to find a series of photos, most of them obviously unintentional blurred shots of green. But there are a pair of 41 second and 54 second videos near the end.
The first is a covert view of the Ussiaxan village from a distance. Jidadaa, watching over her shoulder, exclaims in disappointment. “Ai. People so little.” Mandy spreads her fingers on the screen to zoom in, eliciting another exclamation from Jidadaa. The people on the screen are now fuzzy blobs of dark pixels in their town square. But she is still able to identify them. “Chinese man. The Daadaxáats shaman. Kasáy.”
“The one we call Lady Boss. What’s her name? Kasay?”
Jidadaa nods. “Means ‘always sweaty.’ Here her men.”
Flavia stands and joins them. “Eh, what are they doing?”
“Kasáy, she make decision. Chinese man her koox̱ now. See?”
He wears a collar and they lead him like a dog. One of the villagers pounds a stake into the ground and they leave him there, leashed to it. The video ends.
“Seriously?” Flavia asks. “That is what Wetchie-ghuy hopes to do with me? Lead me around with a collar and leash?”
Jidadaa shrugs. “If you don’t act good.”
The next clip is from a closer vantage from above. Jidadaa must have taken refuge in a tree. The camera is canted, panning and tilting with frantic energy. Screaming people run beneath the tree. None think to look up. They are all focused on the edge of town.
Nearly a hundred people congregate, surging toward the treeline. They have left Jidadaa behind. Something gray flickers before them in the canopy and they all fall to their knees, like they’ve all been chopped down. The whole crowd falls silent, unmoving.
“What is this?” Flavia demands. “What are we seeing?”
“That is first time they see dla x̱ald, mother fox. First time for Ussiaxan since the eleventh mother. She will choose to give baby fox to one person in Ussiaxan.”
“Wait. The fox decides?” Flavia hadn’t believed this silliness until now. But here is the proof, digitized and indisputable.
Mandy points at the screen. “Look, here comes Kasay-jah like a big bully. Oh my god, even she falls to her knees? Wow, she looks like she’s starstruck. This must be like such a big deal.”
Flavia scowls. “No, do not give the fox to that mean woman…”
Jidadaa laughs as the video ends with the people crying out in shock and outrage. “She do not. The baby go to young girl. Starts big fight. Kasáy try to take baby fox. All people say no. She is sent out of village with her koox̱. Now they must find new home.”
The phone’s battery dies and the screen goes black. Mandy stares stupidly at it. What has she just witnessed? Somebody’s life was just really really fucked with. Two people, actually. The Chinese spy and Lady Boss. Things will never be the same for either of them.
Jidadaa claps, remembering another detail. “And the Ussiaxan wreck the Chinese man radio. No more orders. He is lost.”
Mandy doesn’t know how she feels about that. It brings her no joy that the man who shot her is now a bound slave to an outcast village chief on an undeveloped island thousands of kilometers from his home. Maybe a vindictive person would feel pleasure. But he must have a family and hopes and dreams of his own that have nothing to do with being discarded on Lisica like this. But at the same time, Mandy can’t quite bring herself to feel sorry for him. Fucker shot her.
“Who is there?” Esquibel calls out from the clean room door. “What do you want?”
“It’s just Jidadaa…” Mandy begins but Esquibel interrupts her.
“No. There. Out on the meadow. What do they want?”
Mandy and Flavia turn. Among the green and gold grasses a hundred meters away stand two women, the Mayor and Yesiniy. They watch pine camp, standing patiently in the open.
Jidadaa answers. “I tell them. You leave soon. Sewat and Yesiniy say no, they must tell woman story first. Woman to woman. They do not ever see woman on Lisica. Only Maureen Dowerd. Then only men. Now you are women.”
“Now we are women,” Flavia echoes. “Well, I didn’t know girl power mattered. I mean, if it did, they could have been a lot more nice about it before now. Okay. We have a sisterhood now. Fine. What is this woman story? Some secret?”
“Come.” Jidadaa beckons to Esquibel as well. “Come, please. They wait for you. To tell.”
“Brilliant,” Esquibel mutters. “More nonsense.” But she follows, bringing a chair.
As they approach, Flavia asks, “Ehh, where is Katrina? None of us speak their language. She is the one they want.”
“Maybe one of you could record it for her?” Mandy asks. “My phone’s dead.”
Both Esquibel and Flavia agree, taking out their phones. And not a moment too soon. Before they even reach the meadow, Yesiniy begins intoning a chant.
“Wait! Wait!” Flavia calls out. “We haven’t started recording yet!” They hurry into position as Yesiniy continues.
Jidadaa translates. Esquibel puts her chair down and turns her own camera on her. “It is the story of two sister. First mothers. In beginning they were Ganaaxteidee clan, hibernation frog. Before they are mothers. They are little girls. Two sisters only share little names. Names they only call each other. They forget their old names. They call each other Init and Ta.
“Init and Ta live in Qe’yiłteh. Alone on island. The people do not like Init and Ta. They make their family live alone. They are outcast family. There is no love. But then white men come in big ship. There is fight. Men from the village are killed. They take one white prisoner. This is Tuzhit. He is slave. They make him live with family outside town. He meet Init and Ta.”
“Wait,” Flavia interrupts. “You’re telling me this is their origin story from like three hundred years ago? Can they prove any—?”
Mandy hushes her as Jidadaa continues her translation.
“Hibernation frog clan do not like Tuzhit. Treat him like dog. Tuzhit and Init and Ta steal boat. They try to go down coast but storm take them out to sea. They think they die. Eh. Here is where Yesiniy tells about gods of water and wind. Many gods. Some love, some hate. Three people on the ocean and one mama fox, babies in her belly. Now there is more talk of the gods of wind and water. Sewat repeat what Yesiniy say. Repeat three times. The boat land on Lisica. Here they become big family. Init and Ta have many children. Children marry and have babies. Again and again.
“In the time of sixth mothers there is new shipwreck. Two men. One is dark from south islands named Mkuwelili. One is pale like Tuzhit named Kristaps. Lisica people take them as slave. But time is bad. Island is sick. Too many foxes. Mkuwelili and Kristaps say must kill foxes to save bird and little animal, so people do. They kill many many fox. Then there is almost no fox left and island lose its heart. They blame Mkuwelili and Kristaps. Make them exile in north canyon. Forget their words, forget their language. Only names remember of them.”
“So they were like off some nineteenth century whaling ship?” Esquibel wonders. “Grim end for them, I take it.”
But Jidadaa continues, keeping pace with the chant. “In the time of ninth mother first Japanese ship. They cruel. Lisican people hide. Then American soldier and Russian soldier, all bad. People of all village fight to keep them only on beach. But then Maureen Dowerd come. Everything change.”
“The woman story.” Mandy smiles at the Mayor, who continues her litany uninterrupted.
“Fox say,” Jidadaa tells them in an aside, “Lisica is for woman. First fox tell Init and Ta. They listen with their hearts. That is why, after Tuzhit give them babies, they push him into water and kill.”
“Wait, what? Init and Ta killed Tuzhit?”
“He was first bad man. Bad white man. Bad soldier. Init and Ta escape from bad village. Only after he gone, Lisica is good.”
“Escape from the village back on the Alaskan coast?” Flavia asks. Yesiniy and Sewat have fallen silent, realizing they’ve lost their audience. “So this is the lesson they learn? Murder solves your problems? Their whole lives were bad until they killed the father of their children? But these sisters are not like the Christians, are they? They do not call this murder their original sin. Instead they say it’s when things finally got better. Eh. A brutal age.”
But Jidadaa doesn’t understand the question. She repeats what they already know, just slower. “Init and Ta have clan that hate them. Hibernation frog. They escape with bad man. Come here. Start the people. Past is bad. Him and old clan. So they forget all. Teach children new way. New gods. New traditions. Follow the wisdom of fox.”
“Damn,” Mandy grimaces. “They went hard.”
Sewat, the Mayor, takes up the tale again. Jidadaa shares her words but they already know this part, about Aan Eyagídi the shaman and the love affair between Maureen and Shanno and the baby that came of it. The disputes with Ussiaxan and the advent of the Chinese. The burial of the sub, which cut off their access to the beach for a long cruel time. And how the cycle is coming to a close, with the arrival of the lidass and their inescapable Jidadaa ending this time of peace and prosperity once and for all.
“But why?” Mandy asks. “Why does it have to end? That’s what nobody’s told us. Everybody’s all ready for the good times to turn into the bad times. Why aren’t they like fighting against it?”
“Jidadaa you cannot escape,” the eponymous girl says with a sly smile. “It come when it come.”
“But why are they being punished?” Esquibel shakes her head in disapproval. “This is just a story. There is no real external factor here causing this change, is there? They could stop it if they really wanted to, eh?”
Jidadaa patiently explains. “In the days of third mother they forget to honor first mothers. First bad time. It start long string of curse. First Mkwelili and Kristaps. People from between sea and sky who come. Even Maureen is curse. Yesiniy is curse, all her life. Kula and me. The people deserve Jidadaa very long time. Curse split them into three village. Fox grow very few. Ussiaxan get dark in their chests. Divide island with the creek. Then you come.”
“Oh, yes? We are part of this story now?” Flavia would rather not be included as a co-author on any such disreputable paper.
“You are women,” Jidadaa responds with a simple shrug. “You hear the story and remember.”
Ξ
“No, really. Go on,” Amy tells the others on their return from the lake, stepping away from them. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Well… ask him if he like needs anything,” Katrina calls out as she and the others keep walking, heading back to pine camp. The dark mass of the crew disappear into the gloom. They are still mostly stunned from the tragic events of the day and none of them have the energy to argue with her about splitting up.
Amy watches them go, then turns back to the small fire Morska Vidra has built in front of his tiny hut. She approaches the grove of madrones in which he has built it. Her sandals make noise on the dried leaves. In response, his dark head pokes out of the narrow doorway. The old man watches her approach.
“Bontiik.” Amy chucks his chin. He does the same to her. “Where’s your fox?”
But Morska Vidra just looks glumly at her, his face closed.
“I know. Can’t live without them, can we?” Amy gently removes the fox kit she keeps in her pocket. The poor thing is fading. She just can’t find enough nutrients for it.
Its appearance makes Morska Vidra exclaim in shock. He pulls away, outrage flaring in his eyes. He begins to lecture her.
“No no. The mama rejected it. She told me I could have it. It would have died otherwise. I swear.”
But Morska Vidra won’t hear it. He tries to take the baby from her but Amy is afraid of what he might do with it. She clutches it close, daring him to fight her. Protective instincts surge in her.
Morska Vidra sees the ferocity in Amy’s eyes and hesitates. He goes back to appealing to her, his words coming out too fast for her to follow at all.
Amy pulls back and waves goodbye. “Uhh. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry.” Perhaps she can catch the others before they get too far away.
The old man suddenly stops talking. He looks out at the gloom instead and asks a loud question.
“Oh, shoot.” Amy turns, dismayed. “Someone out there?”
But who emerges from the gloom isn’t human. It is two foxes, Morska Vidra’s fellow and the vixen he impregnated.
“Wait!” Amy cries. “Mama, what are you doing here? Where are your babies? Oh my god, you didn’t lose them…!” She can’t make sense of it. There isn’t hardly a single mammal in the world that will abandon her babies so soon after giving birth.
The vixen’s teats are swollen with milk. Amy drops to her knees as the silver foxes approach. She holds out the tiny kit, wriggling in her palm. Its mother blinks at the tiny thing and approaches. She nickers at it, licking its head, then nudges it toward a teat.
Morska Vidra carefully approaches as Amy encourages the tiny thing to latch and suck. He may have opinions about its life or death but he won’t gainsay its mother. But it may have already been too long. With a gentle pinch Amy coaxes a drop of milk from the teat and the little thing starts slurping greedily.
Morska Vidra’s fox sniffs his child, blessing it with a lick.
The man looks up at Amy, his face filled with wonder.
“Uh… This wasn’t my idea. I only did what she told me.”
It is dark now. Morska Vidra’s face is in shadow. She can only see his eyes. Still he stares at Amy. There is something coiled in him, as if he is about to pounce on her.
“What? What is it?”
His fox pounces instead, landing in Amy’s cross-legged lap. But she is too familiar with animals to react. Staying still, she allows him to crawl around, sniffing at her. The creature stands on her bent knee and watches the mother and baby nurse. Amy finally releases a held breath, which ends with a quiet laugh.
Morska Vidra laughs too, scratching his old boy between his ears.
As the infant finally gets the nourishment it needs, Amy’s maternal anxieties finally ease. “Thank you, Morska Vidra. And thank you, mama.” She reaches out and strokes the vixen’s head with a fingertip. “Thank you for saving the baby.”
Chapter 57 – A Straight Demon
January 27, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
57 – A Straight Demon
“I have been thinking lately about time. How the present moment is a collision between the path stretching behind us and the future racing ahead. A perfect fusion.” Pradeep sits on the edge of the bunk, Maahjabeen at his side. “This is your realm more than mine, Triquet. Although in your case, maybe less about the future. But I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.”
“Yeah… It’s weird.” Triquet sits further down the ward room on a bunk with Miriam and Alonso. But now they stand, pacing up and down the narrow aisle, weaving between the outflung arms and legs. Since Maahjabeen and Pradeep returned from the sea cave none of them have moved. They’ve all been in this ward room for hours, processing the events of the past few days. Now, after the most urgent subjects have been properly covered, their thoughts are turning more philosophical. “All these destiny and prophecy themes. Think about how all the Lisicans consider time and chronology. They have a hard date for the beginning of their world and evidently an equally hard date for its end. That’s got to change how you approach each day.”
“And the sky is a ceiling that contains only you and the ocean,” Pradeep adds. “Yes. We are in a place with different geometry. At home we think of the generations growing and developing, often in contrast or rebellion to the generation before. And this is a limitless line of progress stretching to a vanishing point ahead. But here? What would be the point to build or develop anything if your world will end in 72 days with a cataclysmic Jidadaa of doom?”
“Or, in this case,” Katrina chimes in, “72 hours.”
Pradeep nods. “Quite so. Why be curious about the outside world if it is invisible and impossible to reach? The arrival of outsiders must really mess with this cosmology.”
“Except,” Amy says, “that they themselves were once outsiders and I’m not sure there’s been like a real break in immigration since they first arrived. There’s always someone new here. Maybe the Lisicans are just ethnocentric and don’t think the rest of us are worth their time. And why would you, if you lived in paradise?”
“Eh, as far as islands go, I prefer Sardegna.” Flavia doesn’t even look up from her laptop.
“Yeah, it’s like…” Jay searches for the words. “I just went up top to get baked and I was thinking about that. Here I am in a bunker built in 1961 smoking a plant that was illegal when the soldiers were here. Imagine how much I could have blown their minds! You said they were all unhappy here, Triquet. Well, here comes Doctor Jay from the future with a jay.”
“Layers of time,” Triquet nods. “We make our own fleeting little depositions here in the sub and then in a few days we’ll pass on just like the sailors did. And someday someone else will sit in this bunk and wonder why it smells faintly of marijuana smoke.” The room fills with laughter. “Oh, I need this. Some unstructured thoughts. How about it? Breakout session, everyone. Let’s hear everyone’s most out-of-the-box ideas about these last few weeks. Nothing’s too wild. Come on. Miriam? How about you? What do you got?”
“Well…” Miriam smiles at Esquibel’s aggrieved glance to Flavia. “Nothing too crazy, ladies, I promise. But yes, I have been waiting to tell my own tale. Just a few things I found up in that canyon with a lake.” She pulls her backpack from its storage beneath the bunk and unzips it. From a hardshell container she removes a handful of white chip fragments and shows them to everyone.
“Fossils,” Triquet says. “Far older than what I usually handle.”
“Oh, far.” Miriam takes out another, a rounded lump with a series of short curved lines along its side. “This is a Trigonia clam. Unmistakable little ridges there, that look like eyelashes, aye?”
“Aye.” Katrina peers at the fossil. “It’s cute. How’s it taste?”
“Nobody knows.” Miriam holds it up. “The entire Trigonia genus has been extinct since the Paleocene, 56 million years ago. This lad solves my chronology riddle. So here’s my Plexity datum, right here, thank you very much. The limestone layers that make up so much of this island’s geology are at least 56 million years old. Certainly older, but that’s the nearest in time it can be. And I was able to get some pretty solid geomagnetic readings out there too. The bedrock below is rare stuff. It shows fragmentary clues of the theorized plate that existed here before the Pacific plate subducted it around 48 million years ago. Which means there was an eight million year window where the ancient plate and the limestone crust atop it still had exposure to the surface. So this is our time range. Now near the end of that window was the transition to a new geological epoch. I imagine the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum must have been a real pivotal time here, when ocean temperatures spiked and there was a mass die-off, leaving all these fossils. But that subducted plate… I’ve never really studied North Pacific plate formations before. You know what it’s name is?”
“Uh… Jerry?” Jay guesses.
“It is the Kula Plate, an ancient remnant that hasn’t been seen on the surface in 48 million years.”
“Kula!” Jay exclaims. “No way. What are the odds? All buried and covered up for sure.”
“And it turns out Kula is a Tlingit word,” Miriam continues, “a word that actually means ‘all gone.’”
“So is that her name or is that just what the villagers decided to call her when she got buried in the tunnels?”
“Subducted.” Katrina says the word with distaste.
“Poor Kula. What a life. Imagine being named ‘all gone.’ Yeah, you’re going to name your daughter ‘doom.’ This shit sounds like a Johnny Cash song.” Jay snorts. “Hey, Miriam, if you’re all finished can I go next?”
Miriam nods. “Aye. I’m done.”
“Right on. Now. Prophecy poems.” Jay nods slowly. “These are wild. So I started like researching them. And I came across the songlines of the Australian aborigines. Anyone heard of these?”
“Oh, yes. I had a seminar on them a few years ago.” Triquet still can’t sit still. They climb onto an empty top bunk and start doing exercises. “Love love love their dreaming tracks. But Lisica hardly compares. This place has only been inhabited for three hundred years. The aboriginal culture stretches back over sixty thousand years in Australia. Their dreamworld is unimaginably deep.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Jay agrees. “But I think it’s got some of the same like features. Rhythm. The aborigines would walk in these long rhythms for days, and the songs are sung in that rhythm. The chants here are something like that. And the Lisicans have woven all their plants and rocks and mountains into their chants, kind of in the same way.”
“I do not know,” Alonso tells them, “about these songlines. What makes them so significant in Australia?”
“Well,” Triquet answers, “say you live in your village in Australia and for various cultural or religious reasons you’ve got to travel like a thousand kilometers on a special journey. Off you go. You don’t ask anyone directions. You already know the way. It’s in the songs you’ve been taught since you were born. And this way-song is like literally a list of directions as well as a kind of literary description of the first ancestors who walked this way and created the land as they walked it. Created all the plants and animals with each step and word. And now you’re just re-tracing their steps while you sing their song. But that’s just the barest description of it. Their whole culture is based around these songs that are like baked in to the actual landscape. A mountain is a story is a dream is a journey.”
“I don’t understand,” Alonso confesses.
Triquet nods in agreement. “Oh, for sure. Nobody who isn’t aboriginal really does. I mean, it’s like the Eyat, where it just forces you to stand on your head and look at the world in a fundamentally different way. Time is different to them. Life and death. Same with the Lisicans, I’m sure. Totally unique beliefs.”
“I would guess,” Flavia contributes, still not looking up from her laptop screen, “that our Tuzhit founding father fellow mustn’t have been a very pious Christian, or we’d have Orthodox iconography all over the place. And these people would be a lot more tortured.”
Maahjabeen waves the insult away. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? Flavia, you think more about religion than I do.”
“So…” Jay interposes, in an attempt to head off the argument, “I decided I’d make my own prophet poem, about this island, and being lidass and all that. I mean, I know plants and animals. I can rap about like cliffs and forests all day. And I can’t just let all these others decide my destiny. I can’t just be a cameo guest appearance on someone else’s track. Time to get my own voice out there.”
“MC Jay on the mic!” Katrina crows.
“So what is the song?” Miriam asks. “Have you finished it?”
“Uh, still a work in progress, but…” Jay shrugs. “Takes a rhyme to beat a rhyme. You said you wanted wacky. Here’s wacky. The wackiest shit on this whole wack island.”
“It certainly is,” Esquibel sourly agrees.
“Well, what about you then?” Jay asks with a frown. “You’re pretty good, Doc, at telling everyone where they’re wrong. But what about you? What’s the craziest most far-out weirdness you’ve seen here? Huh?”
Esquibel has to think about that. It is true that this island is a strange place, but she learned growing up on the outskirts of Nairobi that her future lay with the modern world, not with the ignorance and superstitions of her neighbors messing about in the bush. And she saw how many times their forecasts and warnings were wrong, and how easy it was for them to explain those misses away. But science and medicine do not make those same mistakes. They work or they do not, at least if properly applied. The clear problem here is that science is no longer being properly applied. They are falling into unreason and a kind of new age voodoo that she absolutely despises. “Weirdness… I only have concerns about what this place is doing to our objectivity. I think, if we had just been able to keep a solid internet connection, that most of this madness wouldn’t have affected us so strongly.”
“Oh now you would give my satellite phone back?” Flavia cries. “I cannot believe you.”
“Seriously?” Miriam laughs at Esquibel. “After all that has been done to us here, you’re still saying there’s really nothing out of the ordinary with Lisica? Are you blind?”
“I am saying there is no magic. No prophecy or omen or curse here that has any power in the least.” Mandy lies sleeping behind Esquibel on the bunk. The doctor turns and places a comforting hand over Mandy’s gunshot wound, indicating with her action what is really important here. “There are only imperfect humans with our imperfect senses.”
But Maahjabeen isn’t buying it. “So you have no faith.”
Esquibel sneers. “I never did. If I did I would be married and trapped in some man’s house giving him children and free labor.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “Oh, like me? I understand the challenges you faced and I am not saying it is easy. But you don’t have to run so far in the other direction that you would deny that a world exists outside science—” She speaks louder to override both Esquibel and Flavia’s objections. “And yes I understand that it cannot be properly measured or replicated or characterized by our brains. But you are crazy, willfully blind, if you insist that it doesn’t exist and we only live in your, ehhh, deterministic clockwork.”
“Says the average 16th century woman,” Flavia retorts, “on the subject of unsolvable mysteries such as gravity and medicine. Just because we don’t understand the phenomena yet, doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, we’ve solved the science of gravity now?” Miriam mock wonders. “That’s grand.”
“And medicine? Ha.” Maahjabeen grips Pradeep’s arm. “When we were poisoned Doctor Daine had no clue what was happening to us. No offense, you did the best you could to the limits of your abilities, but you weren’t the reason we were healed. It was those shamans and their spells. No, medicine is as much an art as a science and you know it.”
“So what you are saying, Flavia,” Alonso rumbles, “is that these things that some of us are interpreting as mystical events are actually real-world phenomena that can be characterized by physics and mathematics. We just don’t know how yet.”
“Exactly. My grandparents didn’t know about chaos theory. And now, without it, the whole modern world could not exist. Quantum mechanics is used in my laser pointer when I lecture. I have a whole bit about it with my phone, how we hold so much exotic computation so easily in our hands. There are even higher-order outputs, as systems get more and more complex and interact at more refined levels. These things might manifest to us as emotions and dreams and ideas like faith and destiny. But it is only because there are an innumerable amount of particles and interactions collapsing onto this moment in spacetime all at once that we have to abstract and simplify them just so we can see them. But our sight is imperfect, eh? And in the end we are all still drooling monkeys with monkey brains. So we hold on tight to these ideas rooted deep in our biological brains. Family. Sex. Fear of death. Belief in higher powers. I mean, until a few centuries ago, Maahjabeen, you would have told me lightning was your god being angry with me.”
“Sometimes it is.”
“Then you say things like that and I despair for our future…” Flavia holds up a hand, surrendering after that cheap shot. “No. I am done. The world is full of all kinds of people, that is for sure the truth. Some looking forward and some looking back. And some,” she leans to the side and rests her head on Jay’s broad shoulder, “who are happily here in the present.”
“Facts.” Jay nods judiciously, deciding it’s a compliment.
“Okay. I think what Flavia is describing,” Alonso ventures, “is ultimately a positive vision, an idea of progress where our greater understanding of crazy things like what is happening to us here can eventually fall under the domain of formal things like public policy and therapy, instead of shamans and curses and doom.”
“Yeh, that’s where I am,” Katrina agrees. “Except I like a bit more ghost in my machine. It ain’t mechanistic what Flavia and I do, Maahjabeen. That’s the thing. It’s both science and religion all at once. We’re all saying the same thing here, just with different terms. Remember, there wouldn’t even be any higher maths today without the great Arab thinkers like Al-Khwarizmi and Omar Khayyam. And they invented their mathematical concepts as a sacred language in glory to Allah, yeh?”
“Yes, I love maths,” Maahjabeen agrees. “I do. And I appreciate your understanding of the history—”
“All I’m saying is that the sacred language of maths just keeps getting closer and closer to god. We develop it like you develop your own sacred works, with more pronouncements coming out from your faith leaders on a regular basis, yeh? They’re trying to understand the world and the divine that much better. We’re on the same path, everyone. None of us here are trying to hide from the world, like nearly everyone I know back home. We’re the weird ones. That’s what I love about my big Cuban family here. We’re all looking for the truth, with our hearts and minds and everything at our disposal. We’re just hungry, you know?”
The sweetness pouring from Katrina mollifies them all. After a brief silence, Pradeep is the first to continue. “I really appreciate what you said, Katrina. But I want to circle back to something else Flavia mentioned before we change topics. Emergent phenomena. Yes, Amy is nodding her head. She knows what I mean. This is how emergence feels, what we are experiencing here. There is, like I said about time being a collision between the past and future, it’s like all of Plexity’s factors and metrics are colliding upon us all at once, and it is… breathtaking. Too much for my mind to track all at the same time. Never have I felt so…”
“Much like a horse wearing blinders,” Amy finishes for him. “Oh my god that’s exactly how it was in there with the vixen. After the first couple days I felt the rhythm. Remember how we were talking a few weeks ago about plants chirping like reef ecosystems? I could feel it. Not hear it. These old ears can’t hear much. But…”
“Yes,” Pradeep jumps back in, excited. “And that is what I was trying to show you last month, Alonso, with those mycorrhizal networks, the way they were speaking to each other, the grand networks that exist everywhere…”
“Yes…! Yes!” Alonso does remember. Pradeep’s insights had sparked visions that lasted his entire trip. “Networks everywhere! The flow of information! It can be unbearable at times!”
“And then I asked if you could hack the language of the trees so we could change the tune?” Katrina adds with a laugh. “What ever happened to that idea?”
“Yes…” Pradeep frowns, his enthusiastic charge halted by the audacity of the concept. “But I couldn’t imagine it would help then and I still can’t see how it would help now.”
“Oh my god.” The epiphany rises in Amy like a sleeper wave, flooding her with a holistic overview of the entire island. “When they say the foxes rule the island, this is what they mean. Keystone species. Gentle nudges of the ecosystems. Harmonics. Remember, Alonso? Way back at the beginning. We were talking about all the harmonics that Plexity can measure. The microfluidic channels of the Dyson readers being more analog than digital. Remember those arguments, Pradeep? Flavia?”
Alonso laughs, a deep sound filled with pleasure. “Ha ha ha. She has got you there, does she not, Flavia? Your harmonics were too mystical for this old data scientist, remember? We are all at the edge of our respective disciplines, and sometimes we step off. But this is what Katrina was just talking about, isn’t it? We are all striving toward the same goal with different languages?”
“Harmonics is a very well understood mathematical concept.” Flavia shrugs, defensive. “But if you want to make it like a Harry Potter spell or whatever, with like a long string of nonsense rhymes and wiggling fingers, then be my guest.”
“Wait.” Pradeep reaches across the aisle and grabs Katrina’s hand. She inhales sharply at the same instant, her eyes scanning the ceiling.
Then she sees it too. Katrina cries out, “Oh my god.”
Flavia holds up a hand, seeing what they see. “Oh, no no no.”
Pradeep tries to infect her with the beauty of his vision. “No, it’s everything, Flavia. It’s everything that we’ve just talked about. It’s not just… hacking the forest. It’s—”
“Wait.” Alonso scowls. “What is going on here with you three? You can actually do that?”
“Well,” Pradeep stops his runaway train of thought once more to address this. “I mean, it’s just communication. And the most direct means to speak with a forest, for example, would be with fire, yes? Trees react quite dramatically to the presence of—”
“No, you can’t!” Amy protests. “What are you thinking?”
“Or water,” Pradeep allows. “I’m not a monster. I’m just saying these are basic elements we can use. Sunlight. Cold. Parasites. But what I am really saying is that we all need to think much bigger here. Think like Jay.”
“Like Jay?” For Esquibel, this is too much. “You are joking.”
“What I am saying is that he’s writing a prophecy poem and the rest of us are providing him the language. But the audience for his poem isn’t the Lisican villagers. It is the flora and fauna of the island. The winds and the rain and the stars.”
“You are…” Esquibel bites her tongue, trying to find a gentle way to say it. She likes Pradeep and admires his intellect. “A romantic.”
But this is the final piece of the puzzle for Jay. His head rocks back. “Whoa…” He nods, his destiny locking in. “Ohh, this is what they meant by the whole lidass thing. Oh, man. Me myself and I. I’m the man of words and the man of action. Right place at the right time and all that. Dude. Fuck. Got to choose the right words, though. I can really get into some trouble out here, can’t I…?”
“What the hell are you all talking about?” Esquibel demands. “Talking to the trees? What? Singing to them? Changing their song? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I will begin with an analysis of some of these networks we’ve identified in Plexity,” Flavia tells Pradeep. “And tell you where the most likely entry points into the wider systems might be.”
He nods and points at Amy. “Ring the whole island like a bell. And Amy can help me identify what means we have to introduce permutations to the ecosystems. There are a few pheromones we can isolate and I think we can perhaps also trigger some reactions with compounds we currently have with us.”
“You are going to change the ecosystem of Lisica?” Alonso echoes, his heart dropping. “Isn’t that the one thing we said we would never do?”
“Well.” Pradeep takes a deep breath. It seems like every choice he’s ever had to make in his life is a devil’s bargain. “This is like climate change, Alonso. It is already happening, whether we do anything or not. This island will change in just a couple days, is already changing to hear Jidadaa tell it. The Russians are here, the Chinese are here. Wetchie-ghuy is enslaving people and trying to steal foxes. Everyone is already trying to change it. And this is the means we have to short circuit all their efforts.”
“But to what end?” Esquibel wonders. “Each mission must have a goal. This cannot just be an exercise for its own sake. Just to stop what others are trying to do? Is that why we’re here?”
“Yes, listen to this. Esquibel makes a very good point. What do we say the goal of such a project should be?” Alonso surveys the room. They are for the most part excited by this topic. Good. He loves that they are all once more working together.
“I don’t want to choose sides,” Flavia asserts, “between all the geopolitical monsters. China, America… I don’t care.”
Amy nods. “And I won’t do anything that contributes to the destruction of the habitats here. Not a single thing.”
“Perhaps,” Miriam offers, “our mission goal here is just that old medical guideline: do no harm. Eh, Esquibel?”
“Can’t it be more proactive than that?” Pradeep asks. “More like ‘we are here to de-escalate conflicts,’ or something like that. Like what the blue helmets do for the UN. ‘Send your wounded to us.’ I just want to be a force for actual harm reduction, not just avoidance.”
“I think,” Jay says in the silence, “that if this is like the songlines, what we’re supposed to do is dream up the most beautiful world we can, the world we really want to see, everybody all shiny and healthy and happy, and that’s what we sing into the trees. Show them the best possible world and have them yearn for it. Love not war, yo. It’s not just words or a concept. It’s a… vision. Now it’s up to us to speak it into existence.”
Ξ
Perhaps an hour later, the sub has fallen silent. Some work at their screens, others drowse. Katrina hums as she plays a game on her phone. Then she stops. “Hear that?”
“Hear what…?” Jay lifts his head, blinking away his runaway thoughts. “Oh.” The faintest knock comes from belowdecks. It repeats. “Shit. The spy found us?”
“Doubt he’d knock.” Miriam sits up. “He didn’t seem the polite type. More of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of chap.”
“Then who is it?” Jay rises, frowning at the hatch leading further into the sub. “And what do they want?”
He takes a step but Esquibel grabs his leg. “Wait. He is armed. We can’t take any risks.”
“And what’s he knocking on?” Katrina wonders. “You didn’t barricade the way in down there again, did you, Esquibel?”
“I couldn’t. You people stole all my materials.”
Jay makes a decision. “Well, I’m going to see who it is. We can’t just hide in here for three days.”
“Why not?” Flavia demands. “That is exactly what we should do. We shouldn’t even go back into the island’s interior now that we have an honest-to-god spy after us.”
Jay appeals to authority. “Come on, Esquibel. Let me go check it out. Somebody might need us.”
Esquibel sighs, looking up at Jay with a total lack of confidence. She turns and regards Mandy for a moment. She has her eyes open and she watches Esquibel in turn. “Don’t worry, Mands. I won’t let anyone harm you.”
“See who it is,” Mandy tells her weakly. “We can’t just hide.”
Esquibel frowns, then stands. “Okay. But stay behind me, Jay.” She grabs her black satchel and steps toward the hatch.
She leads him down the narrow hall, past the door leading to the warrant officer’s cabin. Then as they pass the locked door of the radio room the knock is repeated, so close it startles them both and they fall against the far wall.
“It’s from in there.” Esquibel removes her pistol and points it at her feet, the safety still on.
“No way. How did somebody even get in there?” Jay is spooked. “I thought it was coming from below. Had to be. You know…”
“Like someone from the village, yes.” Esquibel’s eyes are wide. She is having trouble controlling her breathing. “But this…”
The knock repeats. It is a tentative sound, with a halting forlorn rhythm. Jay inspects the door. The steel panel is set into the frame with no gaps. He tries the knob. It doesn’t turn.
But his efforts have been noticed on the far side. The knock comes again, more urgent, and Miriam ducks through the hatch behind them. “Who is it?”
“Uh, the radioman, if we’re making guesses…” But Jay doesn’t like his own joke. He steps back. “Somebody trapped in there. We should like get them out.”
The knock sounds again.
The three of them share glances. “You could like shoot the lock off,” Jay suggests.
Esquibel looks at him as if he’s deranged. “Does the word ricochet mean anything to you? Anything at all?”
Jay ducks his head into the Captain’s cabin, looking for tools. “Just like need a crowbar or…” He searches the desk drawers, only finding a paper clip hidden in a corner. “Hold up. This might work. Did some larceny as a kid. Let’s see if I still got it.”
Jay pulls out his phone and kneels before the radio room door. He shines his light into the old-fashioned lock and starts poking at it with the paper clip. “Naah. Shit is frozen. Need some lubricant more than anything. See if Triquet can—”
And then a giant bang shakes the door and the door knob falls off. The seal cracks for the first time in decades, a sharp sound of rust flakes breaking off.
Jay pushes on the door. It swings inward with a billow of dust. Inside the cramped room stands Jidadaa holding a metal strut. She is panting, smeared in mud, eyes wild.
“What?” Jay is disappointed. “Aw, it’s just you. How the fuck did you get stuck in there?”
Jidadaa steps aside to show him the hole in the wall behind her and the tunnel leading down into darkness. “Jay lidass. I have been to Ussiaxan. Let me out.”
Jay turns away from the door in disgust. “Fuck. It’s just Jidadaa. Stirring up shit. I’ll be in my bunk.” He pushes past Esquibel and Miriam to return to the ward room.
Jidadaa hurries after him, smearing her mud on both women. “Wait, Jay. The Chinese man. I can tell.” She ducks through the hatch, Esquibel and Miriam following, to address the entire crew. “I can tell you all. He is in a cage.”
“It’s Jidadaa!” Katrina cries, scrambling to her feet and reaching for her, then pulling her hands back. “Who’s in a cage?”
“The Daadaxáats shaman argue with Chinese man. Ussiaxan decide Chinese man is wrong. They put him in cage. He is stuck in it. You are free to go.”
“Put him in a cage…?” Alonso asks. “They imprisoned him? They put the spy in jail? In Ussiaxan jail?”
“Yes.” Jidadaa is relieved to hear the right words. “Chinese spy in jail. No more sneak at night.”
“Ha! Seriously?” Katrina cackles. “Ha! Tried to get them to come after us and they were like, nah, mate. We’re looking for foxes now. Chill out.”
“Yes!” Jidadaa claps her hands. She steps forward and leans over Mandy. “No more spy. No more blood.” With her thumbtip she points at the gunshot wound, leaning close. Then she pulls back abruptly and addresses the room. “You are safe. Now I must go.”
Ξ
“We are here,” Katrina informs the Mayor, her words slow and deliberate, “to find Jidadaa. We think she stole Mandy’s phone.”
The Mayor’s expression does not change. She stares at Katrina and Jay with a flat expression of disbelief, or perhaps distaste.
“Uhh… Where is everybody?” Katrina peers past the Mayor to the village beyond, at least what she can see from the cave mouth. She can only see Yesiniy and the non-binary youth, who plucks the feathers from a dead bird the size of a partridge. She holds her own phone up. “Looks like this but with a pink case. Chinese model. Has all her stuff on it. Uh…” Katrina edges past the Mayor and slips into the village. “That Jidadaa’s sure got sticky fingers.” She nods at Yesiniy, who gapes irate at her. “Ma’am. Don’t mind us. Just passing through.”
Yesiniy’s response is a hoarse warble that reminds Katrina how close to the end the old woman is. She must be like seventy or more, which has got to be old here, without any modern medicine. Perhaps Katrina can find a time to persuade Yesiniy to record a few long interviews before they go. She can translate them when she gets back home. Her perspective would just be so invaluable to preserve. Then Katrina looks away, guilty at the appraising look she measured the crone with, as if she was already dead. Instead, she should focus on what Yesiniy’s saying. Her condemning tone. Okay. She is obviously telling Katrina that things are going wrong. And that she and her friends won’t win. The fox always wins.
Katrina emphatically nods back and uses all the Lisican, Eyat, and Slavic constructions she knows to signal her agreement. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t win at all. Totally. That’s why we’re leaving in a couple days. Just need that phone first.”
Yesiniy’s response is even more heated and she tries to get to her feet, but that is difficult now without help. The youth hurries over and gives her their hands. But as they pull her up their own voice rises in contrast to whatever point the old woman is making. The two Lisicans argue face to face, in an embrace, shaking each other. Finally Yesiniy falls silent and looks away in surrender. All Katrina can tell the fight was about was some mention of Yesiniy’s sacred tree and, somehow, the allocation of water to each hut. Strange. Must be a list of random grievances getting worked out.
The youth turns their smooth brown face to the two trespassers and looks blandly at them. They have a stronger jaw than most of their kin, and a body trending toward stoutness in a few years. They also have the longest hair in the village, black ringlets intermixed with gold, braided loosely around their face to keep it out of their eyes. Their shift is a style that only the women wear. And their easy manner reminds Katrina of a brash middle-aged Filipina bar owner in Lidcombe she knows and loves. She decides she likes the youth, and nods, giving them her most brilliant smile. “Cheers.” She places a hand against her chest. “Katrina.”
After a long moment of consideration, the youth decides to share their own name. “Xeik’w.”
Xeik’w turns away and deposits Yesiniy back on her mat in front of her hut. Jay notices the streaks of drying bird blood that remain on Yesiniy’s upper arms from where Xeik’w grasped her. Wicked. “Man, now I get why you cats all decided Jidadaa wasn’t welcome in the village. Fucking thief. Mandy needs her phone back pronto. Mui importante.”
“They don’t speak Spanish, Jay. That’s been well-established.”
“They get what I mean.” But the three villagers have all returned to their tasks and are no longer paying attention. “But seriously. Where’d everyone else go? Pine camp?”
Following this assumption, they withdraw from the village and head down the path toward the creek. But as they go, they hear the mewling cry of a child echo around them, urgent and lost…
Katrina and Jay stop at the trailhead and look back up the slope of the hill behind the huts. Is that someone moving in the dense undergrowth? “Xaanach?” Jay calls out. “That you?” He turns toward the sound and moves toward it. “What’s wrong, kid?”
But the Mayor and Xeik’w hurry to intercept Jay. There is real fear in Xeik’w’s face. The Mayor has the blackest gaze Jay’s ever seen. “What is it? Is she okay? I just wanted to check on her.” Then Jay remembers that Xaanach doesn’t belong to the village. She’s an outcast like Jidadaa. Oh, is this like the pariah treatment they gave Amy? Man, these people sure do like kicking folks out.
“Uh… where is she?” Katrina asks, slowly returning to the village square, trying to puzzle out the Mayor’s response.
“I only saw the bushes moving up there.” Jay points at a spot, but as he does so he hears the cry come from a further spot, downslope at a diagonal, at a surprising distance. It is an uncanny sound. Even though it is filled with a child’s heartbreak, something about it makes Jay’s hackles rise. “Nah, dude. Stop. They’re right. Come back to me. Uhh. So creepy. That ain’t a child.”
“What do you mean it isn’t a…?” Katrina tries to reconcile his words with the cry for help that tugs at her heartstrings, and in the pause that it takes her to process, Wetchie-ghuy scuttles onto the trail between her and the village, cutting her off from the others.
“Aw, shit. Hey.” Jay strains in the surprisingly strong grip of both the Mayor and Xeik’w. “Hey, you leave her alone. Katrina. Stay back. Don’t get near him.”
Katrina puts her hands up, her breath suddenly fluttering in her breast like a trapped bird. He has divided her from the others like a sheep dog with his flock. But Wetchie-ghuy isn’t facing her. He confronts the others, hunched over, smelling ripe and evil. She steps further back, nearer the trailhead, to get out of his range.
Wetchie-ghuy mewls like a lost child one last time, then cackles and says something derogatory about Jay and Katrina, with a careless gesture behind him to include her.
“No, fuck you. You can just—” But Jay’s heated words are cut off by the Mayor’s even hotter response. She quivers in fury, spitting her words at the shaman, cursing his filthy bare feet. And Wetchie-ghuy just crouches there and takes it, face split into a malevolent grin. No, there’s no joy in that face. It’s a grimace of pain. He bares his teeth at the Mayor in challenge.
“Isn’t she his sister, yeh?” Katrina calls out.
“Oh, fuck. You’re right. Totally spaced that. Yeah, look at them. That’s how siblings and only siblings can—”
Wetchie-ghuy suddenly storms forward, holding up a talisman of bone and sinew. The Mayor meets his charge and tries to slap it out of his hand but he is too fast. They both are. In an eyeblink they have wrestled themselves into a deadlock, standing hip to hip holding each other by the wrists down by their ankles, trying to pull each other off balance.
Wetchie-ghuy springs free. The talisman has lost one of its sinew straps. He hisses in fury and backs away, chanting.
The Mayor marches after him, in the rhythm of her own chant. These must be their prophet poems, at war. “Oh, hell yeah. Full on rap battle.” Jay cheers. “Get him, sister. Chop him up.”
Xeik’w holds Jay back, calling out a chant in care of the Mayor. Yesiniy lends her own screeching cadence from her door. These rhymers don’t even take turns. It is pure cacophony.
But then Wetchie-ghuy steps past his sister and reaches for Jay, his rhyme ending in an unmistakable—lidass!
“Oh, you coming for me now? My turn?” Jay throws his arms wide, fronting, blood rushing to his brain. This dude wants a battle with him? Jay is up for it like he’s never been up for anything. But the noise is too much, all the fools yelling so nobody can’t hear nothing. Jay bellows, “You coming for me?” and the white-hot fury in his voice finally silences them.
His favorite MF Doom song springs unbidden to his lips. He quotes Megalon at the opening: “Who you think I am?”
The existentialist cry fills the air. Before Wetchie-ghuy or the Mayor or anyone else can respond, Jay drops into the rhymes.
“…Loved not for who you think I am,
but who you want me to be
A true thuggin emcee, true thugs, with no strings attached
I wanna give you my slugs and don’t wanna take em.”
Katrina screams in pleasure. She had no idea Jay could be so hot on the mic. She falls behind his bouncing figure, his hype girl, shouting out echoes and refrains of each line’s end. Opening an app on her phone as she bounces, she makes quick adjustments, and instrumental beats fill the square in time to Jay’s rhymes.
Wetchie-ghuy is dumbfounded. The Mayor falls back, amazed. The look on Xeik’w’s face is a mixture of amazement and horror. MF Doom is obviously unlike anything they have ever heard.
But the heat keeps rising in Jay. This motherfucker has been after them since they got here. No more. Jay drops the memorized lyrics and switches to a snarling freestyle, getting personal with his bars:
“You want Doom? I’m your doomsday killer.
Rap battle? Ain’t no MC sounds iller.
Cold clock? You been sneak up by my bed
Reach for me, homie, gonna wish you was dead.
The birds in the trees and the bees all know
That motherfucking Wetchie-ghuy is the one who’s got to go.
Lee-dass? Lid-ass? You want a piece of this?
When you coming for the chosen one you best not miss.”
The wall of hostility is too much for the shaman. He steps back with a scowl, his words just fragments, trying to find a way to force his way back in but Jay is too much.
“Got fools scared cause you call yourself the shaman,
but you’re the wicked one who should be feeling all the shaming,
so lame how you frame the facts to rig the game
accusing all others when you’re the one to blame.”
A strong hand pulls Jay back. It is the Mayor. She cautions him from following Wetchie-ghuy too deeply in his retreat. Now it finally dawns on him and his flow falters. Oh, shit. Jay isn’t defending the Mayor. Wetchie-ghuy didn’t come here to confront his sister, he came here for the lidass. And if Jay takes another couple steps out of her protection, the bastard might actually get him. Jay’s not anyone’s white knight coming to the rescue here. He’s the precious one they’re trying to keep alive. Crazy.
Now Wetchie-ghuy’s face collapses into an even more black scowl. All his attempts to confront or kidnap the lidass have been confounded. With a last curse and shake of his talisman he vanishes into the underbrush. But they can hear him for a long time as he departs, refusing to give up, shouting his prophecy poem in a shaking voice that sounds of nothing but futility.
With a wild cackle, Katrina opens a keyboard app and plays a final few chords, just to put a fine point of resolution onto the conflict. Then in the ensuing silence her laughter is the only sound. She squeezes Jay tight. “Aw, lad! Where’d you learn to spit like that? You’re a straight demon!”
Chapter 56 – Amy’s Foxes Ever Did
January 20, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
56 – Amy’s Foxes Ever Did
Flash.
Cleaving the darkness of Alonso’s sleep, a white corona of light pops in an upper corner of his closed eyelids, shattering his slumber. He drags himself awake as voices rise. Someone starts screaming. Another. Familiar voices.
A gunshot.
Somehow Alonso is now racing barefoot across the slope. Where even is he? Pine needles beneath his feet. Others run beside him, shouting. He had been so deeply asleep. Not even dreaming. And now he’s charging out from under the edge of the trees, his legs stabbing him with nerve pain but still carrying him out into the dark meadow. Ah, yes. They had all returned to pine camp at the end of the night once Katrina told them their presence in the village made old Yesiniy irate.
A huddle of women stand in the field in fierce dispute. He can’t even make sense of their words. Oh. Esquibel kneels and tends to Mandy in Katrina’s arms, Flavia holding a light. What is going on?
“He shot her!” Katrina yells, outraged, to those who approach. “The fucking spy shot Mandy!”
“Superficial!” Esquibel assures them. “She will be fine.”
Alonso and Miriam pull up short as Pradeep and Maahjabeen and Jay emerge from the darkness behind them, their phones flaring with light.
“Where is he?” Jay scouts the perimeter. “Why’d he shoot her?”
“We surprised him.” Flavia holds her light on Mandy’s stained shoulder as all the others flare around her. “With the flash.”
“Of all the stupid bloody things you’ve done…” Esquibel seethes. But she needs to focus on stabilizing Mandy first. Wounded in precisely the way that Esquibel is trained as a specialist. She will have the very best care. This will not harm her. Not Mandy.
“The Chinese spy?” Alonso is slow to grasp all the elements of the scene. “He is here?”
Katrina nods at a line of darkness. “Dived into those bushes. Headed toward the creek. Upstream. Who knows. He might still be right there, lining us up. Esquibel, did we not have a deal that we were not going to do any more of this shit in private?”
“This.” Now Esquibel has to be as precise with her words as she is with the few surgical implements she carries. “This is exactly why I had to… I am sorry. Does someone have a blanket?”
Jay instantly tears off his jacket and places it under Mandy. Maahjabeen does too, rolling hers into a pillow and kneeling at Mandy’s head, soothing her with caresses at her temples.
Mandy clutches her shoulder, silent and grim. Fuck this. Fuck everything about this. It feels like a really angry giant punched her. Really hard. And she can’t have anyone fussing at it, even Skeebee. Especially Skeebee. Mandy grunts at a sudden sharp pain, a shot at the base of her neck. Her whole right side starts to tingle then goes numb. She eases a bit down onto the jackets and looks up at Esquibel with suspicion. “Now what are you going to do?”
“Just cleaning it up, Mandy G.” Esquibel’s voice is quiet and infinitely tender. “The bullet passed through. Hit nothing major. Good entry and exit points. Right now I’m just going to remove any fragments, okay? Just make it spotless for you…”
Mandy feels a distant tugging. The faces of nearly everyone from the camp loom over her. But it’s too much. She closes her eyes in distress and turns away, blocking it all out. What a horrible mess.
Pradeep appears with a pair of groundcloths and blankets and pillows. He builds a nest beside Mandy and prepares for her transfer. “Ready whenever you are, Doctor.”
“Thank you, but…” Esquibel focuses on her task, pulling the fibers of Mandy’s punctured jacket and shirt out of the entry wound, washing it with a bulb of sterilized water. “I don’t want to move her at the moment. Can you fetch my two big kits for me? Back at the tent. It is all I brought from my clean room in the cave. Thank you. And someone start boiling water.” She hears Pradeep rise and hurry away through the grass.
“Anything else we can do?” Miriam appears, laying her fingertips on Mandy’s other shoulder with the lightest touch.
“I have Flavia and Pradeep.” Esquibel is taking refuge in her professional training. “The rest of you, honestly, are in the way. Please go back to bed. We can discuss everything in the morning.”
“Ehh…” Alonso groans. “I don’t think any of us will be able to go to sleep for a long time. Not while poor little Mandy is out here in the field with a bullet in her neck.”
Mandy makes a frightened face at Esquibel, who smiles comfort back to her. “Shoulder,” she corrects Alonso. “Just muscle. Small caliber. Nothing major. And the bullet is gone. Now I am just doing some pre-op care so when I do stitch her up she won’t have much of a scar at all. Good thing you’re not left-handed, darling. We’ll need you in a sling for the next week or two.”
Despite her order, the others arrange the pillows and blankets Pradeep brought and lie down in the field beside her as she works. Esquibel frowns and shakes her head. “Your big Cuban family is very strange, Alonso.”
“Yes, aren’t we?” He has his head in Triquet’s lap. “I am sorry, Doctor Daine, if we are continuing to bother you. But my heart, it is still hammering.” Others murmur in assent. “There was a shooting. An actual person we know and love getting shot. The adrenaline is too much. We can’t just go back to bed.” Esquibel continues to work in silence, now pushing Mandy onto her side so she can tend to the ruptured skin of the exit wound. Alonso tries again. “So what happened? How did this…?”
Jay, who has been patrolling the bushes since Katrina pointed at them, now hushes them. “Shh. Shhh…” He listens, straining in the darkness. They all do. There. The faint crack of a footstep, then another, moving away. “There he is. So what should I do, team? Follow him? Let him go?”
“He has a gun, Jay.” Miriam may not be able to go back to sleep but she sure is weary. “He just used it. Please don’t give him—”
“Yes, come back, Jay.” Alonso’s mind is starting to clear. What a disaster. He wishes he knew what to do but nothing is clear. “We need to hear what happened first. Katrina?”
“Yeh. Well.” Katrina is at the edge of the groundcloth, sitting on her heels hugging her knees facing Esquibel and Mandy. “We just knew she wasn’t going to tell us so we had to keep an eye on her. Last night, nothing. But tonight, Flavia wakes me like an hour ago and whispers, ‘she’s on the move.’ So we hopped up and crept like cats through the bushes and sat shivering in the dark for like ever while Esquibel stood out in the middle of the field like a fucking scarecrow. Just standing there.”
“Oh, Esquibel, what were you thinking?” Alonso appeals to her, trying to include a modicum of respect along with his exasperation. “Please, uh, illuminate us on the subject.”
“Shortly. If you will only give me ten minutes…” Esquibel wishes Mandy hadn’t fallen back into the dirt when she’d been shot. Too much grit in the exit wound. Now she must be thorough. “I will be glad to answer all your questions when…”
“I believe it would have been fine if Mandy had not found us.” Flavia holds the light steady, on its highest setting. It is the least she can do. But she does not look at the blood. That is too much. “But, eh, she did not know the plan.”
They all give an expectant moment for Mandy to tell her side of the story but she remains silent while Esquibel picks at her.
Katrina takes up the tale again. “So, I mean, Mandy sort of got rightly irate about the situation when she realized what was going on. We had trouble keeping her quiet. And when the spy heard her I guess he thought Esquibel had double-crossed him so the gun came out and that’s when—”
Flavia finishes, “I had the brilliant idea to do like Jay and flash my camera at him. But that only made him want to shoot me. And I am so sorry. He hit Mandy instead. Poor sweet child.”
Jay is the only one who doesn’t settle. He gathers firewood, piling it at the edge of the groundcloths, and after a few manic minutes he builds a fire. With all this activity he doesn’t hear what Esquibel says to the others to fend them off. He doesn’t need to. There’s other smarter people here for that.
“No no no, Esquibel. That is demonstrably false. You know,” Flavia responds, growing irate, “I wouldn’t have had to make such a decision if you had only trusted us for once! And told us what you would be doing!”
Esquibel bears it in silence. She is now stitching both wounds closed, having determined that there is no more reason for delay. She has to focus on keeping her hands steady, something that is normally not a problem. But nothing about this is normal.
“I have a question…” Alonso holds up his hand like the professor he hasn’t been for five years. “What does any of this mean about the likelihood of being picked up at our appointed hour?”
The camp silences. They’ve all been thinking it. Miriam is the first to brave the topic. “Well, Zo, I mean, really, this mission is still too big for just one man. He can’t decide it all, can he? It’s not like he was going to pilot the ship himself. There’s what, like at least a few dozen personnel involved.”
“But he would give the orders.” Triquet frowns into the darkness. This reminds them of their worst nights in Guatemala, the jungle alive with rebel gunfire. At least this time they aren’t suffering the shits. They’ve had nothing to add until now, but this kind of big-picture analysis is where they can chime in. “It’s like a command structure thing, yes? I mean, Baitgie could just delay the pickup for another eight weeks and make up his own reasons to his boss, right? And this is some black budget nonsense so there might not be almost any oversight at all. They’ve forgotten about Lisica before. He could keep us out here for years.”
“Now… now talk like that is making me insane.” For the first time the light in Flavia’s hands shake. “If we get trapped here I will kill myself. I swear.”
“Flavia, please. Paranoia doesn’t help…” Esquibel has heard enough raw emotion. Now she needs them to calm down.
“Paranoia! You say that? She is lying right there! The woman you love! Shot by a Chinese spy!”
“Stop shouting that!” Esquibel hisses. “If he can hear us, he will know we know! I hadn’t let go of the facade he is Japanese!”
“Flavia. My dear. We will get you home,” Alonso promises. “I understand. Everything feels very dire right now. For all of us. But we will figure this out.” He waits for Esquibel to finish wrapping Mandy in gauze and covering her with an extra blanket before continuing. “Now. Doctor Daine. Please tell us the contents of your conversation with the spy.”
Esquibel sighs. She has run out of other things to do. “He held out his hand. I said I didn’t have it. He never spoke. He took a step toward me. I said that I had done my best but there was no storage anywhere that I could steal. I told him I was really upset with myself and to give me another couple days. He reached for me. But that’s when we heard Mandy behind us and he pulled me to the ground and took out his pistol. I shouted. I told them no. But then the flash went off and he fired. Then he ran. That is it.”
“All the way back to Ussiaxan.” Jay still patrols the far side of his fire, peering at the dark line of undergrowth where he disappeared.
“And how do you believe this will be handled by Baitgie? Do you think this will prevent him from having us picked up?”
“Well, no.” Flavia immediately tries to interrupt but Esquibel holds up a hand. “Wait. There are several possible scenarios and in each of them I can’t see how it would help. Like, let us say he really wants that data. His real bosses have decided it is valuable enough to mount this operation all the way out here. But all the moving pieces are too complicated and it fails. The plane crashed. The handoff with the crooked doctor doesn’t go as planned. Now will they just give up? No. They will still pick us up on time and just wait to find an easier way to steal the data, perhaps after we submit it to Baitgie. For some reason, they didn’t want to wait that long. Now they must. Or…”
“Or maybe they just send like a whole Chinese strike team or whatever to Lisica,” Triquet adds, “who take it from us by force.”
“Or why doesn’t this American colonel just keep us out here so the spies can keep trying?” Maahjabeen’s cynicism about the great powers has never been so validated. “We are just puppets to him. Numbers on a sheet of paper.”
“There is an actual global satellite agreement coming into force next week. He didn’t make that up.” Alonso tries to recall anything about his interactions with Baitgie that could be useful now. “The whole situation will change. He said once that when it happens he’ll be required to publish an inventory of all his secret hideouts. People will start looking. He will only have a small window here…”
“If I am not home by the 20th of May my department chair will call the Italian Polizia, I swear. Interpol. All of them.”
Alonso frowns. “I doubt that. Maybe after a week has passed.”
“This is just not how militaries operate!” Esquibel needs all this ill-informed nattering to end. “I was in endless meetings leading up to this mission. Support teams. Resources. Extra training. So many people know we are here and are working to bring us home in, what three more days? Multiple branches and even nationalities working together in international waters. It isn’t just a shady figure in an office all alone pushing buttons. He would have to, possibly, falsify the facts on the ground here to get the operation to change its timelines. And he would never do that. It would lead to a whole list of questions he couldn’t answer.”
“So what do you think it is, then?” Miriam asks. She sits behind Katrina, the girl leaning back against Miriam’s bent legs.
“I doubt that the point of this whole operation is about the data.” With a steadying breath, Esquibel centers herself and focuses on this last scenario. Saying it out loud will help fill in the gaps that have been torturing her for the last few nights. “It isn’t about Plexity. It’s about me. This is just how they are grooming me to join Baitgie’s little band of traitors. After I committed to this whole charade, they had me. See, the way it will go is I will go home. And some anonymous contact will send me footage and proof of me betraying this team. The spy, he wears a camera. He films me each time. It’s already happened. I am already compromised. They can ruin my life unless I join their efforts. Labor in secrecy my whole career. I’m probably not even supposed to know that Baitgie has also been turned. But this is how they will get me. And I am useless to them if I remain out here. So they will come get me.”
“And maybe it’s just a little bit of column A…” Triquet holds up one hand, then the other, “…and a bit of column B. The Plexity data will be useful to whatever their own mad scientists are cooking up, and you’d also be a valuable asset for them.”
Now Mandy rolls back, putting a hand to her shoulder, and looks at Esquibel. “Valuable.” The word holds no weight. Mandy’s eyes are unreadable. “What are you going to do now, Skeebee?”
Esquibel shrugs at Mandy, sad. “I knew that espionage was going to ruin my life, but I didn’t realize how quickly or… fully. I swear to you all I had no idea at the… depths of this. I am sorry, Mandy. I hoped we could somehow continue this wonderful love affair that we have here, but… I am so sorry you got shot. I am so so sorry. You deserve better. Better than me. You deserve safety.”
“I guess I appreciate the apology. Or something.” Mandy hates this. The intruding bullet, dividing them from each other. In her heart she can’t blame Esquibel. The intense woman has always been larger than life. She operates under a whole different set of rules. Things like this always happen to her. Of course the Americans and Chinese are fighting over her. But still. This is a hell of a way to get dumped.
In the silence, Pradeep quietly asks, “Flavia. That flash. Was it just a light or did you actually take a picture?”
“Oh. Ehhh…” Flavia frowns, instantly upset with herself for not thinking of this. “Yes. Here. But they are too far away.”
“Is there anything,” Pradeep continues, “that might identify the spy as belonging to one country or another?”
Flavia zooms in on the two figures. Esquibel is on the ground. The spy crouches over her, legs spread, pistol out. His black suit is featureless, nearly undetectable against the darkness behind him. “No. No… You can’t even see his face. No details…” She searches in vain and then finally shrugs, giving up. “It is a useless picture.”
“Well. In a sense.” Pradeep rises, joining Flavia beside Mandy. “We know that this image can’t identify him. But does he know it?”
“And more importantly,” Triquet adds, “do his bosses know it?”
“Exactly.” Pradeep takes Flavia’s phone and examines the image himself. “Esquibel. You fell awkwardly. Maybe twisted your ankle? It looks quite bad.”
“It is fine.”
“Yes, so our spy has retreated to his base, where he must contact his superiors and tell them… what?”
Maahjabeen answers. “That we all know about him now and one of us took a picture.”
“Which will put him in very bad trouble,” Pradeep continues. “What kind of reaction do you think his commanding officer might have to that news, Esquibel?”
“Oh, fury. I am quite certain.” Esquibel considers the issue. “The Chinese are all about saving face, even in the PLA. It’s kind of… known. Different military cultures. They will almost always double down and try to save the mission before his commander has to report the failure to his own superiors. Yes, Pradeep. You are right. Our spy may come back with a vengeance. Take everything we have at gunpoint. The hard drives, everything.”
“No!” This stirs Alonso and he heaves himself up to address them all. “He cannot have it. I would die to defend it.”
“You might just. He might get orders to secure Flavia’s phone and kill the witnesses, yeh?” Katrina asks, miserable.
Esquibel scowls. “He… might. I just wish I knew why they are doing what they are doing. Then we would be able to make a plan. But we will never know.” She shivers, thinking of how easily the Chinese spy put slips of paper beneath her shirt as she slept. Twice. Esquibel won’t sleep well these last few nights, maybe ever again. “I think it would be best to retreat to the sub, someplace that only has single doors that can be defended.”
“Exactly,” Flavia agrees. “Doors and walls and furniture.”
“You’re talking about right now, aren’t you?” Katrina groans.
Esquibel tries to calculate it. “Well, if his base is in Ussiaxan, then we know he can’t get there in under an hour, and that’s during the day. It took us at least that long. So it will be at minimum two hours before he can return here. Add time for him to relay how he failed and to receive new orders… It’s currently 3:19 am…” Her frowning face is illuminated by her phone’s screen as she consults the time. “I think we will be safe until dawn. But we must expect him after that.”
“What if he has friends?”Flavia asks. “More spies?”
“What if he brings the whole Ussiaxan village?” Jay adds.
“No,” Esquibel and Katrina say at the same time. Then Esquibel continues. “They are looking for the fox, remember? According to the Russian we met, nothing is more important to them.”
“Yes…” Alonso now recalls that Esquibel, Katrina, and Mandy had returned in the dark after a long absence with Jidadaa and Xaanach. “I never heard the details of this. We were too busy moving back here. And you were gone all day and into the night. In a field, you met a Russian… what, soldier?”
“No,” Katrina answers with a sigh. “He was a scientist like us. He mentioned some technical university when he was raving. I didn’t recognize it. I think it was in the east, like Vladivostok area.”
“He… was?” Alonso asks.
Esquibel nods once, curt. “He did not survive. Sepsis. But I was able to take away the pain at least.”
“Who killed him?” Pradeep wonders.
Esquibel shakes her head. “We couldn’t tell. The original injury was… well, an autopsy could shed some light but I couldn’t tell. His ribs had splintered and punctured a lung. But we don’t know if…”
“It could have been a boar,” Katrina lists, “or a bad fall in the woods or maybe the Thunderbirds just got sick of him. Maybe he asked the wrong questions. Their like representative there didn’t seem too upset when the bloke died. He just took back a necklace they’d given him and vanished.”
“What kind of scientist?” Flavia asks.
“His name was Viktor. He didn’t say. But I got the impression…” Katrina consults Esquibel with a glance, “something in the medical field. Not a doctor or a nurse but…”
Esquibel shakes her head no in agreement. “No, but maybe a technician. If he had been a real medical professional he would have done more to combat his infection. But he just… laid there. As far as we could tell he had only been in his sleeping bag smoking cigarettes for a week or more.”
“Waiting for his friends to find him.” Katrina shakes her head at the sad memory. “I bet those Russians who scared us off the beach were sent to find him. But they couldn’t find the way in.”
“Yes,” Maahjabeen agrees, “the Russians must enter where the Japanese did, up the west cliffs somehow. Maybe that message was for him, written in the sand.”
“He wasn’t waiting for his friends. He was waiting for the end.” Mandy’s voice is a spidery rasp. It makes them all fall silent. “He told us all about the foxes, Alonso. He said it’s all about the babies and where they go. He was like fixated.”
“Yes, Jidadaa has already told us this.” Alonso is sad to hear about the man’s loss. “What a waste. He gave his life for them.”
“But he told us…” Mandy sits up with effort, accepting help from both Katrina and Esquibel. “The Russians have figured out that to control Lisica you need to control the foxes. It’s their religion. It’s their whole culture. Lisica. The island isn’t just named after foxes.”
Mandy looks at both Katrina and Esquibel, who scowls. But it is the doctor who eventually continues. “He said, no he raved, that the foxes are actually in charge here. That they rule Lisica.”
“He wasn’t raving,” Katrina corrects her quietly.
“He was raving the entire time. Just because he had moments of lucidity,” Esquibel retorts, “doesn’t mean what he said was true. It is classic paranoid fever dream material. Animals don’t govern islands, especially ones with hundreds of people on them.”
“The foxes… are in charge.” Miriam knows the statement is preposterous but it still resonates within her. “Don’t know why, love, but that actually answers a whole host of—”
“Are you totally insane?” The amount of scorn dripping from Flavia’s words is insulting. “When did scientists start to believe such fairy tales?”
“I didn’t say I believed anything,” Miriam snaps at her. “I’m just talking in terms of models. We’ve had incomplete data about this subject for eight bloody weeks. But if you plug in these possible factors then all of a sudden our inscrutable villagers might start to make a lot more sense. Remember when you were arguing with the Mayor, Esquibel, about the placement of pine camp? It was Morska Vidra’s fox that chose our spot. Once he sniffed it out they were suddenly all fine with it. It was his fox who originally gave his blessing to us in the mouth of the cave, which let the villagers first talk to us. It was his fox…”
Flavia stands, waving her arms to interrupt Miriam. “Okay, fine. Fine. The people have put their pets in charge. So what? What does any of that have to do with us?”
In the silence, Jay suddenly perks his ears. “Yo yo yo. Someone coming. Oh, shit. We waited too long and now…” He searches helplessly for a weapon, for cover in the open meadow.
They all stand. Esquibel reaches for her satchel as the figure steps stiffly from the darkness into the light.
“Amy!” Alonso’s shout of joy is ragged with shock.
She stands at the edge of the firelight, blinking at them. Amy is gaunt, her eyes hollow. She is covered with dirt and bits of moss, as if she’s been buried beneath the forest floor these last five days.
They surround her, embracing her, murmuring and kissing her, picking debris from her hair.
“Careful. Careful.” Amy shields herself from those who want to squeeze her tight. She spins out of Pradeep’s embrace and clutches at her breastbone. Turning back, she reveals the fox kit the vixen had prematurely birthed then rejected. It has grown in the last couple days, nearly doubling in size, but it’s still sightless, an elongated worm with just the barest wisp of white hairs starting to sprout. It wriggles weakly in Amy’s cupped hands. “My little premie baby. This one was just the first. But it’s done now. Eleven in all. It’s finally over. They all survived. And mama is resting.”
Ξ
“The name of the man Maureen Dowerd fell in love with is not kept here. The soldiers showed little interest in learning any of the local languages or customs. They only called him Shanno. So it will only be among the Lisicans that his full story is known.” Triquet lectures all the others, crammed together on the bunks in the upper deck ward room of the sub. “But, well, if you’ll pardon the artistic license, I think this tale needs to be told from the heart. I’ll keep my assumptions and leaps of logic to a minimum here, but here’s what we now know…” Triquet takes a deep breath to place themself back in time, among the crisp collars and nicotine stains and upright posture of 1959. “This boat’s name is the USS Sunfish, an IXSS unclassified Tench-class sub built for intelligence gathering missions in the Pacific after the war. Its existence isn’t recorded anywhere. What we have finally uncovered is a crime of passion.”
“I mean… haven’t we known that already for a long while?” Flavia addresses the room, frowning.
Triquet nods. “That the colonel killed her, yes. Or had her killed. And he hunted Shanno and the child but never seemed to find them. It was Shanno’s own people who eventually killed him, right, Katrina? That’s what you said the head of the Thunderbirds told you. That it was the Ussiaxan. The people without a fox. And that they ‘caused Maureen to be killed.’ Which is pretty much the last puzzle that needed to be solved. That’s the part that took forever. But the collected records of Staff Sergeant Boren really bring the whole thing to life. It was the night of December 12th, 1959. He wrote it in a letter to his brother that he never sent. He says the Colonel ‘cracked like a bad egg. And the diesel shovel ran all day. The men were not happy.’”
Flavia shakes her head, displeased. “What does that mean? Ingles dug his fiancee’s grave? With a diesel shovel? Isn’t that just basically like a bulldozer? Why would it take him all day?”
“He wasn’t burying a body…” Pradeep realizes.
“He was burying a sub. Boren’s schedule for the day shows all standard activities were canceled or moved, even meals. And the next day things had shifted again. To finish the job. Or recovery. Seems like it was a real mad dash. A reckless decision.”
“To plug the hole.” Maahjabeen looks at Esquibel. “Common military instinct, apparently. That was the tunnel to the interior, right there at the top of the beach.”
“Exactly, exactly…” Triquet croons. They fall into character, the tormented jilted lover. “Ingles loses his mind. ‘If I can’t have her, no one can. These damn natives cause more trouble than they’re worth!’ And in his wild fury he orders his crew to put the cork in the bottle, leaving Maureen in the interior with her new man.”
“Too bad they didn’t know about all the other tunnels,” Jay chuckles. “That must have messed with his head when she popped right back out after all his work.”
“No, there were no other tunnels in those days. I don’t think…” Triquet shrugs. “This is where we would have to guess. But I figure all those other tunnels we get lost in underground here were dug in reaction to the sub taking away the villagers’ path to the beach. They tried a million different directions and only a few actually made it all the way through the cliffs.”
Maahjabeen waves at the ground beneath them. “But what about the channel underneath and all the concrete leading to the sea cave? The… the… what is the word?”
“The culvert,” Miriam offers.
“Yes, was that already there?”
Triquet shrugs. “I think it wasn’t. I think the culvert and sea cave were probably developed later. But I might be wrong. There are layers here. I think the sub got dug in and then they just kind of built all these things around it. Then they cut the conning tower off and fully buried it when it was time to change leadership, so they wouldn’t have to answer any tough questions, I expect. They built the bunker over it in 1961, the year Ingles left.”
Alonso chuckles. “We wracked our brains so hard trying to figure out why the Americans would bury a sub down here. We thought of so many like tactical and geopolitical reasons. But in the end it was all because of a broken heart.”
“And racism,” Triquet agrees. “And isolationism. All the normal human impulses. But I keep coming back to the phrase ‘they caused Maureen to be killed,’ instead of the Ussiaxan killing her. And what I’m pretty sure that means is that they were the ones who revealed Maureen’s infidelity to the colonel. It was a blow to the back of the head that ended her life. Behind the ear. She didn’t see it coming. She may not have known it was coming.”
“You’re saying,” Esquibel asks, “that he caught them while they were having sex?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe leaning over a crib. The baby’s been born. The baby who grew up to be Yesiniy, the old woman who now lives next to the Mayor. She’s obviously not his, not with that hair. It’s when Ingles discovers Maureen’s secret that he kills her. Hides her body in that grave in the woods. Leaves without saying a single goddamn word about it to anybody. Total monster if you ask me.”
“He never understood…” It’s the first time Amy’s spoken since they’ve set up in the sub. Her focus has been almost entirely on her infant fox, coaxing it to drink some of the powdered milk she has reconstituted. Now she shakes her head in sorrow at the tragic myopia the soldiers and sailors had. They never explored the interior of the island. They never saw its astounding life, never understood the secrets hidden in its green heart. “Poor man. Such a sad way to exist. Just so rigid. Sometimes I wonder how my ancestors were able to make it through a day.”
“I mean…” Flavia shrugs, “people still kill people for cheating today. It is not very different.”
“It’s not that. It’s…” Amy shakes her head, no words for what she now knows. “Postwar culture was just so monolithic. You know what I mean. We can hardly even watch their movies any more. Listen to their music. It’s not that it was just simple, it was… inert. Like everything they did was about enforcing some unnatural social norm or another. They were so busy doing all that they couldn’t hear the trees singing.”
“And you do?” Esquibel has given Amy a wellness check, which she satisfactorily passed, but that only indicates the health of her body. What her mind must have endured for the past five days has obviously left some indelible mark on her. It reminds Esquibel of the hallucinatory psychosis surrounding some new mothers’ births. What is it about the process of delivering infants that tears the fabric of reality for so many people?
Amy shrugs. “I got deep in the forest’s rhythms, I can tell you that much. And that vixen, she was just such a… vixen. Now I know why the word has the connotations it does.”
“What connotations?” Miriam asks, mock offended. “You’re the one who first started calling me Vixen back in the 90s.”
“Yeah, when you were being naughty,” Amy laughs. “I never thought an animal could be so controlling. It’s all somehow in their ears. The way they tilt and move them is so expressive. Like a lady with her fan. The idea that they run the island makes all the sense in the world to me now. She’s just got so many demands.”
“So, Triquet,” Alonso asks, “are you finished? Are these your final findings on this subject?”
“Final? Well, no. But it’s where I’m at now and I think most of the major questions have been answered. I’ll hand over my research to the authorities when we get back and see if they want to make anything of it.”
Esquibel nods. “They should. If only that an unregistered woman somehow got on their top secret island for a couple years and they never knew.” She frowns, watching Triquet duck through the hatch leading deeper into the sub. They return by the time she ends her sentence, arms full of bottles. “Now what? What is that?”
Triquet smiles wolfishly. “The last thing I have to share this morning. Who wants a shot of Bushmills in their oatmeal?”
Ξ
“Take my hand.” Pradeep holds his out at the threshold of the sea cave’s door. Maahjabeen giggles and grabs it. He pulls on her and she gives out a little yelp, then collapses into his arms. He swings her up and carries her through like a bride. “Welcome home, my love.” He kisses her, or at least tries to. But they are both laughing too hard and their teeth clack on contact.
He stumbles when he enters the cave and his grunt is met by a series of heavy splashes in the water. They both gasp and whip their heads around, to spy the last of the sea lions dropping from their perches on the shelves of the cave.
Only a few remain, watching the intruders with shining black orbs. Other heads surface, their curiosity getting the better of them. Pradeep and Maahjabeen remain still and quiet, frozen in an awkward fall, hands braced against the stone floor, bodies twisted. Finally one of the closer sea lion mothers barks at them, an urgent plaintive bellow that echoes from the walls and water. The call is taken up by a few others and soon more heads have emerged to join the chorus. It is a deafening sound, hurting Maahjabeen’s ears. She finally shifts, rolling onto her side so that she can plug her ears with her fingers. An urgent glance to the back wall shows that Firewater and Aziz are still safely stacked there.
The sea lions subside, mollified, and hump their way back onto the shelves. Pradeep frowns at their behavior. “They are awful quick to accept us. I was afraid that we’d scared them off entirely. But they’re already back out of the water…”
“Because something in the water scares them even more.”
“Your orcas.”
Maahjabeen smiles fiercely in agreement.
“Fantastic. Remember the carcass we found here the first time?”
“You are so romantic.” She cups his face, only half-joking. There are so many sea lions in here she can smell them. Probably sixty or more, and all crowding her favorite spots in the cave. She rolls to her feet and one of the distant sea lions takes up the alarm again, but this time none of them join her. She subsides after one of the larger males croaks, a decision having been made. “Yes, papa. I would risk the two skinny little humans instead of the pod of orcas as well. Wise choice.”
Pradeep is a bit spooked by the lustful growl in Maahjabeen’s voice. He notes the gleam in her heavy-lidded eyes. Her stance. “What has gotten into you? You look like a predator too.”
“Oh?” Maahjabeen would reflexively deny it but she sees no reason to. The pulsing heat racing through her limbs proves it. Yes, how fine it must be to live as a black and white torpedo with fangs. To have these endless oceans as a playground, through which you can rocket faster than anyone. To snare a wriggling bit of meat, plucking it right from the water and tearing it open… She grabs for the next best thing, hauling Pradeep close and kissing him wetly, pressing herself against him.
“This is weird…” is all Pradeep manages to say before she is atop him, smothering all further protests.
After she collapses, shuddering above him, they hold each other tight. Maahjabeen opens her eyes, the fireworks having passed and the odd refractory post-coital thoughts drifting through her. She is shocked to find a juvenile male sea lion on the stone floor of their own side of the cave, not more than two meters away. He bobs his tapered head, nose alive to their rich scents. She laughs at him.
Pradeep lifts his head. “What are you…? Ah. Yes. Weird. How long has he been there?”
“Long enough to learn things, eh, Mahboub?” She settles once more, head on Pradeep’s shoulder. The young sea lion still keeps his distance, and his head keeps bobbing. “So cute.” She loves the glistening intelligence in this creature’s eyes. “What a shame they taste so good. It is like hunting the deer, eh?”
“Okay now you are identifying with the orcas to a disturbing degree. I have worked with sea lions for years but I don’t think I have ever once wondered how they taste.”
“Hot. And juicy.” She kisses him and rolls away, sitting up. “I want to see if my clan are out there.” She stands wearing only a sports bra and shoes. Relishing the sea air on her naked skin she picks her way along the left wall of the cavern toward the next open grottoes where they built and then demolished their concrete buildings. Maahjabeen feels luxurious, a kind of fullness she has never before experienced. For perhaps the first time in her life she wants to walk around naked, in the most private place in the whole world, with nobody’s eyes on her except her own true love. And dozens of these furry, fatty snacks.
“Careful.” Pradeep scrambles to his feet, his shorts around his ankles. He pulls them up and holds out a useless cautionary hand. Maahjabeen steps toward a cluster of the resting pinnipeds. Can they tell how much she is on the side of their hunters? “Don’t get between them and the water.”
“But I just want to see…” Maahjabeen cranes her neck past their bodies. She edges forward and one of the nursing mothers lifts her head. “Oh, look, Pradeep! The baby is so precious!”
“Do you think you could get some of that milk for Amy’s fox?”
“Ehh…” Maahjabeen and the sea lion stare at each other. “As Salaam Alaikum.” She bows a bit and tries a close-lipped smile.
The sea lions all start barking again. But it isn’t because of her. She can see a tall dorsal fin racing in, a bow wave building before it. Then the orca rises from the water, mouth gaping, and snaps at the edge of the platform across from Maahjabeen. She cries out in pleasure, making eye contact with the magnificent fellow before he pulls back into the water, having missed his catch.
The sea lions at her feet surge against the back wall, caterwauling their terror, as the orca slowly swims the circuit of the cave. On the platforms in the center of the water, one sea lion is pushed to the edge. She falls in and the killer whale surges toward the spot.
Neither come up. A long minute passes. The orca is gone.
Maahjabeen finally drops her eyes from the last spot she saw the sinking fin. On the stone floor before her is a white splash, a mess of milk where the infant was nursing. She takes off her shoe and sock and soaks the fabric in the puddle. “Look, Pradeep! I got some milk after all!”
“Ha. What a fox this will be.” He shakes his head in wonder at the foreign DNA they are feeding Amy’s kit. “First boar milk, then powdered cow milk, now sea lion milk. It sounds like a superhero origin story. The fox who became a legend.”
Maahjabeen draws a sharp breath, a deep insight lancing her. “The orcas. The foxes. The foxes rule the land here and all the people on it. But my orcas, Mahboub. They are the rulers in the same way of the sea. Remember how much trouble everyone had about how the orcas led us to the old shaman? They are shaping what happens here as much as Amy’s foxes ever did.”
Chapter 55 – Something Important First
January 13, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
55 – Something Important First
From atop the cliff, the sea shines chrome, in a band that emerges from the eastern horizon where the dawning sun rises. Maahjabeen watches the sea fill with light, thinking of God and destiny and the immutable design of His creation.
“Oh my god,” Flavia’s gasping voice behind her breaks her reverie, “they said you spent the night up here and I couldn’t believe it. This is about as far as my friend Maahjabeen can get from her beloved ocean.”
“Yes, but I can see it from here. I can see so much.”
Flavia stands on the far side of the mouth of the shaft that drops four hundred meters to the tunnels within the cliff. She carefully skirts it and joins Maahjabeen on the lip of the cliff on the far side, among the wreckage of the observation platform where Mandy lost her weather station during the bombogenesis. There is a little hollow beside the splintered timbers that have been neatly stacked as a windbreak, in which Maahjabeen’s sleeping pad and bag fit quite nicely last night. Yet she hadn’t barely slept. She can’t shed a sense of approaching doom. Only the staggering breadth of the ocean can forestall it and calm her mind.
“Where is your boyfriend?” Flavia stands beside Maahjabeen behind the stack of broken planks, looking where she looks but not seeing what she sees. The southern horizon is the very concept of infinity made manifest in the world. But Flavia’s taste for the abstract finds this real-world dividing line, where one shade of gray is finely divided from another shade of gray, far less comforting than the perfect representations of such mechanics that wheel and elegantly unfold in her mind. Ultimately, what she is looking at here is just a messy transition between two states of matter, from the liquid of the ocean to the gas of the atmosphere. But they are still mostly made of the same constituent parts. It is all just a matter of the density of moisture in each cubic meter and how the surface tension of the water is the bound between the two states.
After a long moment, during which Maahjabeen is filled once more with the peaceful silence of the open sea, she recollects Flavia’s question and replies, “Ehh, he has some notion to find a pond or inland lake before we leave. Collect more samples for Plexity. Good for his studies but not for mine. And I knew Alonso would argue with me if I tried to go to the sea cave, so this seemed the next best option.”
Standing beside her, Flavia takes Maahjabeen’s hand and rests her head on her shoulder. “Too cold. And I have already filled my lifetime quota of this ocean wind. When you are ready, we can go back down and I have espresso for you, mia cara. Do not be long.”
“What will you do…?” Maahjabeen asks, “when you get back?”
Flavia groans in pleasure. This has been her favorite thing to think about for weeks now. “Well, first I will feed my dog. And then I will take a bath for about six days. Then I will… let me see…” Flavia squeezes Maahjabeen’s hand and searches within herself for her deepest craving. But it has been too long. All of her favorites, that she tormented herself with missing during the first five or six weeks on this godforsaken island, now seem far too elaborate and decadent and… artificial in some depressing way. Even like the simple Carbonara they make on the corner for her. All those rich ingredients stacked together seems an oily mess, a nauseating indulgence. Tiramisu from L’osteria down the road is the same. She’s had it for her birthday every year for a decade but now the thought of all that sweet cream and sugar turns her stomach. “Oh, no. What is happening to me?” Flavia clutches her belly, finding it shrunken and uncharacteristically complaisant.
Maahjabeen turns to her with concern. She is nowhere near ready to leave this view but the tone in Flavia’s voice concerns her. “What is it?”
“My body… My taste… You do it. Think of your favorite meal or dessert. The thing that makes you the happiest. What is that dish?”
Maahjabeen shrugs, far from the concerns of the flesh. “Maybe a good Lebanese baklava, with walnuts not pistachios, and just a tiny hint of rosewater. That is my favorite.”
“Yes but now think of it. Would you eat it now, if I magically had it in my pocket and I take it out and here.” Flavia mimes handing Maahjabeen her baklava. “Buon appetito. Would you eat it?”
“Uh… thank you.” Maahjabeen giggles and mimes taking a bite.
“No, no.” Flavia waves away the idea of it. “I mean, could you really eat all that honey and sugar and dough right now, after we have been surviving on plain rice and like bugs and ashes for all these months? I can’t imagine eating my favorite foods any more and it is making me very sad. What if I never adjust back? What if my taste for the finer things in life is forever gone.”
“These are the finer things in life.” Maahjabeen sweeps her hand across the glittering surface of the sea.
“You know what I mean. I think of pizza and my stomach turns. That is so much cheese and oil and garlic! Even a nice salad. It is too much indulgence. These carefully picked leaves of cultivated lettuces and vegetables. And the aged balsamic. I do not think I can do it. Ai. The modern world has left me behind.”
Maahjabeen laughs at Flavia. “Yes, it is true. I would not eat the baklava. Even a little nibble would be too sweet. But this is not the first time I have left civilization and returned, you know. The hard part, I find, is how big and loud and scary the automobiles are. For the next couple weeks, you will be astounded that people just drive these giant blocks of metal around at terrifying speeds. You will see one from the corner of your eye and you will jump. And that will last maybe a couple weeks.”
“Oh, I can’t wait. On that last day maybe we sit up here and wait for the ship to appear on the horizon. Just you and me. We can make plans to visit each other and everything. I can’t wait for the cars to scare me.”
Maahjabeen nods, drawing Flavia close. “Pradeep too.”
“Oh, certainly. Your handsome boyfriend is always welcome. So what will you do when you get back? Will you still see each other?”
Maahjabeen laughs at the question, helpless. “We are obsessed with each other. I think we must. I don’t know how either of us will get any work done when we get home.”
“Home is where? I thought you didn’t have one?”
“Well, he’s been working with Amy and Jay in California. I have never been to America but if he is there then maybe it is time to try. He says their university is next to the ocean and that should be good enough for me.”
Flavia shakes her head, unconvinced. “I am not sure America is right for you, Maahjabeen. You are too pure. That is a place for… for hustlers. For salesmen and lawyers. I think you have avoided it all these years for a reason. Maybe you can find a better place for both of you. Does Pradeep ever want to go back to India?”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “He never says so. He thinks of visiting his family of course, but he has gotten more excited talking about going to Tanzania. He says he has a friend in Dar es Salaam we could stay with. He could work at the university and the Indian Ocean is right there for me.”
“Well there you go. Zanzibar for you.”
“Yes, but he has another eighteen months in this doctorate program first. So I am thinking just a bit of California. He says there are wide open places there. It is not all cities and highways. If I can find those open places, especially on the water, I will be fine.”
“Oh, yes. The states are huge. California itself is like the size of Algeria. It is good advice. Just stay out of the cities.”
“And what lessons will you bring back home?” Maahjabeen studies Flavia’s open face. “What have you learned here?”
“To never come back. Now let’s go. I will make you a breakfast of instant oats and dried berries that will knock your socks off.”
But still Maahjabeen doesn’t move. She looks at the horizon instead, but her smile fades into worry. “Wait. We have a problem. We can’t… Oh, no.”
“We can’t what? What is it?”
“Think about it. The ship will arrive on the morning of 19th May. We will hide up here, watching. Maybe Esquibel will have to be with us to make sure it is the Americans and not the Russians.”
“Oh. Right. Yes, that is a good plan. And if it is the Russians we can just wait up here until they leave. Smart thinking.”
“No, but that isn’t the problem Flavia. I mean, that is certainly one problem, but what happens when the Americans arrive?”
“We… go home?”
“Do we? Who is in charge of this mission?”
“Alonso. I mean, Esquibel, if you want to be more…”
“No no no. It is that Colonel Baitgie. The one who is working for the Chinese. In the end, this is his mission. What if he is the one on that ship when it arrives? Will he even let us back aboard?”
“Ehh, he should. I don’t know what his game is.” Flavia frowns at the implausibility of Maahjabeen’s scenario. “But he is engaging in espionage. He is not like some action hero standing on the deck with a big gun. He will be more secretive than that, won’t he?”
The two women stare at each other, their minds racing. “I think,” Maahjabeen finally says, “that we might be the only ones who have thought of this so far and we might need to share our thoughts with Alonso.”
“And Esquibel.”
“Yes. At once.” Now Maahjabeen follows Flavia from the cliff through the tall grasses wet with morning dew to the climb down and the village below.
She is hardly aware of the descent as she does it. Her mind is too full of concerns. Maahjabeen spots Esquibel at the mouth of the cave from far above and drops down to her, running down the last of the steep slope with abbreviated steps. Flavia is right behind her.
“Doctor Daine.” Maahjabeen strides through the village, its occupants busy on all sides. She only has eyes for Esquibel though. Flavia is right with her. “We have been thinking about our last day. And we have a problem.”
“Our last day?” Esquibel had worked to narrow the cave mouth with bundles of firewood and unused planks of redwood bark last night. Now she steps out of her fortification, sipping a mug. “What do you mean?”
“You have to talk to that Chinese fellow before they come.” Flavia has advanced several tactical steps in her mind and realizes she has gone too far to make sense. “I mean, listen, what if Colonel Baitgie is aboard that ship when it arrives?”
“Colonel Baitgie?” Esquibel makes a face. “I doubt it. For one thing he’s Air Force. He’d just get the Navy to do it for him. That’s how we all came out here. The smallest taskforce possible.”
“But what if he has heard that you have not handed off the…”
“Ohh… Yes.” Esquibel nods, weary. “The blasted USB stick that has ruined my life. I have been thinking about this. How to save my military career.”
“Your military career?” Maahjabeen exclaims. “How about the lives and security of all the people on this island?”
Esquibel is surprised to hear Maahjabeen be such an alarmist. “I can’t imagine that Baitgie would jeopardize his position with such a bold move. He must be worth quite a lot to the Chinese. They will keep him hidden in the background. Do not worry.”
“Well, then, what if he has helpers? All we are saying is that if the Chinese have told him that they never received the data they were promised, why would he let us off the island until we have satisfied their demands?” Maahjabeen’s hands flutter with worry. “Maybe he gives the Navy a false order, that we are supposed to be left here, or maybe that we should be taken into custody. Maybe the whole Chinese thing is a lie, just an elaborate plan to frame you, Doctor. If you did give them the data then he can blackmail you for the rest of your…”
“You think I haven’t worried about that?” Esquibel hisses, making the closest villagers flinch in reaction. “That is what I am spending all my sleepless nights here doing, trying to decide what I will tell him. I have to play stupid. I have to present my side of the situation as being hapless and unhelpful. If I am incompetent then that is better than being in opposition to him, no? Oh, I had no idea there were show tunes on that USB stick. I downloaded all the Plexity data. I have it right here for you. I must have mixed the sticks up.” Esquibel shrugs. “See? To protect the rest of you, he cannot know that you all know. So we must all agree. You must all be very trustworthy and discreet and asking that of people like Jay and Katrina is…” Esquibel presses her head from both sides as if she is keeping it from exploding. “But I have no choice. I cannot expose any of you to this danger. It is mine alone.”
“And what if the Russians arrive first?” Flavia asks. “We will watch from the cliff above but we don’t know what a Russian or American ship looks like. Will you join us up there?”
“Yes. Good plan.” Esquibel can see the wisdom in it. “And they won’t be able to see us, unless they are very lucky. And even if they did, there is no indication that they know how to access the inland from the beach.”
“They do, the Russians have their own way in,” Maahjabeen says. “That’s what that other bunker in the west is all about. And the leader of the Thunderbirds speaking Russian. Right?”
“Ah. Yes. True. But still. We can wait them out. If they arrive first, I am sure the Americans will chase them away and then we can depart in safety. We just need to be careful these last few days. It is getting very dangerous.”
Flavia shivers. “Ugh, I hate this so much. Who would ever put a poor research mathematician in such a place?”
Esquibel gives her a lopsided smile. “Well, a traitor would. I will play stupid as long as I need. But when I get back to the mainland, I will go to the CIA headquarters in Virginia myself this time.”
“Dear God, this is a scary game you are playing.” Maahjabeen resolves to include Esquibel’s well-being in her daily prayers. “I wish we could be more help. But we will do whatever you need of us so we can all put this place behind us when it’s over.”
“Thank you, Maahjabeen. Thank you, Flavia.”
The two of them hug Esquibel in turn and depart. She withdraws back into the cave, where she’s built her clean room in the small alcove where they rode out the storm and the flooding in here.
Esquibel’s mind is blank. Her pulse is quick and shallow. She stops and tries to take a deep breath but the adrenaline coursing through her veins won’t let her calm herself.
Once she is sure she is alone in here she removes the latest slip of rice paper from within her bra and reads it one last time. It had been against her skin when she’d awakened, just like the last one. The block letters spell out in tiny letters:
NO DATA. WRONG FILES. TONIGHT AGAIN.
Ξ
Pradeep leads Miriam and Jay up the slope he climbed the day before. But once the undergrowth clears on the steepening slopes he traverses off to the right at a tricky angle, using crusted knobs of dirt to save himself from sliding down on loose soil.
“Definitely…” Pradeep struggles, grasping at vines and only belatedly realizing they have thorns. Palms bloody, he slides down into the bracken once he releases his hold. “Ah. Definitely not an actual path this way. May not be a path at all…”
“Land of the lost, dude. Let’s go find some dinosaurs and shit.”
“How are you lads at bouldering?” Miriam has stopped to clean her sunglasses and survey the slope. They’re about to enter a canyon, the raw banded rock of the far cliffs obscured by trees. This is the geological wonderland she’s been seeking. And she can spot a rockfall ahead and far down that promises a path forward.
“There?” Jay points at the target. “Yeah, if you’re good with like a dirt glissade to get all the way down there. Ha. We could use shovels instead of ice axes.”
Miriam nods and takes off her pack. She removes three tools with foldable handles: a spade, a pick, and a hoe. “Grand. Which would you prefer?”
“Oh, you’re being serious?” Jay guffaws. “Right on. Uh…” He takes a closer look at the slope before them. “I don’t know, dude. My leave no trace principles are really screaming about this one. We could start like an actual landslide and we don’t know enough about what lies below, know what I’m saying? We might really wreck some shit, totally unaware.”
“Yes, and then what? How will we get back up?” Pradeep makes a face, his anxiety pricking at him for one of the first times ever in the deep wilderness. He points at the slide. “That’s a one-way road, that is, and I’d prefer not to trap ourselves on this hike. I think if we just get a bit further here along my route there may be a more solid path down. Ah! Yes. We’ve got a better chance over here. But don’t put your tools away quite yet, Miriam. Things will still be very tricky. And I’ll, uh, take the hoe.”
She passes it forward and tries to peer over his shoulder. “What do you see?”
“Solid footing. A maze of rock and ceanothus.”
“Ooo! What kind of rock?” Miriam eagerly follows Pradeep with Jay at her heels. “Looking very ultramafic down here. This deposit might just be a type of intrusive troctolite, assuming these bits here are a calcic plagioclase.”
They weave their way down, forcing a path through the brittle clawing branches and broken sandstone steps, using their tools as makeshift handholds on the drops. The last twenty meters is a true face-to-the-wall descent, and Pradeep once again objects to obstacles that will only let them travel one way.
But they can see much more of the canyon now. It winds inland to the northwest, toward the heart of the island. A stream exits its narrow mouth, bordered by redwoods and willows. “Where does all that water go?” he wonders. “Sorry. Think I’ve gone about this all wrong. Thought I could find a middle path but… You’re both going to hate me but I’m pretty sure we should retrace our steps all the way back to pine camp and then come at this canyon from wherever this stream joins the main creek instead.”
“Uh, we could do that,” Jay frowns, “but how would we know we’d choose the right stream and make sure were going up the right canyon? Remember on our three day ordeal how spun we got trying to get back?”
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a proper surveyor,” Miriam sighs. “I haven’t worked on a site without ArcGIS data for ages. Aha! No, Pradeep. We don’t have to go quite so far. Look, from here we can drop and switchback down to the stream with a bit of luck.” She pushes aside a flowering bush and reveals a narrow gully dropping down at their feet.
“Ah, you’re right. Thank god.” Pradeep sighs, the hours-long detour avoided. “I am so glad you agreed to come along, Miriam.”
“Me too, love. You’ve gotten me quite excited. I think we finally might see the geological heart of this island after all.”
After another dozen minutes of fighting their way downslope, Pradeep leads them through the last of the vegetation, forcing his way through a stand of dogwood. “Ah! Eek.” He pulls up at the edge of the water, balancing on clods of dirt that slowly crumble beneath his feet. Trapped after all, with no way back up. With a muttered curse he drops into the stream from the overhanging bank onto a sandbar submerged nearly a meter. He yelps as his legs are swallowed by the cold water. Then he wades toward the shallows as Miriam and Jay drop in beside him. Pradeep frowns at the fern-clad overhang off which they jumped. “Hard to get back that way. We’ll have to find another way downstream.”
“Blimey, look!” Miriam gazes into the canyon, which is lit by a rare slanting ray of golden sun. The trees glow green, beckoning. The cliff face beyond is striated with quartz and silicates, yellow and brown. “Mercy me. I’ve never wanted to work a site so much. Come on, lads. Now it’s just a bit of wading.”
“Lead on, Doc.” Jay moves to a collection of deadfall at the edge of the stream and pulls a crooked staff-length limb free. He snaps off the secondary branches and hands it to Miriam. “Just watch your footing.”
Entering the canyon is like stepping inside a cathedral. Miriam’s Catholic upbringing would have her genuflect and cross herself. The towering shafts of the ancient trees and the precipitous cliffs place her deep in the bedrock without being underground.
The canyon’s neck is narrow, leading them through high granite and sandstone bulwarks on either side that force the water through in a rushing flow. They can’t be climbed. But Pradeep finds stones that can be used as stairs, right in the middle of the stream. Finally it opens into a wider passage, the floor of the canyon as broad as twenty meters in places. Here they find more sandbanks in curving oxbows, including one above the waterline. Finally they can rest. Taking off their packs, they drink and eat as Jay rolls a joint.
“Ah. Look. This is quite a nice spot.” Pradeep pushes aside some broadleaf vine maple and white alder to reveal a higher washout behind them that is now level and clear with a floor of sand.
“Yeah, if you don’t mind flash floods,” Jay says.
“I can’t imagine the kind of storm that would lead to a flood at this upper level. See? It hasn’t reached this high at all this year, even after the storms we’ve seen. And the rainy season will taper soon as summer begins. This is better than pine camp, I’d say.”
“It’d be brilliant to stay here the last few days.” Miriam picks up a river rock at her feet, gray sandstone with black inclusions. “I could finally get so much done. But not all of us would agree, I’m sure. I can’t see Alonso hiking even a single percent of that route.”
Jay passes the joint to Miriam. “Ah, but what if we could get him to follow the stream from the beginning? At least, that’s the hope. We could even float him most of the way.”
“Well if we’re floating then I bet I could get Maahjabeen to do it.” Pradeep laughs, then looks to the top of the opposite cliff. “Look. It’s right up there. That one unmistakable big rock way at the top. Uh, what’s the proper term, Miriam? That big rock there.”
“You mean that truncated spur with the tower of red granite?”
“Yes. The top of that short tower is where Xaanach led me. Cut my hand.” He holds up his bandaged finger. “What is that, like two hundred meters? Three hundred? Straight up.”
Miriam laughs at the guess. “I think we’ve already established that we’re quite shit at estimating cliff heights. But what a beauty! This whole cliff. Look at all the lovely stratigraphy! Pradeep, you’ve done it. You’ve finally found the heart of this place.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Pradeep studies the canyon even further upstream. “I mean, now that I’ve paddled all the way around the whole bloody island, it’s at least six or seven kilometers in length, maybe more. And right now we aren’t even a kilometer north of the southern coast, are we? We’re barely in the interior here. No, there’s a lot more in there that we will never see.”
Jay shakes his head, jealous, peering upstream into the shadowy green density. “Man, that’s where Amy is. Somewhere way back in this maze. Dreaming the green dream.”
“Yes, I envy her too.” Pradeep thinks of how deeply she must have sunk into this extraordinary web of life. The secrets she must be learning of this island will remain forever beyond him.
“You… envy her?” Miriam shakes her head in distaste. “You know, she’s been gone nearly five days. Two big storms. We don’t even know if she’s eaten or slept that whole time.”
Pradeep shrugs. “Well, at least we know that nobody is holding her hostage. She could come and go at any time. Morska Vidra didn’t say she seemed unwell.”
“I just hope,” Jay adds quietly, “she comes back soon. Getting mad worried for her. And I just—just really miss her. She’s like my mom and my best friend and my boss all rolled into one.”
“Aw, Amy would love hearing that.” Miriam watches Jay climb the deadfall upstream. “Careful, now. That’s probably never held a human weight.”
“Yeah, tons of wreckage here…” Jay scrambles along the logs lying crosswise at angles. They were deposited so long ago they have grown moss and ferns from their blackened trunks.
“Keep climbing, Jay. I saw a pond or lake from above—”
Jay sways over a sudden pit. “Whoa! Okay. When you follow, do not under any circumstances go this way. There’s like a net of vines over a full drop into rushing water. Like ten meters down. You fall in there you ain’t never coming back.”
Pradeep and Miriam pause in their own climbs until he can find a better path upward. He finally does so, peeking over the ledge. “Yeaaah boi! Here’s your lake up here, Prad! Oh, it’s so awesome! Come check it out!” And he scrambles up out of view.
Pradeep laughs, pleased that all this effort is paying off, and heaves himself up the remaining logs to behold the dammed canyon above. The water is a dark shining band, like a fat snake winding its way through the cliffs. But it has pockets of sandbars and narrow shorelines where willows and bay trees drink.
Brown pelicans and seagulls float on its surface. A trio of Canada Geese browse the edges. “Look at that, Jay! The geese are the only Anatidae here. Even here. No freshwater ducks or swans.”
“Trippy. Weird to see a wild lake without ducks. Didn’t Amy say she’d spotted some buffleheads in the lagoon?”
“Well that would be the only ones then. Both they and the geese are migratory so that’s how they must have got here. How we get here is another matter entirely…” With tentative steps, Pradeep makes his way off the dam of fallen logs to a narrow band of muddy shore on his left, the striated cliff at his back. From here he is able to survey the lake more clearly. Around the bend upstream it seems to balloon in size. That would be fantastic. The waters might even branch into untrammeled side canyons and unique ecosystems. But he won’t be able to see any of that from here. Without one of Maahjabeen’s boats he may never get to see the upper lake around the bend at all. He sighs, gathering his resolve, and kicks off his shoes.
“What are you doing, Pradeep?” Miriam gains the muddy ledge on which he stands. She asks absently, her attention absorbed by the staggering wealth of minerals on display before her.
He peels off his clothes and stands wearing only his boxer briefs, his lean brown body all skeletal right angles. Pradeep takes a hesitant step into the water. “Eh… Just going for a quick swim.”
Ξ
“Is there anyone…?” For the first time in hours Alonso looks up from his laptop screen. His mouth is dry as paper. “Ach. Where is Amy with her tea?”
He looks helplessly around. None of his team are nearby. Well, Katrina is interviewing that old woman across the village square but he would have to bellow to be heard. And it is just a cup of tea. Or a bottle of water. Anything would be fine…
A trio of children are playing nearby with a fragment of woven reeds, tugging on the frayed corners and interrupting each other with competing rhymes. One sees Alonso watching them and calls out to him, incorporating the bloated pale giant into his chant. The others turn and watch him too. He smiles and they laugh at him, a cruel sound to his ears. His smile fades with a sigh.
“No, if anyone is getting water it is me.” Alonso stirs, lifting his legs, which always scream with disuse. The sign of healing that he notices, though, is how fast the pain fades now. He draws his knees up halfway to his chest. Yes, he is getting more range of motion back. Do more with less pain. That’s his motto going forward.
“Ai, Alonso, what are you doing to yourself?” Flavia appears from the cave mouth with Maahjabeen. “Sit. Sit. What do you need? I will get it for you.”
“Ah.” Alonso falls back, the struggle just started and easily abandoned. “Flavia, you are a superhero. Yes, water, por favor. And lots of it.”
“Of course.” She ducks back into the cave and returns bearing a wide-mouth bottle and a mug. “Alonso went and got himself lost in the data, didn’t he?” She leans down and hands him the mug with a smile and a caress of his grizzled jaw.
He drinks greedily, emptying the mug, then hands it back to her for a refill. “Perfect. Thank you. No, not lost. Far from lost. Just forgot about my bodily functions all morning. Now it is after noon and I don’t know where the time went.”
“We bring you,” Maahjabeen holds up a pair of Dyson readers, “samples from the sea cave. Every corner of it.”
“You are also a superhero, Maahjabeen. Thank you so much. Do we have a terminal for them set up? Ah, yes. Here. At my feet. That dock is plugged in. Someone must have done it for me.”
Maahjabeen regards Alonso, sitting like a fat spider in his techie web, cables leading to metal cases and solar panels and the duffel bags of like five people stacked in there unzipped. There is no trace left of Morska Vidra’s home, only this untidy mess of modernity sitting in its place.
But Alonso doesn’t think of any of this. He is working like a man possessed. He hunches over the keyboard again, fingers flying. The struts and beams of this new architecture he is building are starting to become clear in his mind. It exists nowhere but in an abstract dataset of computational biology, and if he can pull it off with minimal errors, he may be able to dispense of nearly half of the executive process error margins. Its completion will resolve many of the remaining limitations of Plexity. They might just escape this island with a working prototype after all.
Flavia takes a long drink herself and wipes her hands on her jeans. But the jeans are so filthy her hands get no cleaner. She will have to go down to the creek or something and take a bath. Maybe she can get a few of the others to join her… such as her colleague who has just arrived. “Eh, Doctor Triquet. How are you?”
Triquet hurries across the village square, preoccupied with what they study on their phone. “Hmm? Oh, hi doll. Doing peachy. Just got a final clue here, perhaps. An entry in Ingles’ diary. Popping back down to the sub. How is it down there?”
“Very dirty. So I was hoping you would like to join me for a bath at the creek soon.”
“Sorry, Flavia. Got to go get myself dirty first.” Triquet winks at her, saucy, then continues toward the mouth of the cave.
“Wait. What is this final clue?” Flavia calls out.
Triquet scrolls back through the image to read it from their screen. “Dated December 12th, 1959. ‘Finally put a stop to all this nonsense once and for all.’ That’s all. But you know, at first when I read it, I just thought he was complaining about some trivial thing but now that I am more familiar with the Colonel’s understated way, I can tell this was a huge deal to him and he was recording his only response to the whole drama. All the dates line up.”
“The whole drama? So 12 December is the day he killed the Dowerd lady?”
“Give me two hours in my stacks downstairs and I’ll let you know. So close!” With a wave, Triquet disappears into the cave. Flavia turns back to view the village. Their voices had been loud enough to carry across it. The old woman with Katrina is staring at Flavia, mouth open, eyes wet with distress. She mouths the word Dowerd and wrings her hands.
“Oh, what have I done this time?” Flavia waves weakly at the pair of them and turns away, catching up with Maahjabeen, who is finishing her own mug of water. “Eek. Get me out of here. You will take a bath with me, yes, my dear sister? Get all this mud off us.”
Maahjabeen nods. “Modestly, yes.”
Ξ
Xaanach laughs at Mandy and pushes her out of the grass back into the treeline. She lectures her, pointing at the grass with her chin and the tip of her thumb.
“Uh… Okay…” Mandy smiles weakly, looking for help from Katrina and Esquibel, but they are flushed with their exertions and preoccupied with catching their breaths. Jidadaa and Xaanach set a wicked pace. And it’s not like this is a trail or anything. Mandy’s poor legs are already bruised and scratched from barreling through dense stands of buckthorn. The two Lisicans slipped through the brush, hardly making a sound. But the three women tromping behind left a passage through the bush as wide as a sidewalk.
Katrina had asked them, when the Lisicans waited once for them to catch up, how they managed to move so freely in the thickets. This led to a long conversation between Jidadaa and Xaanach. Finally, the little girl pulled a branch of the buckthorn off and waved it, its thorny leaves the shape of her hand. She offered it to Mandy, lecturing, pointing at the structure of the plant.
“Xaanach say,” Jidadaa translated, “step to heart of daakakʼáts… eh, this bush? Yes. Every bush have door. Find door in, walk to center, then out. Leaves face out. Thorns face out. Always step from in to out. Yes?”
“What? What the bloody hell does—”
“Language…” Katrina reproved Esquibel like a schoolmarm before the doctor could explode.
“Whoa. Okay.” Mandy hadn’t even felt stupid for not getting what Xaanach meant. It was inexplicable. She just tried to think of ways to keep the conversation going. “So, like, that big stand of bushes there. Could you walk through it? I don’t see any door.”
Jidadaa stepped slantwise toward the buckthorn, pointing up and in from her left knee. “Here. You see? Every bush have door. If you a polite guest it show you.” She crouched, stepped forward and down to the left, then moved through the brush with only the slightest of rustling crackles.
“Huh.” Mandy frowned, not really getting it. She watched Xaanach move off once again, effortless through the buckthorn. She and Katrina practiced for the next hundred meters or more, while Esquibel still stomped loudly behind, complaining of the thorns and the impracticality of this entire endeavor.
Then they reached this grand meadow, its long stalks yellowing and waving in the breeze. Mandy had sighed in both frustration and relief. She had just been starting to get what the Lisican girls had meant about the doors in the bushes. But she is also happy to have their choked path lead to an open field.
When she tried to follow in Xaanach’s footsteps into the meadow the girl had stopped her and pushed her off the grass, lecturing her about something, some monster lurking in here?
Now Jidadaa arrives from her own hidden route up a narrow draw to their right. She laughs at Mandy’s uncomprehending look. “Pigs in grass. No walk in line. They knock you over. Walk here.” And she leads each woman to a place in a staggered formation, about three meters apart, facing the meadow. “Now we walk.”
“Just how far away is this supposed emergency anyway?” Esquibel asks. At least this new tactic makes sense to her. Boars are a real thing, not mystical doors in bushes. “If we need to move a patient back to the clean room, I don’t see how we can do it.”
They wade into the grass, dividing the waves of green and gold that reach in places above their heads. Now Mandy can tell why they didn’t place them even further apart. If they moved into a wider formation at all they’d lose sight of each other.
They smell it before they see anyone, the unmistakable odor of cigarette tobacco on the wind. Then the acrid edge of something rank and unwholesome.
Mandy steps out into a small clearing in the grass, a hidden nest open to the sky. Katrina is to her left and Esquibel is to her right, with Xaanach and Jidadaa watching for their reactions from the other side of Esquibel. Mandy takes in the scene:
Garbage everywhere in small disordered mounds. Flies buzzing. A stained camouflage tarp has been tied down at a drunken angle on scavenged branches. A pair of boots pokes out the nearest end, where the tarp is tied low to the ground. The smoke emerges from within. The boots twitch.
Mandy doesn’t like the look of this at all. She backs away from it, into the safety of the grasses, crouching like a spooked cat. Beside her, Katrina goes still, her mind racing at this unexpected assault on her senses. Esquibel recognizes military-issue boots when she sees them. With a silent grimace she shoves her medical kits off her hip so she can access the satchel that holds her sidearm. But before she can draw it the grasses part on the far side of the clearing and a Thunderbird elder emerges. He calls out to Jidadaa in challenge.
She responds, making a firm point. They fall into a long dispute, with Xaanach crying out seemingly unhelpful bits as punctuation. Jidadaa refers to the three women again and again, specifically Esquibel. Finally, the elder drops his head and relents.
“He will let you see him now.” Jidadaa leads Esquibel across the clearing. She still holds her hand in her satchel, eyes darting.
“How nice of him. See who?”
Esquibel crouches at the side of the tarp at a safe distance from its shadowed interior. She can’t see much in there, only the outline of what looks like a bundle of clothes. Then the clothes shift and she can make out his profile. He lifts the cigarette with shaking fingers and takes another long draught.
She can smell the necrosis from here. It is an awful tang in the air that reminds her of that one ward she once knew full of Ethiopian refugees. They had come to them seeking medical care after weeks on their own in the bush. So many of them could not be saved. This man smells just like the Dadaab refugees.
“Does he have friends?” Esquibel asks Jidadaa.
“No. Man alone. Very sick.”
Esquibel finally takes her hand from her satchel and pulls her medical kits back into place. She unzips her traveling pharmacy and takes out a syringe kit and ampoules of Amoxicillin. “I can tell. Where is he hurt? Does he speak English?”
The man’s head lolls to the side, finally acknowledging the activity happening outside his shelter. He whispers something broken, fragmented syllables ending again and again in ‘avos.
“Not English,” Katrina answers Esquibel. “Russian.” She calls out to the wounded man, peering into his shadows. “Ona vrach. Ona pomozhet tebe.”
The man whispers something else and Katrina has to cross the clearing and crouch down to hear it. “He says it is too late.”
“Yes, well,” Esquibel wrinkles her nose and edges closer. “He is probably right. Is he armed?”
“Don’t shoot her. Ne strelyay v neye.”
“U menya…” He coughs, an ugly wet sound, “net oruzhiya.”
“He has no weapon.”
Esquibel holds up the syringe. “Medicine. Antibiotics.”
The man waves the cigarette, coughing, mumbling his words. Katrina leans in, nodding.
Esquibel waits for him to finish. “What? What did he say?”
“Nothing. I mean, I couldn’t follow… He is raving.”
“Yes. He is very close to the end. Jidadaa. Where is his injury?”
Jidadaa asks the Thunderbird elder and he passes his hand under his left ribs and along his left leg.
Esquibel nods, pulling back and circling over to the far side of the tarp. She can access his left side more easily from here. “Mandy. I need a hand. Please, uh, put this towel down here. Keep it clean. Sir? I am going to give you a few shots, yes? Make you feel better?”
But her patient holds up his trembling hand in protest. He takes a deep breath and says something forceful.
Katrina translates. “Wait. He says he needs to tell you something important first.”
Chapter 54 – Where Did It Go?
January 6, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
54 – Where Did It Go?
“What a total disaster.” Mandy yanks on the rope, now tangled in the branches of a nearby madrone. Her weather balloon hangs from a high limb, deflated, its instrument suite swinging like a pendulum beneath, perhaps twenty meters or more above.
“Don’t pull.” Katrina grabs Mandy’s arm. “You’ll just make it worse. Uh. Maybe we can cut it out of there?”
“How?” Mandy drops the rope and tries to find a calm place in her center. But she can’t even feel her center. She only feels an electric irritation racing over her skin. Oh my fucking god. How many times does she have to look like an idiot in front of Katrina?
“Yeh, that’s the question, innit?” Katrina tries snapping the end of the rope to flip it over the branch above. But there is no chance. It is too little snap for so long on such a heavy rope. If someone could climb… even part way… “Jidadaa,” she calls out, catching sight of the girl before she departs camp upslope among the pines. “We need you.”
Jidadaa turns back. Her face is set, a decision having been made. But she returns to Katrina anyway, wordless but with an expectant look on her face. It is Mandy who points glumly upward.
After a moment’s consideration, Jidadaa grasps the trunk of the mature madrone, a meter wide, its rough russet bark only giving way in patches to orange hardwood beneath. With her bare feet and strong hands she scales the trunk, rising five meters before she grasps the first limb. Now she moves even more quickly, weaving through the tapering branches until she reaches the limb that bears the weather balloon and rope.
“Oh! Careful, sweetie!” Mandy cries out, appalled at the precarious position the Lisican girl has so quickly put herself in. The branch is no wider than Jidadaa’s leg and bounces every time she steps out onto it. They wait in dread to hear a crack.
But Jidadaa is too light. She hovers above in the canopy, one leg stretched out to a nearby fork for stability, while she picks at the twists and knots in the climbing rope. But she makes little progress.
“What’s wrong?” Katrina calls out after an impatient minute.
Jidadaa tilts her head down and makes helpless gestures with her hands. “I do not know this.”
“The knots? Just unravel them. You know, like with…” Mandy falls silent, realizing the examples of shoelaces and power cords she was about to use are probably outside Jidadaa’s knowledge. “Uhh… Do you like know about knots and rope at all?”
“Necklaces and nets. This one too hard.”
“Oh! That is Jidadaa up there!” Flavia appears, drawn by the shouting. She has finished packing and is eager to get back down underground where it’s safe. “What is she…?” Then Flavia sees the weather balloon. “No. That is too high. She cannot stay up there.”
“The knots are beyond her.” Katrina’s shoulders sag in despair. “She can’t get the balloon down.”
“Knots? Oh, I love knots!” Flavia perks up. “They are one of my favorite hobbies. No, I am not making a joke. It is true. The topology of knot theory is some of the most advanced maths there is. This is the practical type but still, I wonder what kind they are?”
“Wait!” Mandy brightens, reaching into her pocket for her phone. “I know! If you had pics of them could you figure it out?”
“Maybe…” Flavia shrugs. Whatever gets these ladies moving so they can retreat before the Ussiaxan arrive. “But we should hurry.”
“Mandy, you’re a genius.” Katrina kneels beside her. The smile Mandy responds with is far beyond the worth of the compliment. She primes her phone as a camera then wraps it in the end of the rope. They stand.
“Jidadaa! Pull it up!” Mandy tugs on the rope. “My phone’s in the end! We need pictures!”
By fits and starts the rope is drawn upward. Figuring out how to pull a rope by instinct is something not easily done twenty meters in the air. Then Jidadaa finally grabs the end and pushes the phone out between the gaps in the ball of the knot they tied.
“Take lots! From every angle!” Katrina drops her gaze to ask Flavia, “Or would video be better?”
“Like you could get her to figure out how to switch camera modes. No.” Flavia waves the question away. “Pictures are fine.”
After another excruciating moment of bouncing limbs but no sight of her, Jidadaa finally leans down and waves the phone at them. “Many pictures! Like Jay’s phone!”
“Yes! Exactly! Brilliant!” Katrina claps. “Now just stick it back in that rope end and lower it down to us!”
Jidadaa does so, shoving the phone edge-wise back into the balled knot.
“Slowly!” Mandy begs her.
But this is another thing that is difficult to reason through. Jidadaa drops the ball and the rope plummets to the ground, bouncing off a rhododendron and thudding into the dirt.
“You broke the screen!” Mandy wails after she extracts the phone. “Why did you do it like that? We told you to take it slow!”
Jidadaa watches from above, impassive. In response, she retreats from the crash site to more firm footing in the center of the canopy.
Flavia pulls the phone from Mandy’s hands. “Yes, yes. Let’s see. Ehh. Horrible photos. Ah. Here is one. Here is the problem. The big knot here and the satellite hitch beside it. See,” Flavia adopts a lecturer’s tone. “The linking integral is an invariant that describes how two closed curves link. That is the important part here. But usually maths theoreticians just think of abstract knots in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, but here the linking integrals are still key. See, I like to spend my time solving these riddles in actuality. Other people play sudoku. I untie knots. So there have recently been a number of papers published that blend abstract topology theories with actual mechanical forces and friction. Fascinating work, good for surgeons and industrial… Ah. Yes, first she must free the hitch here and then she will have slack to attack… ehh. No. Look. If she comes at it from the opposite way instead, this part here is a looped mass that only connects to the rest of the tangle at two points. And… Yes! Here. And here. How do I make marks on your phone?” Mandy helps her draw red circles around the two important points. Then they force her phone back into the rope’s ball knot. “Jidadaa. Attack it where I made the red circles!”
The rope ascends more smoothly this time. Within moments, the weather balloon crashes to earth. Mandy squeals in delight and races to it, gathering up the torn fabric and tangled rope to locate the instruments beneath.
Jidadaa descends as quickly as she climbed, dropping lightly back to the ground. Katrina claps for her.
“Yay! Jidadaa in the house! Thank you so much, love!”
Jidadaa, sheepish, accepts the compliment. But she is far more excited about something else. “Now lunch!” She holds out a bird nest she has stored in the folds of her ragged hoodie. It contains four dead spotted chicks, their necks snapped.
The others pull back from the macabre sight. “Oh! Uh… That’s fine. All yours, girlfriend!” Mandy squeaks, patting Jidadaa on the shoulder, then withdrawing when the girl goes still. “Oops. Right. No touching. Sorry.” Mandy sadly lifts the wreckage. “Well, another anemometer in the trash can. Great. That was my last one. I sure hope it got some data at least.”
Katrina gives Mandy a sideways hug. “Aw, poor Mandy dandy. I’m sure it did. Flavia. Let’s download it and perk her spirits up.”
“Now? But my machines are all packed.” Flavia waves at the camp, where her bags wait in a neat row. “We are in the middle of a retreat, remember? The bad guys, they are coming? To kill us?”
“You’re right.” Katrina helps Mandy gather the remains of the weather balloon. They all start walking back to camp. “But I still need a few minutes to get my things together. And so does Mandy. So if you don’t have anything else to do…”
“Ehh! Fine!” Flavia throws her hands into the air. “Anything to make Mandy happy, even if it means we get turned into slaves!”
“You don’t have to…” Mandy begins but Katrina shushes her.
“Thanks, Flavia,” Katrina answers instead. “You’re the best.”
Jidadaa strides away from them with purpose. Katrina calls out after her. “And where are you going so suddenly, little miss?”
Jidadaa turns back, her face troubled. “Today. It is a very important day. No time. No more time!”
“No time for who?” Katrina hates these cryptic warnings. How have they ever helped?
“For our prophet poem. Me and Kula.”
“Oh. You and your mom have your own? I guess everyone does. But… I mean, what’s today that’s so important?”
“For lidass to bow down and give blood to summer wind.”
“And if he doesn’t, your poem like, what, fades away?”
Jidadaa stares at the ground. “It go down one trail. We go down another. We see it through the trees, then no more. We forget. Right now the poem make promise to us. If it is broken, it pass like the wind.”
“I mean, maybe you can ask Jay for a bit of blood, I guess, but he hasn’t been very happy about…” Katrina trails off as Jidadaa stalks away through the camp and into the trees, ignoring her. “Aw crap is she going to be gone for like another three days again?”
Mandy gets serious about removing her belongings from her tent so she can break it down. As she shovels her clothing into a duffel bag, Flavia hurries up to her holding her laptop.
“Mandy, wait. Look. Look.” Flavia thrusts her laptop in front of Mandy, pointing at columns of data. “You did get something. See?You got what you were seeking, eh?”
Mandy’s shoulders slump. “Sorry. I don’t speak math. I only speak English, and not even that good. When will you people realize I’m like way less smart than—?”
“What is this instrument? The CSN-11957?” Flavia indicates the source of the data at the top of the column.
Mandy just shrugs. “I have no clue. What is that, like a serial number? I don’t…” But she moves over to Flavia’s platform, where the remains of the weather balloon’s instrument suite are plugged into another laptop with black USB cords. Lifting each of the units, Mandy finds identifying numbers on each of them. “Yeah. Here. The differential-absorption optical hygrometer.”
Now it is Flavia’s turn to be mystified. “And what is that?”
“Measures humidity by shining two lasers, one that refracts H2O and a control that doesn’t. So it got these like amazing readings? Great. What’s so amazing about them?”
Flavia shrugs. “It is three things. First, the volume of data is far more than from your other instruments. And second, the quality of that data is very good. Its sampling rate seems to mainly be limited by storage, not any performance constraints. So your laser is very busy, giving us these values five times every second. And, three, what the values show is a tremendous dynamic shift in the weather here. That must be of some importance, no?”
“Yeah, it’s a change in humidity. Happens several times a day. Thanks, Flavia. That’s super cool. I’m glad it wasn’t like a total waste of your time…”
“Not at all, not at all,” Flavia answers absently, back at work on the data. “Glad to help. Now I just want to plug this new source into our database quickly here. And look. Remember your heat map? Now it has this extra refined layer of humidity, yes?”
“Yes…” Mandy breathes, leaning in. The island is nearly black with the density of its humidity. Air currents deform around it in every direction. She scrolls outward, seeing the humidity as a spike pinning the wheeling currents and storms of the entire Northeast Pacific. “Look at that, Flavia. It’s all the surface biomass on Lisica. Respiring like a champ. Just enough to make things stick. Oh my god. We really are in the center of the world. The saline shift. The water column. I can’t believe we didn’t know about this place! This will change every model NOAA uses for… everything! Knowing there’s this like pin in the pinwheel is…” Mandy shakes her head, helpless. “It’s all these trees. These giant trees. See, they attract the water in the air locally, but that starts a cascade effect that draws more and more water to them from further and further away until a forest of sufficient size can condense a rainstorm out of clear skies. Add some mountains to break the surface-level wind and this becomes like a major feature on the open ocean. This tiny dot of green. Oh my god.”
They look first at each other, then at the emerald treetops waving above. “It is like,” Flavia points at the sky, “a column of water rising like a volcano. It is invisible, but it never stops erupting. Not for a million years.”
“And it’s all feedback loopy. The more moisture the island calls the more rain falls and the more plants grow and it just goes and goes until, I don’t know, maybe there’s like a maximum, uh…”
“Carrying capacity for every square meter of the island? Yes, there must be. Finite resources, constrained on multiple levels. We could work on that next if you like. See what the upper limit of the island’s humidity generation is. It is too bad we lost the drone, because we do not have any close scans of the north half. But maybe we could extrapolate, based on what data we do have. Well. Enough. It is time we must go. Again. We will do this work when we are safely back in the sub. Now if you need any more help here, I will be happy to do whatever. Packing, cleaning up. But we need to go.”
Ξ
“Ugh. Where is Katrina? I can make no sense of this woman.” Esquibel stands at the edge of the village square in a mask and gloves haggling with the Mayor. “Look. We won’t even stay for lunch or put our things down. We will just pass right through. Down into the ground, yes? And you may want to join us. The Ussiaxan, yes? Very angry. Bloody furious. On their way.” She mimes holding an imagined spear above her head but the Mayor responds with equal fervor, indicating the village and the people, her hand on Esquibel’s arm, pulling her close.
“I tell you they are coming. We had a drone. Remember?” She points at the sky and makes a bzzzzhhhh sound, tracking it across the treetops. “Then the Ussiaxan shot it down. They scattered into the hills in fright. But Jidadaa tells us they will regroup and attack in the dark.”
The Mayor calls out to one of the youths. It is the non-binary villager, their hands busy packing a wet paste into woven baskets. But without a word of complaint they set their work aside and fetch something from the Mayor’s hut. It is a spear. The Mayor takes it from them, still lecturing Esquibel, and holds it above her own head. Her meaning is clear: We will stay and fight.
Esquibel blinks rapidly, shaking her head. “No, no, bad idea. Look. There is no defense here. Once the enemy got across the creek they’d just overwhelm you, wouldn’t they? Think this through. You can’t have more than, what, sixty people here? Fifty who can fight? They have four times that number if they come at you with everyone they’ve got. And they can just come at you across this entire line here. This broad slope. You can’t hold it. They would have every advantage. Triquet. Come here. Help me reason with her.”
But the Mayor doesn’t wait for Triquet’s arrival before spreading her legs into a stance that grips the earth, taking a deep breath, and intoning a long and formal chant. Her thumbtip points at spots across the island, near and far.
Esquibel drops her hands. “Oh, great. Now what is she doing?”
Triquet listens closely, finally starting to hear the individual words in the cascade of sound. “My guess is this is her prophet poem. You know, that thing everyone’s banging on about right now? And she believes it holds all the answers to our questions. She is giving you your answer, right here. Shame we can’t understand it. But I don’t like this. Seems they’re all headed for a big conflict, where all the prophet poems say opposite things about these days. They’re all getting really heated about it too.”
“So she is just…” Esquibel reaches for the words. “This is her briefing. Situational overview. Mission objectives. Available resources. But what happens when we get to the review? We need to be able to understand each other to work together, and I’m trying to tell her we can do that much better together in the caves. Bottleneck their assault. Small numbers can hold up far better against larger forces in… Wait. Now where is she going? Is she upset because I am ignoring her?”
“What do you think?”
“Well she is ignoring me too, so…”
Alonso catches up to Esquibel and Triquet, limping along behind them carrying a small backpack. “What is it? Something wrong?”
“It is that Mayor woman,” Esquibel says. “She won’t let us go into the caves. And I have told her that she is about to be invaded but she thinks…” Esquibel gives a helpless shrug, unable to describe what the Mayor thinks.
“There’s a ritual thing going on here,” Triquet interjects, their voice quiet. “Pretty sure. We’re getting deep in their cosmology now. We are like so so in the wrong place at the wrong time with these people. Who knows how peaceful their little transition would have gone if we’d never shown up and wrecked it all.”
“What did we wreck?” Alonso asks. “We have been very good. After we leave, there will be no trace of us.”
“Except for a burned out elevator shaft. That was us.” Flavia is compelled to keep the record straight, even though calling it out makes Mandy—who approaches arm in arm with Katrina—turn away in sudden grief.
“Well, yes, but that could have been anything.” Alonso gives them an eloquent shrug. “Lightning could have done that.”
“Katrina.” Esquibel raps out an order. “Go make sense to that Mayor person. We don’t need anything from them except passage through their village. See if you can make her see—”
“Make her? Ah, Christ,” Katrina groans, “What have you done this time, Lieutenant Commander?” She pushes past Esquibel with a smile on her face and a Bontiik for everyone she sees. Slowly Katrina makes her way across the village to the Mayor’s hut, where the older woman is in and out, packing a small pouch with stones and cords. A sling? Is she going bird-hunting? Now? “Bontiik?” Katrina offers, stepping close and chucking the chin of the Mayor. The woman looks tired today, her eyes even more deep-set and worried than usual. Katrina studies her, marveling at her features. She has a strong aquiline nose with a blunted tip that hangs above her pointed chin. Wide sad eyes. A broad forehead that somehow promises strength and wisdom. An expressive, downturned mouth. She likes her. Katrina smiles at the Mayor in admiration, like some daffy undergrad meeting her favorite folk singer at the coffee shop, and tries to communicate. “The Ussiaxan…”
The Mayor grunts and steps past her out into the village square, headed for the slope behind the huts and the line of trees to the west. Unspooling the cords as she goes, a leather patch is revealed that can hold the surprisingly small stones. She is going bird hunting. This isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing. Not at all. There’s a fucking war about to start, mate. We have to defend ourselves. Yet Katrina can’t say these things. She follows at a discreet distance instead.
The Mayor steps softly through the undergrowth, head cocked, sling hanging from her wrist. Her feet are noiseless on the dry pine needles. Her eyes flick from tree to tree above.
The canopies are alive with birds. If she’s hunting for food there’s plenty of fat targets flying all around her. But she must be after one particular kind of bird. Or maybe one bird. Maybe there’s like one bird out here who’s been keeping her up all night and she’s just had it. And his name is like Justin. Justin, you’ve had your day, boy. Now she’s coming to get you.
When it happens, it’s so fast Katrina doesn’t really grasp what she saw. Reconstructing it later, she figures the Mayor dropped a stone from her palm into the leather patch, swung it like not even more than a half-arc with a snap of her wrist, and was stepping to where the dark songbird lay twitching on the ground before its suddenly stilled song had left the air.
It has a black coat and blue edge feathers. That’s all Katrina can see of it before the Mayor stoops over her victim and disembowels it with a flake of obsidian hafted to a wooden handle like a pencil. She pours its innards and blood onto her hand and pokes through them with her miniature spear.
The Mayor turns to Katrina and glares at her, as if displeased to have been followed. But then she says something… something about the Ussiaxan…
“The Ussiaxan, they are not coming.” Katrina turns to find Jidadaa standing behind her, along with an old villager. Ah. That’s Morska Vidra and his fox. Katrina takes a long moment to ingest the meaning of these translated words.
“They aren’t…? You mean like according to the poor little bird entrails?” Katrina doesn’t think she can get her rational-minded colleagues to go along with that.
Jidadaa nods slowly, a gesture she’s seen the researchers make. “And me. I go there. I listen. They talk about fox. Not Keleptel village. Ussiaxan not come here. Fox has babies tomorrow. They listen to new poem. Now Daadaxáats is koox̱.”
It takes a moment for Katrina to translate this. “Daadaxáats is the sky shaman. Sherman. And koox̱ is slave. Yes, they have them as a slave. I saw. So the shaman is getting the villagers all riled up about the fox with their own prophet poem?”
“Shaman lead them. They all go back into the hills. To find her. Fox babies are all thing to a village. Ussiaxan live with none. Many years now. Why them so danger. No soul. No heart. No love.”
“Okay. So what you’re saying…” But now Jidadaa is telling the Mayor the same news in her own language, that they are safe, that the Keleptel village will not be invaded. “Yeh, your Honor,” Katrina agrees. “Turns out the entrails spoke the truth.”
The Mayor leads them back to the village, to find that Esquibel has moved into position at the cave mouth, while Alonso stands with the others where they were left, now engaged in animated arguments about what to do next. He sees those who approach and breaks off his dispute with Miriam, squeezing her arm. “Eh. It is the Mayor! Uh, Bontiik! Ma’am! I very much want to thank you for those leaf wraps and your herbal treatment! It has done wonders! And I was hoping I could perhaps get another, when you had a chance… Oh! Pardon.” Alonso steps back, realizing that the Mayor is trying to get around him and has something to announce. She calls out in a voice loud enough to carry to every corner of the village. Heads lift then drop, the villagers going back to their daily chores. They all seem content to let her news pass with silence. Then the Mayor returns to her hut and goes inside.
“What did she say?” Alonso asks Katrina.
“That there will be no attack. The Ussiaxan are hunting foxes.”
“Oh, praise be.” Miriam sighs and puts down the huge pack she carries, like ninety percent of their belongings. She hadn’t looked forward to wrestling it through the tunnel and now she won’t need to. “So can we stay here?”
“Did you hear that, Esquibel?” Alonso calls out across the village. “Peace has been restored. There will be no attack.”
“What?” Esquibel squawks, too far away. She steps from the cave mouth, unwilling to come out much farther. “Why?”
But instead of answering her, Jidadaa turns to Alonso. “And Morska Vidra. He saw your friend Amy.”
“He did?” Alonso and Miriam both turn, to the girl and the old man and then back to each other, overcome by the sudden relief of hearing word of Amy. “She is fine?” Alonso asks.
“She is with the fox. For birth.”
“Oh my days she’s a midwife,” Miriam laughs, releasing even more tension. Then she sighs. “This must be some kind of absolute dream come true for Amy. And she’s well? She’s safe?”
Jidadaa smiles. “The fox is still alive.”
Ξ
Pradeep walks under the eaves of the trees the Mayor just visited. The bird life here is so rich. They flit and soar and flutter, the air alive with their wings. In just a single glance he finds a Steller’s Jay, two nuthatches, and a family of robins, with two red-tail hawks soaring above and a clutch of quails rustling below. A riot of passerine life, loud and boisterous and mostly fearless. The jay lands close and brays at him, cocking an irate eye.
Pradeep bows. “Pardon my trespass. I am only here to look.”
He steps deeper into the trees, thinking of Amy. She is out here somewhere living like an animal, in the world of animals. If it had been anyone else, Pradeep would have been concerned. But back at Cal State Monterey her exploits were legendary. Who knows? This is maybe just another Tuesday to her.
But he misses Amy, so he consoles himself with the birds she loves. She taught him nearly everything he knows about West Coast populations and distributions. They only had a handful of mornings together in the hills above Prunedale, cataloguing the chickadees in the grasses. But she expanded his view out to the horizon and the sea birds that dwell there. The dunes and coastline are themselves an entire ecosystem, with pipers and pelicans and egrets seen nowhere else.
On Lisica, he’d just like to find an inland pond of some size. That’s the goal he’s set himself these last few days here. Alonso wants new data, from under-represented sites? Good. A nice pond or lake would be brilliant. So he’ll just stretch his legs to the top of this ridgeline and see if the neighboring valley has any bodies of water he can see from above.
As he ascends to a saddle between two impassable outcrops, a head disappears from view. It is one of the Thunderbird clan. So Jidadaa was right. They are still watching from a distance. What an odd name for them. How are they in any way the Thunderbird? They are the most secretive and mystical of all the tribes here. Why would they have such a bellicose name? Maybe Katrina knows…
No, he can see nothing of the next valley on the far side. The view is too obscured with thick forest. And there’s no clear way down from here that wouldn’t involve some bouldering and perhaps a bit of rappelling. So. Time to turn around.
He is surprised to find Xaanach trailing him, chewing on a stick. “Oh. Hello. Pleased to meet you.” Pradeep doesn’t recognize her. He’d been insensate when she led the others back to him before.
“Wetchie-ghuy.” She crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out, then smiles wolfishly at him.
“Ah. Yes. Indeed.” There is something uncanny about this child. She is tiny, and waif-thin. Also quite ratty in appearance, with her hair a tangle of detritus and her shift torn to rags. “Wetchie-ghuy is a bad man. Common enemy. Friends, yes?” Pradeep can’t seem to shake his stiff formality. He had never been good with kids. Even when he was a kid. Perhaps this little urchin has the same problem. “Pradeep.” He places a hand on his chest and bows.
“Xaanach.”
“Ah! Xaanach! I remember you now! Our little rescuer. Flavia loves you, you know. And you don’t live… with the others or… anywhere…?” He looks around, questioning each compass point. But she doesn’t seem to respond to any one direction.
So Pradeep points to the birds instead, naming them. “Let’s see. Black-capped chickadee. Goldfinch. Goldfinch. Steller’s Jay. You know what?” he asks her, heartened to see Xaanach pays close attention. “I haven’t seen any of the larger Corvidae since we got here. No crows or ravens or… Huh. These jays are the largest we’ve seen. No magpies. Do you have magpies here?”
The girl responds in a torrent of mish-mash. It sounds like child talk, not even Lisican. She presses her filthy palms together and twists them, then reaches out to grasp him by the wrist.
“Oh. Uh… Okay.” Pradeep allows himself to be led back down the slope, but at a northeastern angle away from the village below. Yet she almost immediately thinks better of it. She halts and says something abrupt, then pulls Pradeep around and releases his hand. She yanks at the tail of his shirt, trying to get under it. “Wow! Uh, what are you, uh…?”
She repeats one word until he understands it. Lisica. She wants to see if he still has a fox on his tailbone. “How do you know about that? Just who is this kid?” He looks around, as if he might see her parents waiting patiently at a distance. But of course Pradeep and Xaanach are alone. And evidently his Thunderbird bodyguard doesn’t consider her a threat. So…
Pradeep untucks his shirt and displays his lower back to her. She gets uncomfortably close and he smells her rankness. The poor thing has maybe never had a bath in her life. She prods his skin and picks at something like a scab. Then she steps away and grabs his wrist again. But he pulls away. “Let me—Hold on! Let me get my shirt back in first then I’ll go wherever you want. I promise.”
The instant his hand is free again she snares it and pulls him forward once more. She drops down the steepest pitch of the slope, heedless to the dirt sliding around their feet, then picks her way patiently along a spine of descending rock to the crown of a massive red granite outcrop overlooking the valley below.
“Whoa…!” They stop at the very edge, the void appearing suddenly beneath their feet and falling away a hundred meters to a jumble of fallen stone. Maybe more. Pradeep scrambles back and Xaanach giggles, joining him, still holding his wrist. “Could use a warning, if you’re going to take me over a cliff. Next time.”
He examines the view more closely. This is one of the most narrow valleys he has seen. Beyond the rockfall is a pretty glade of ancient bay trees and the glitter of water through the trees. Is that the lake he seeks? “So pretty. Such a nice little sightseeing tour…”
But now the girl only grows more serious. She begins chanting, in ragged imitation of the other prophet poems they have heard. Pradeep turns away from the view of the canyon to study her instead. This is hers? This little wilderness orphan even has a poem? Who taught her? What is her story? Oh, how he wishes he could understand her. Pradeep fumbles with his phone, to record her, but of course only gets the last few fragments before she stops. Then she grasps his hand again, this time in a ritual manner.
Pradeep puts his phone away and stands straight, attempting to give this girl the gravity she demands. Then she takes out a small flake of flint and slices open the tip of his ring finger. “Ow! Hey! I didn’t say you could…!”
But she waves his protests away and snares his hand again, chuckling to herself in a way no child does. She pulls on his finger, pressing it against the stone of the cliff top, as near to the edge as he will let her take him. “Stop! You’ll get it infected!” But she isn’t satisfied until a good fat smear of purple blood is pressed into the granite. Then she releases him.
“Absolutely mad, you are.” Pradeep backs away from the girl and her precipice, holding his finger up. Wilderness medical training says to bleed a small wound like this, use the blood to wash the dirt out. Flush it back up to the surface of the skin. So he is satisfied to see another bright bead roll down his finger. Good. The cut is clean. That rock had been sharp. It should heal fine.
Xaanach appears to be done with him. In fact, the smile she grants him is one of great relief, as if she just accomplished something she has long been attempting. Then she turns away, looking out over the valley, and emits a piercing scream in perfect imitation of the red-tail hawks soaring over the treetops.
Ξ
Several of the villagers are still awake in the dark, tending small fires before their huts. Their murmurs are punctuated by laughter. Where Morska Vidra’s house had been is now a makeshift camp for a handful of the crew. Alonso stretches out on a pile of mats and bags under the cloudy sky while Mandy and Katrina try to resume their treatment of his legs. Jidadaa sits nearby, watching.
Mandy marvels at the progress he has made. “Oh my god. The tissues are actually moving again. Feel that?” She moves her hands at contrasting angles across his left calf. Before, it had been a shockingly undifferentiated mass of scar tissue and swollen flesh, but now the individual muscles and tendons can be identified. “Even your scars look better. Like the ones on your feet. We got to get some of that magic herbal treatment for Esquibel’s hip. And for everything Jay’s gone through. How does it feel?”
“Still very painful to the touch like that,” Alonso answers tightly, his breath caught in his diaphragm. “Yes, it is much better, more than I could dare dream, but I’d also say that your adjustments were a critical part of that, Mandy, even though they hurt like the fucking devil. So you have my deepest gratitude. Are you going to now do more of the same?”
“Oh yeah, frankly we’re just getting started. You need months of these treatments. But better the pain now…”
Alonso lifts an interrupting hand. “Platitudes are unnecessary.” He lies back, frowning at the dark gray sky. “Do what you must.”
“Ooo look at the tough chap.” Katrina pokes him in the shoulder and Jidadaa laughs. “Trying desperately to remember the Stoic philosophers he read in college right now. Or is it the Buddhists?”
“What are you adding here, Katrina, exactly?” Alonso pushes her irritating pokes away. “Did you expect me to take your drugs? Here? With all that is happening?”
Katrina shrugs. “I mean, I did bring them…” She takes out a folded and sealed ziploc. “But I understand your concerns.”
Alonso waves the baggie away. “I cannot, as the head of this mission, with all these active security concerns. I must be better. No more nights of drunken stupor. No more drugs until I am relieved of command. Please do not try to convince me otherwise.”
Katrina shakes her head and sets the MDMA and LSD aside. “I will not. I never would. I mean, these tiny paper squares only make the pretty pictures if you’re open and ready and your surroundings are safe. And our surroundings…” She looks around herself, shaking her head in despair. “Nice to hear news of Amy, yeh?”
“My god, yes.” Alonso appreciates how carefully Katrina is handling him as he deals with the apprehension of yet more pain. Mandy’s hands have already started to pull apart things that do not want to be separated. He wants to focus instead on Katrina. “You know, I do find that our two sessions have had a very deep, very profound effect on me. I would not want you to think I do not appreciate them, even if I do not quite recall most of them, and what I do is very… Ah! Yes, that long one, Mandy, is the center of the whole left ankle problem. No, Katrina, what I do recall is very embarrassing. But the thing is, it actually isn’t. I mean, I remember weeping like a baby and saying all kinds of humiliating things. All my weakness on display. And yet, even with these memories, I am not embarrassed. I know I should be, or rather that I would have been in the past, but none of the crazy things I did before you mattered because I know I was surrounded by love. We all love each other. I hope Pavel your brother, when you see him, appreciates all the love you bring to his healing.”
“Aw, that’s so kind and thoughtful. Thank you so much.” Katrina smiles sincerely and cocks her head. “So can I ask you what your trips were like, I mean as much as you can tell me, and about how it changed? You know, for like my own research…”
But now Alonso is groaning as Mandy presses on his ankle’s scar tissue and flexes his foot, forcing the fibers to stretch and align. He starts panting, reaching out for Katrina’s hand to squeeze.
“Breathe.” Mandy spares a hand to press down on Alonso’s diaphragm. He is shocked to have his attention brought there and it makes him gasp, releasing so much of what he holds. He takes his first deep breath and Mandy stretches his foot even further.
“Oi.” Katrina is playfully merciless. “I’m talking here. Taking data. You know, for science? So if you could maybe stop thinking about yourself for a moment, you old queen, and answer?”
Alonso stutters a laugh through the pain. “Alright. Yes. Good idea. Get my mind off it with some pleasant—ah! recollections. Yes. Well, I will have to say that I did not enjoy either drug so much as when we finally combined them together that one night with the dancing. That was… I mean, that was space travel.”
“Yeh, that’s what we call it. Space tripping and candy flipping. The mind and the body altogether at once. The deep celebration.”
“Yes, that is very much how it feels. To allow yourself to love what you have, even the very ooooohhhhhh…” Mandy’s hands grind his words to a halt.
“Even the very…? Yes?” But Katrina will get nothing more from him for a long while. “Lots of forgiveness in these sessions. To other people and also yourself. I saw you forgive yourself for a lot of things on those nights.” Katrina takes her own deep breath and gently shifts her hand in his tightening grasp before he breaks it.
Alonso squeezes tears out from between his closed eyes. “Yes. Gracias. This is much of what I oohhhh… what I am saying. I have forgiven my legs for looking like this. The pain for making me feel so stupid and depressed. There had been… so much guilt.”
“Breathe!” Mandy presses on Alonso’s diaphragm again. “You tense up and it doesn’t work.”
But Alonso finds it nearly impossible to release and face the pain defenseless. It is just too much. And Mandy is relentless. He goes rigid, slamming the back of his head against the ground to take his attention away from Mandy, who is tearing his feet from his legs and taking whole minutes to do it.
“Hey, hey… Shh…” Katrina cradles Alonso’s head and his eyes snap open, flicking up and left, then off to the middle distance. “Okay, bit of neuro-linguistic programming here. According to my sources in the military what you’re doing is processing some of the trauma that’s connected to those exact injuries here. A little bit of flashback, maybe?”
Alonso nods, trying to let the shade of the cackling sadist pass through him and not catch on anything rough or jagged. He needs to be clear to survive this, to let the pain cleanse him instead of damage him. The acrid smell of his torturer, the chill in the air. These are the sensations he needs to forget before he can finally face the looming silhouette of the man over him. “There is still… one forgiveness…” he pants, “I am having trouble with, Katrina my dear…” Alonso gags on the memory. “I thought I was doing far better than this. But there are still demons hiding in my legs. Ah!”
The Mayor silently appears at the edge of their camp with a frown. She holds wads of black leaves and a jar of paste.
Alonso sees her. He sits up and reaches out to her as a savior. “Ah! Yes, please, Your Honor! Thank you so much for your help!”
But the Mayor doesn’t approach. She shares a disturbed look with them instead, distressed by this much pain.
“It isn’t me, mate,” Katrina mocks, “Mandy’s the one who did all the nasty stuff to him. I’m just here for the internal bits.”
“I never hurt him!” Mandy is indignant. “This is healing pain!” She reaches tentatively for the Mayor’s left arm and grasps it. Then after rotating it, Mandy says, “this one’s a bit tight here. See?” She traps the tendon and pulls gently on it. Then she massages it a bit and hands the Mayor her arm back.
The Mayor flexes her arm and studies Mandy. Then she drops to Alonso’s side and begins to cover his right leg with paste while Mandy continues her work on his left. They work in silence. Soon he is wrapped in dark leaves and dozing, his head in Katrina’s lap.
After all the others quietly depart, Katrina is alone with Alonso. “Now where…?” She pats around herself for the folded ziploc baggie, unwilling to shift and disturb him. “Uh oh. That’s bad. Where did it go?”
Chapter 53 – Before It Died
December 30, 2024
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.
Chapter 52 – A Human Body
December 23, 2024
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:
52 – A Human Body
Esquibel releases the climbing rope and lands on the far side of the creek. They’ve suspended it between two trees and she’s the first one across. Now she scans the treeline around her, looking for threats, as Mandy grabs the rope behind her.
“Wait, Skeebee! My hands aren’t as strong as yours!” She hangs straight-armed from the rope over the opposite bank, her toes dragging in the current.
“Hook your legs over too! Like a spider!” Esquibel mimics the technique. “Your heels!”
With a heave, Mandy swings her body up onto the line and gets a leg over. Then the other. She inches across, followed by Katrina. Esquibel helps them both to the ground.
“Jidadaa!” Esquibel’s voice rings out, filling the meadow. “Last chance! We can’t wait any longer!”
But the island girl remains missing. They haven’t seen her since they started packing. And she was supposed to guide them.
“Anyway, I know where we’re headed.” Katrina strikes out across the meadow, pushing against the green grasses that are just now starting to turn gold and brown. They reach her elbows, their flowers and stalks and fronds surrounding her in a vibrant rainbow. To the treeline she goes, where the Ussiaxan had marched away to, and where she had seen their trail from the drone.
It is less of a clear path on the ground when they reach it, more an absence of obstacles. Yet it is the only passable tunnel through the thickets and dense copses of young saplings. Every shade and hue of green is here, from the darkest fir to the most fluorescent leaf, and everything in between.
Following Katrina’s footsteps, Esquibel considers whether she should get her sidearm out yet. Worried about ambushes ever since they came up with this scheme, she had resolved to be always on guard from such a thing. But now that they face the immensity of the vegetation before them, she realizes how impossible it would be to anticipate any kind of ambush. She can hardly see a meter in front of her face.
Katrina halts, peering into the tangle. “Feels like the very heart of the island, eh? Like we just been nibbling round the fringes this whole time but these Ussiaxans live in an absolute ocean of greenery. Kind of claustrophobic, to be honest. And dark.”
“What did Jidadaa mean,” Esquibel asks, trying fruitlessly to see past Katrina, “when she knew the villagers would return by night? She confirmed it by saying they only move in shadow. Are they… nocturnal? I thought you said your encounters with them with all their spears and speeches in the meadow were during the day.”
“Yes, but in the instance that I saw,” Katrina says, picking her way forward through hanging vines and heavy fir limbs, “they were responding to an immediate security threat. So maybe they rousted themselves out of bed or something. Hard to say. But she was pretty sure they wouldn’t be back til sunset and we’ve definitely learned to trust her. Oh, here’s an open bit. Look at all the clover.”
They spill out into a long narrow defile filled with the clover’s pink blooms. A tiny rill splashes with water below hanging lilies. “It’s all so… charming.” Mandy trails her hands through the soft petals of the lilies. “Like this is what I imagine when people talk about magical forests. With elves and fairies and all that. There could be like a unicorn stepping out from behind that tree and I wouldnt even be surprised, you know?”
“Yes, I know all about your overactive imagination.” Esquibel peers past Katrina to the end of her view. “It looks like we must make a decision soon.”
“Ah. Right.” Katrina approaches the T instersection ahead. The trail is forced either left or right by the sudden rise of the forested slope before them. “This is that ridge that hides the Ussiaxan from the big meadow behind us. If I had to guess, going to the left is probably a bit shorter.”
“Then maybe it is the path they are watching.” Esquibel looks to the right. That way vanishes in a curving tunnel through the dense vegetation. It looks hardly better to the left, with the exception of a patch of light in the distance that implies an opening in the forest.
“Yeah, let’s swing around the long way and sneak up on anyone if they’re there.” Mandy takes a step to the right.
“I don’t know…” Katrina grimaces. “I think we have to trust Jidadaa here. She said it’s empty, but she also said there’s a time limit, eh? I’m worried we go off to the right and get lost just trying to get around this hill. Let’s go left and make it as quick as can be. I don’t want to even be on this side of the creek in like three hours.”
They both turn to Esquibel. Her thoughts are taken up on the delicate negotiations she plans to have with the Japanese operative. Who knows how long that might take. She will have to defer their time concerns to the objectives of her mission, at least within reason. In the end, it is the patch of light to the left that decides her. She needs to get out of these thickets before she loses her mind. “Left. And quickly.”
They hurry ahead, single-file, Esquibel now in the lead. Her hand remains inside her black satchel, around her pistol grip. The decision to keep it hidden is less about the natives and more about the way Mandy will look at her.
“How…?” Katrina asks idly behind her. “How did we get to a point where we’re willing to risk our lives for this shit?”
But Esquibel has no answer for this. Instead of such philosophical questions, her mind has cramped down into the necessities this mission dictates. In fact, such existential matters aren’t suitable here. “Let’s focus. We are here now. And the path is getting wider. I am on point, so I will be looking ahead. Katrina, I want your field of view here,” Esquibel extends her left arm, “to the left. And if you see anyone you tap me. Mandy. You look to the right. And every third step I want you looking behind. We will do this properly.”
The opening they enter is from an old rock slide that fell off the bluff above and collapsed a whole grove of trees. To judge by the height of the saplings coming up through the deadfall, it can’t have been much more than a dozen years or so. But the gray sky is visible here, and the bare bluff that emerges from the ridge above is crowned with dark red faces of stone.
“Wait.” Before Esquibel enters the clearing, she stops them in the last of the treeline. Pointing at the crown of the bluff, she whispers, “If I was to set a watch, it would be up there. Let’s wait and see if anyone gives their position away.”
They wait there for several silent minutes, peering at the dark edge of the crown’s silhouette. But nothing moves. Finally, with a decisive nod, Esquibel hurries them along the dusty path that can be found between the fallen logs. They clamber over firs as tall as themselves, trying to hurry. But it is a good ten minutes before they win free to the far side.
Gasping, Mandy hisses, “Well if there was someone up there we are definitely dead now. Dead dead dead.”
“Mandy, stop.” Esquibel considers leaving the other two here, where they can hide among the trees, and going on alone. But no. If they have learned anything at all about Lisica it is to never split up. “Stay close. We’re heading in toward city limits now I think.”
“Yeh.” Katrina nods, trying to square the view she had in the air with what she now sees on the ground. They’ve definitely skirted the ridge and are about to head in, aren’t they? “I just hope we can find their trail up that bluff. If we’re going to get the drone back we got to get up there somewhere on the return trip.”
“Close. And quiet now. This will be the most dangerous part.” Esquibel’s warning silences them. They hunch forward, Mandy hooking her fingers into Katrina’s waistband. “Remember to watch. And tap me. Don’t walk on leaves or branches unless you must. Step softly. Now let’s go.”
The three women hurry silently through this last stand of trees. Soon they can spy the first of the log houses through the trunks. They stop and listen but there is no sound. So far, it does seem that the settlement is abandoned. Then the complacent grunt of a pig breaks the silence. That’s right. They have livestock.
Esquibel reconsiders her plan to enter the village proper. These animals will make too much noise when they see the strangers. She pulls the other two down into a crouch and speaks as softly as she can. “Look. We do not need the town. We only need the treasure house. Look there first, at least. We can skirt all the rest to the left here, in a wide arc. Where would you say the treasure house is?”
For an answer, Katrina turns instead to the ridge, now behind them to the south. She tries to orient herself based on where the drone had been in relation to that landmark. She turns to the northeast and points. “There, I reckon. About half a klick out.”
Esquibel nods, heartened to hear this kind of precise data. It’s exactly what she needs. “Okay. Same as before. Quietly in this line here. You said there’s a stream?”
“Yeh. We’ll have to cross it somewhere.”
They follow a broad but shallow diagonal slope through brown pine needles. Their footfalls here are noiseless and they pass like ghosts. Mandy holds her breath, clutching her hands together. So many parts of her want to freak out or collapse or complain but she knows this is all too important. Adrenaline so far keeps her alert. She has always prided herself on being good in a crisis. It’s just that this crisis is eight weeks long…
Mandy releases her breath and looks at Esquibel’s long lean back, her slender arm that still reaches into that satchel. Yes, she knows what’s in there. She just hopes it doesn’t come to violence. Mandy hates violence. But she came because she has made her choice. She is with Esquibel, come what may. And if Skeebee is in danger, then Mandy will be too.
But they make it to the bank of the stream without seeing anyone or raising any alarm. Now how will they get across? Its width is only a third of the creek they belayed across, but it looks like they will certainly have to get wet for at least a few steps.
“Here.” Katrina lifts a couple fallen logs, about as thick as her leg and twice as long. She puts one down across the front of a shoal of stones in the stream, giving them an easier start. Then she edges to the end of that log, skips onto a close-by stone, and places the second log she cradles onto the next patch of open water. This time, the log rolls and floats back against a few rocks, but never stabilizes. “Aw, well. Wet feet it is.” Katrina shrugs and splashes the rest of the way across, the water cresting just above her knees.
The two others join her on the far bank, where they all remove their shoes and squeeze the water from their socks. Katrina nods along the bank. “We’re upstream of it here, fairly sure. There’s hills up that way.” She points to the north. “When Jidadaa said the Ussiaxan had taken to the hills I was pretty sure that’s where she meant, so we are not going that direction at all.”
“Agreed.” Esquibel puts her shoes back on and stands. “Come. We are making good time. But if you see the operative, I need you to stand back at a distance and allow me to have private words with him. He will not speak to me otherwise.”
“Sure.” Mandy squeezes Esquibel’s hand in encouragement.
But Katrina looks at her sideways. “Private words? What kind of game are you playing now, Doctor Daine?”
Esquibel grimaces. “No game. If you were contacting an agent in the field, what would you do if they showed up unannounced with two civilians? This will be very tricky. Please.”
Katrina only shakes her head in distaste. “Bloody spooks.”
From a distance, the cottage almost looks like a mirage. It is so out of place, after their weeks of bark huts and concrete bunkers, that Katrina feels like she must be tripping. It’s quite beautiful, with planed planks of the darkest wood and a steep pitched roof. A carved cross is in the lintel above the narrow doors. Is it a church?
Its clearing is a well-maintained lawn of clover and meadow grasses. They wait at the edge of the woods to check for signs of life but apart from the trilling of songbirds and the buzzing of insects they don’t hear a sound.
With a shrug, Katrina stands. “Get on with it, I reckon.”
Esquibel nods. “Do not put yourself in the doorway. Stay behind me. Let’s go.”
She approaches the dark entrance, the ancient panels of the two doors tilted ajar. Straps of hide act as hinges and the top ones have rotted through. Esquibel clears her throat. No sound within. “Hello?” Her voice is flat and low and vanishes without a trace.
Mouthing the word ‘wait’ to the others, she takes out her phone and turns on its light. She peers into the shadowed building.
It is dark, with a dirt floor and stripes of gray light across the floor and the assorted treasures collected here. And there are so many, piles upon piles of clothing and papers and stacks of furs. But not a single person within. Oh, heaven help her. Where is he?
Katrina slips past Esquibel through the door after she sees her sag in disappointment. Disappointment can’t be dangerous, can it? She enters and beholds the staggering array of treasures here. “Oh my word. Good thing we didn’t bring Triquet. We’d never get them to leave. Here. Uh. Video everything. Photos of all the documents we can…” Katrina turns, and then sees against the left-hand wall the written word she saw in that old photograph. Here, written in the Cyrillic: “Jidadaa.” And below it, positioned as a shrine just as in the old photo, reside a clutch of postwar American memorabilia. The tapestry Katrina had studied still hangs here, tattered and rotten. The ancient fishing spear and the battered reliquary box haven’t been moved in decades.
Katrina falls to her knees before the reliquary. It is a little dark wood box with bits of off-color enamel decorating it in an abstract pattern. Triquet could give her its entire provenance, she’s sure, but to her untrained eye it looks like maybe 18th century, central European. The Orthodox cross on a staff leaning beside the fishing spear moves her estimate east, though, as do the Slavic linguistic clues she’s been collecting.
With her fingertips she eases the lid open. It cracks and the wood slides sideways, stuck on a frozen hinge of wooden dowels. Katrina quivers in place, worried about damaging it further. But there’s nothing to be done about it now. She pushes the protesting lid up a centimeter or so before the wood cracks again.
Using a finger to fish within, her first touch crumbles a rolled paper. She pulls her finger out. It’s just too old. And she doesn’t know what she’s doing. “I can’t…”
“Someone’s coming.” Mandy covers her mouth with her hands and retreats to Esquibel.
All three of them scan the interior. There is nowhere to hide. The piles are too low, the architecture too simple. It’s nothing but corners and shadows.
Esquibel’s sidearm finally comes out. It is a standard-issue M18 pistol, battleship gray, steady in her grasp. She points it at the door.
Mandy turns away in dismay.
A shadow fills the light of the cracked door. An older, thickset man steps through. Upon seeing them, he freezes. All that move are his eyes, taking in the women, the weapon, the damaged reliquary at their feet.
Finally, he speaks. “Ni hao ma.”
He gestures with an open hand and Katrina recognizes him. “Fuck me. This is the bloke I saw from the air. You were in here, weren’t you, with that other lady? Having an argument. And now you’re speaking Chinese? Wild. Uh, ni hao.”
He nods imperceptibly, his eyes locked now on Esquibel’s pistol. With careful deliberation, he begins a speech. His Chinese vocabulary is very limited and his accent is poor. But it doesn’t matter since none of the three women speak the language.
With his hands up, the man slides sideways into the room, edging toward the shrine they stand before. He points at something on the wall behind them, and mimes draping a necklace around his neck. Now some of his words lapse into Lisican, as he tries to explain what he wants. He’s striking a deal. With his hands, he mimes pushing the reliquary toward them.
“We take this and you get whatever’s on the wall back there you want?” Katrina asks. “And none’s the wiser? In fact, they’ll think we’re the ones took whatever you got, so it’s yours forever, eh? Well I wasn’t going to actually nab this thing. It was more going to be a photo kind of shoot but… I mean, if we’re actually taking things, it sounds like a fair deal to me.” Katrina lifts the reliquary. Mandy enthusiastically nods. Esquibel doesn’t take her eyes off the man, the barrel of her pistol tracking him.
They withdraw to the far wall, giving him access to the shrine. With a hiss of pleasure he leans in and finds a nondescript necklace that had been looped over the staff of the cross, hanging there for ages. Its brittle thong holds a blackened oblong of a locket. With a huge smile he drapes it over his head and bows formally.
The three women bow in return. Careless of them now, he turns his back to them and walks happily out to the entrance. He slips out the doors and departs without any look back.
After a long moment, Katrina follows him to the doors. She peers out. There on the flower-speckled sward she spies four men. The man who just left approaches the other three. It is Sherman the shaman and two men holding them with halters around their neck.
Lifting the necklace he just stole, the man drapes it over Sherman’s head instead. Then he instructs the shaman severely, perhaps threatening their life, before leading the others away.
Ξ
“I feel like Agatha fucking Christie.” Triquet stands back and clasps their hands. They have organized stacks of documents and photos along a pair of tables into an interconnected network of the thirty-seven men and one woman who ever left any record of being on the island. There are a few main characters, like Colonel Ingles and Maureen Dowerd, the fraternizing Lieutenant DeVry, and a colorless figure only known as Corporal, then Staff Sergeant Boren, who signed all the requisition sheets for a decade.
Here they all are, the characters in the murder mystery. All the men who came through this isolated outpost for one reason or another. Of the portraits they’ve found, none of the soldiers look particularly sharp or ambitious. This must have been one of those punishment postings for soldiers they didn’t like, like when they send officers to command posts in the Aleutians. That must have caused resentment here, dark thoughts and actions. Add in a few Soviet encounters over the years and they had themselves a real spicy stew here. Suicide must have been a major factor. “And I don’t even want to think about the sexual assaults.”
But Maureen deserved better than that, didn’t she? She came here for love, if the words in her letters are to be believed. And then she found even greater love once she got here and her former lover the Colonel had them killed. Or he killed her himself. But for some reason he didn’t get her lover, nor the child…
A creak on the deck above interrupts their train of thought. They have been alone down here for a day and a half and both their ears and mind have been playing tricks. Nope. There’s another creak, further along. Someone is in here with Triquet, approaching the hatch leading belowdecks.
It turns out to be Pradeep and Maahjabeen. Triquet can hear their low musical voices and giggles as they approach. Good. They didn’t need any more heart-pumping moments of terror than they’ve already had.
Maahjabeen steps through the hatch, her smile radiant upon her weathered face. “Ah! Doctor Triquet! Still hard at work! Have you been here this whole time?”
“Yes, that’s me. Homebody extraordinaire. And how about you two? How is the sea cave?”
With a laugh they explain to Triquet how they spent the last thirty-six hours circumnavigating the entire island instead. The tale leaves Triquet with their mouth hanging open by the end.
“And…” Pradeep finishes, opening up his daypack and removing the cell phone he retrieved from the corpse of the Chinese soldier, “we brought you something back. A present.”
“Oooo, I love it! Where’d you find it?” Triquet gingerly lifts the outdated HTC smartphone, its screen cracked. “Fell off a fishing boat, did it?”
“No, Pradeep did not tell you about the corpse. It was with the old man. Right in his little hut with him.” Maahjabeen describes what it was like to encounter the rotting flesh of the Asian soldier and their decision to take his phone.
“All good, yes, very good.” Triquet inspects the phone’s ports. Micro-USB. “Look. We can charge this right back up. I’ve already got the cord and a spare battery with me.” It is only a matter of moments before a charging symbol is displayed on the phone’s screen. “So what do you think he was doing here?”
“Well, crashing his plane into the ocean for one.” Maahjabeen has maintained this since finding him. “He must be the pilot, yes?”
“But why here? And why now…? Ah!” Triquet coos happily as the screen fills with text. “Lucky us. No password. But unlucky us. It’s all in Mandarin. So you’re right. He was Chinese.”
Pradeep pulls on the phone. “What about the texts? That’s what I thought might help us first. What were his last texts?”
A long list of Chinese characters is all he can deduce. He opens one text thread, then another. But he has no ability to read any of it. Then in the next text thread he spies a word written in English: B-A-I-T-G-I-E. “Look. They wrote something here in our script. But it appears to be, just, random letters. Bait-something.”
“What are those characters around it?” Triquet uses their phone’s camera to take a picture of the Chinese phone screen. They zoom in on the character. “Got this universal OCR reader here… See if it can make sense of this letter… Or word… Says it means colonel. Colonel Baitgie.”
They all look at each other in shock. This is the name of the Air Force officer running their mission. They’re sure of it.
All three of them bend to the urgent task of translating the rest of that entire text thread.
Ξ
The twin spires of the redwood trunk extend upward like a gigantic wooden version of those old rabbit ears tv antennas. Amy takes a moment to gaze upward, rare these last few days, and admire the gargantuan redwood in which they shelter.
It has a single massive trunk, perhaps five meters in diameter, that only rises perhaps twelve meters from the ground before its bark swells and folds back on itself and gives rise to two trunks of equal size, each big enough to be a mature redwood giant in its own right. It is almost like a defiant fist raised against the sky, with a pair of oversized chopsticks stuck in the fingers.
Its canopy far above is a mass of dark green. She’d love to find a way to explore it some day. It might even be possible to build a platform way up high in a tree like this…
What she loves about this tree more than anything is that it is a testament to resilience. Even though it was hit by lightning or some long-past disease that nearly killed it, this redwood has come back stronger than ever, with nearly a hydra’s heads multiplicative response. “Just try killing a redwood. I dare you.”
Amy’s voice is a raspy whisper, her throat sore and tired from speaking to the vixen all day and night. She has never met a more needy animal. The pregnant fox makes more demands than a blind Chihuahua. And each one leads into the next, drawing Amy again and again into a deep web of obligations and tasks that can be as simple as stripping fern stalks into fibers for a new bed to puzzling out vulpine blood kinetics of some of the herbal remedies the vixen has instructed her to make and administer. She did what research she could on her phone, but only a handful of clues are stored in there in saved notes and digital field guides. It turns out foxes are hardy and brave. Immensely self-aware. At least this one is, to a point where animal intelligence is blurring lines with her own.
They are collaborators here, in this hollow beneath the tree. By all rights this vixen should already be dead. When Amy met her she was septicemic and miscarried one of her litter that first night. But with Amy’s help she was able to stabilize the struggling little mama and then, incredibly, she learned that the vixen knew where the medicines were that she needed herself.
It reminds Amy of her visit with the Karen tribes of Thailand. She got to live in one of their mountain villages for ten days once. Their elephants are sacred and instrumental members of the community, working not only as draft animals and guardians but also the doctors and nurses of the village. Mature elephants would diagnose ailing humans and animals, then go off into the jungle to find the necessary herbs. The elephant would eat the herb, and upon their return encourage the sick villagers to eat, or in some instances smoke, their droppings.
So Amy learned to patiently follow the waddling little fox from bush to tree, collecting samples. She first tried giving the herbs to the fox raw but she turned her head in rejection every time. So Amy tried poultices, which seemed ineffective through her thick silver fur. Finally she had started a fire and brewed the herbs, steeping them for nearly half an hour before cooling them and pouring them down the vixen’s throat.
She responded by the next morning. Her coat was more lustrous and her body seemed more at ease. But she still carried a litter far too large for her little body. Amy fears that what happened is that with too many kits in her womb, it ruptured when they grew too big. Now they are in a race to get the babies out before she has more internal bleeding and systemic infection.
The vixen waddled out of her nest for the first time in two days this morning, leading Amy to a low thicket of Juniperus communis and then to a flowering lily she doesn’t recognize at all. Amy took pieces of both plants, the stem and the petal and the needles of the juniper and bark. Then she returned to brew them, worried the entire time that the vixen had just chosen an abortifacient—which juniper is—to save her own life and terminate this pregnancy.
But that isn’t what the demanding creature needed. After a long mind-melting series of trials and errors Amy finally learned that she did want these new ingredients, but not until they were added to three of the others. Only when Amy had finally put it together in the proper order did her patient acquiesce and sip from the hollow trencher of bark until the broth was gone.
Now Amy is catching her breath, trying to recall what being a human is like after these deep days here with the little fox. Over the course of their non-verbal dialogue, Amy was somehow able to glean from context that the fox has no intention of losing her babies. This medicine will save them all. And she is so close now, the litter coming perhaps tomorrow or the next day. But there is an equal chance they all die first.
If Amy only had a real veterinary station here. She isn’t an actual fully practicing medical professional or anything but she did spend a long summer once sterilizing sea lions. That made her handy with a scalpel for sure. Here she doesn’t even have a sharp rock. Nor anything resembling clamps. With the amount of blood that might be lost here, clamps and sutures are probably the tools she misses the most. But there’s a sphagnum moss the vixen has shown her that not only absorbs an astounding amount of blood but seems to coagulate or perhaps even heal her internal wounds. It had been a delicate operation inserting bits of it up her birth canal, during the first of Amy’s sleepless nights.
Now the vixen bleats a demand at her again. It’s been an hour or more since her last dose and perhaps she needs another. Amy ducks back into the cozy little shelter she’s built against the hollow in the trunk. She lifts the bark trencher to offer another dose but the vixen isn’t asking for it. Her eyes are glassy again, always a bad sign, and her belly is once again distended, as if the kits aren’t lying right. The expectant mother rolls onto her side with a groan and reaches out a beseeching paw.
“Oh no! What is it, mama? I thought you were on the mend. What’s wrong?”
The little fox pants, her forepaws twitching. She is clearly in distress. Is this it? Is this the moment Amy has come to fear more than all others? She has poured her heart and soul into saving this beautiful little animal, and she isn’t ready to lose her and all her babies too. “No. No you don’t. No no…”
She strokes the vixen’s ear and in her agony the fox snares Amy’s ring finger in her molars and grinds down on it.
Amy hisses in pain, sharing it now with the vixen. The creature somehow retains the presence of mind not to break her skin, but it is still tooth against knuckle-bone in sharp agony.
The vixen finally releases Amy’s finger and rolls away. Amy clutches her poor injured hand and scrambles after. No. This splendid creature can’t die. There must be something she can do…
With a stuttering grunt the vixen bears down. Blood trickles from between her rear legs. Amy exclaims and uses the remainder of their moss to stanch the flow. She holds it in place as long as she can and after a nearly unendurable episode the vixen’s breath finally regularizes and she seems to pass into a calm sleep.
Amy removes the moss. A dozen milliliters or more of blood is in her hand. And also, to her complete shock, a pale wriggling fetus no larger than her pinky finger.
Amy exclaims. “Oh! Oh…! Come on now, sweet thing! Tiny one! You got this! Uh… Uh…” The fetal kit is blind, its eyes pink-lidded orbs, and it hardly moves. She folds it gently into her hands, hoping against hope that her own warmth is enough to… to what? She can’t keep this premature newborn alive. Her mother isn’t even lactating yet. There’s no nourishment or therapy Amy can provide the poor thing. If she was merciful she’d just suffocate it right now and end its short tragic life. But she can’t do that. Not when there’s a chance, however remote, that it can hang on.
“Poor mama.” Amy curls around the sleeping vixen. “Poor poor mama. Oh my god. Your uterus must be in such miserable shape. Just hold on, mama. Just hold on one more day…”
And for the first time in days, Amy sleeps.
Ξ
“Jay.”
“Miriam.”
“I was looking for you.”
“I was looking for you.”
“Oh? And what do you need, love?”
“Uh, we got a kind of situation. Underground. So you’re the first one we thought of. What do you need?”
“A spliff. Cracking headache here.”
“Got you, mamacita.” His fingers are so practiced that the joint appears from his pocket as if by magic.
“Bless.” Miriam takes his lighter and sparks up, inhaling deeply before passing the joint and rubbing the center of her forehead with her fingertips.
“Oh, here you go.” Jay hauls on her shoulder, turning her roughly around, and puts his big warm hands on the base of her neck. Then he starts kneading the muscles, parting them to get to the tendons beneath…
Miriam groans and her knees nearly buckle. She falls back against him instead.
Jay laughs. “Yeah, I know a thing or two about headaches. Let me just give you a quick little adjustment here. I can do more later. We’re on sort of a kind of time crunch here.”
“Who’s we?” Miriam’s eyes are closed, already spinning in the THC euphoria and tension release.
Instead of answering, Jay folds her arms up against her chest and lifts her off her feet, bouncing her up and down until she finally releases her spine and the vertebrae pop, five time up a musical scale. She sighs and three more release between her shoulder blades. Then he drops, stretching her out on the dry pine needles, and kneels at her head. He rolls her skull from side to side until she starts to breathe more deeply, releasing those fibers. Then he rolls his knuckles along the straps of tendon.
Beneath her closed lids she sees fireworks. Miriam groans again. Her next breath is deep and shuddering. She drops within herself like a free diver going down, down, deeper than she has in years. For an instant she touches a remembered dimension of herself that she hasn’t seen in years. Oh, what a trickster she had always been. When did that core identity disappear?
Too quickly it’s over and Jay is pulling her back to her feet. There is something thrilling in being manhandled so. Alonso never did. His strength is different. But this lad is like an amusement park ride. What fun.
She opens her eyes with something of the old mischief in them. Now that she recalls how feisty she used to be, she won’t forget it again for love nor money. Oh, this is what she had lost with her five years of grief. Her fey spirit, true to no reality but her own.
Jay sees the feline light in Miriam’s eye and it wipes the smile from his face. Uh oh. What has he done now? “Uh. Cash or credit. Tips accepted.”
Miriam cups Jay’s chin and gives him a deep liquid kiss. She steps back, appraising him. “Thanks, doll. You’ve got the strongest hands. Now, what was your underground mishap?”
“Ah. Right.” Jay’s head is spinning. That was a hell of a kiss. “Yeah. It’s this way. You need anything? We might be a minute. But we really should, uh, get going…”
Miriam rolls her head around. “Right. That really did help. Ah, I can think again. Let me just snare my kit then and we’re off. You keep saying we…”
“Yeah. Jidadaa. If it ain’t one thing with that chick it’s another.”
They pass through pine camp so she can retrieve her canvas sack filled with tools. Then they walk deeper into the grove upslope of the meadow.
Jay hands Miriam the joint. She’d forgotten completely about it. Once again, she’s gotten way more high than intended. But at least she hasn’t thought about her headache now for nearly five minutes. Strong medicine, this. She takes another tiny puff and passes it right back.
“So there are more of these goddamn military tunnels under this island than anyone knew. I mean, seriously. Here. Up on this outcrop. Check it out.”
“Limestone.” Miriam approaches it, the rough crags of the pale reddish stone indicating the inclusion of something ferrous. “Siderite. Interesting feature. Thank you for showing it to me.”
“No. In here.” Jay weaves around the highest of the stone tops, chest high, and leads her to a crack in the ground that disappears into darkness.
“Oooo, you sure have the most surprises, Jay my boy. What a lovely spot.” Miriam kneels at the fissure’s edge, peering down into the inky void. Then an oval face looms up out of it like a swimmer breaching and Miriam falls back with a gasp.
Jidadaa blinks at her. “Good. Coming?”
After Miriam’s heart stops racing, she smiles devilishly and hauls herself into the cave entrance, lowering and extending her leg until she can find a solid footing. “Cheers.” She smiles up at Jay, then descends into the ground like a babe crawling back into the womb.
The tang of iron in the air is noticeable. Geology come to life. This is a ragged tunnel, carved at a deep angle into the heart of the outcrop. Miriam picks her way downward, putting on work gloves and turning on her headlamp. She realizes that until she did, Jidadaa was climbing around down here without any light at all. Barefoot. Sensing the path with her feet, most likely. Now this is a real trickster here come to life. The girl named Doom can never be depended upon to be anything other than herself.
They move quickly, squeezing through narrow passages, and drop perhaps twenty meters in a few minutes. Then they suddenly spill out onto a larger tunnel, squared-off and shored up with dark timbers like an old-time mine. “Oh!” Miriam is startled by the change. She’d thought this adventure would be more challenging. But she can stand up nearly straight in here. It is a straight passage that extends before her but ends in a collapsed cascade of rock behind. She illuminates the nearest wall. They’ve gotten beneath the limestone layer. “Phosphorite, with kernels of silicates. Must have been a bloody beast to dig through. Poor bastards.”
Jidadaa only regards Miriam with a blank stare. “Come.”
Miriam nods and gives Jidadaa a brave chuckle. But it is spooky down here. Now now, old girl. Her old self used to run to embrace the darkness. When she walked in the Irish woods at night as a teen, she’d get worried about someone following her, a pervert from town or a mythical monster who only came out at night. And sometimes she would shock herself into stillness. The only way she could get moving again, alone in the cold foggy night, had been to tell herself that she wasn’t someone’s prey out here. She was the predator, hunting them.
That internal pivot meant everything. Instead of waiting in dread for something to befall her, she would lean forward, knees bent, and divide the darkness with her focused intent.
Miriam does the same here. This is an uncanny place, yes, but she’s an uncanny woman. This is her home, these dark secret caverns that have been forgotten by anyone yet living.
“Look.” Jay, bringing up the rear, directs Miriam’s gaze away from the stone and toward one of the timbers. It has writing on it. Ideograms. “Chinese? Japanese? I don’t know enough to tell.”
Miriam studies the crude symbols carved into the wood. She takes out her phone and takes a picture. “We’ll figure it out. Where does this tunnel lead anyway?”
“The Ussiaxan village. Jidadaa wants me and her to run support for the ladies while they’re in there. But we can’t get past this blockage. Kind of a new development, if I’m reading Jidadaa right. She thought it would be clear sailing.”
They pass under a dark band of moisture that bisects the tunnel. Drips form puddles at their feet. “Creek.” Jidadaa points above.
“Ah, yes. The creek in the meadow.” Miriam orients herself. “We’re passing right under. What a massive engineering project this must have been.” They continue on, another thousand steps or so, the tunnel as straight and regular as a hospital corridor. Miriam begins to see why Jidadaa felt no need for light.
They pass a junction, then another, passages on the left and right disappearing into the dark. “Where do those lead?” Miriam asks.
“No way out.” Jidadaa urges her on. “Now here. Katrina looks for Jidadaa. Too long.”
“Yes. Mustn’t keep Katrina waiting. Aha. Is this your rockfall?”
“This year I did not come. Not last year but year before, the way is clear.” Jidadaa shrugs, helpless, standing before the slide. “Now, too much rock.”
“Well, let’s see…” Miriam appraises the slide. It is mostly a cone of gravel that must have been folded long ago into a metamorphic seam that has broken open. The ancient riverbed was released but instead of flooding the tunnel with water it spilled a surfeit of pale gray riverstones and yellow sand. Miriam removes a collapsible spade and sets its handle. Then she climbs the slope and digs at it, trying to clear the rupture so she can attempt to fix it.
Beneath the layers of sand and gravel is a wetter clay. Well this should be suitable for her purposes. She clears the top of the cone and digs the clay back into the fissure, sealing it as best she can.
Then it’s just a matter of clearing out the gravel so they can win through to the far side. The work goes smoothly. Until it doesn’t.
Her spade hits something woody. She stops and clears the falling sand from what she hit. She can only slow the cascade, though, and not make it stop. The streams of sand fall like ribbons of blond hair over a skull darkened by time.
Miriam beholds the desiccated remains of a human body.
Chapter 51 – Little Love Palace
December 16, 2024
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:
51 – Little Love Palace
“Is that Flavia?”
“Yes? Ah. Hello up there. Miriam? How…? Ehh… I must have taken a wrong turn. How do I get back to the village?”
Miriam stands on a rickety scaffold she’s built againt the inner wall of the mystery shaft that has been both burned and flooded. Just a meter or so above the concrete at its base, she peers at the naked rock that is revealed at this height, scoring it with a knife. “Well, in a better world, you’d just take a lift right here, pop out right up at the top and skip down to them. But no such luck. In this world you’ve got to go back out, take a left, and follow that left wall until you feel the tree’s litter under your feet. Then climb.”
“I am so excited. I have to tell Alonso.”
“Faith, seems like a long time since I heard those words. Weeks it feels like, since anyone has been excited. What is it?”
“I saved Plexity.”
“Well well well.” Miriam doesn’t know what to say. Nobody knows Alonso as well as her, and she’s pretty sure that he doesn’t yet consider it lost. Someone like Flavia using a phrase like that would make him defensive, make him distrust what she says next. But how to tell the prickly mathematician? Best to hear what else she has to say. “How?”
“I was working in the sub. With Triquet. Very nice. Very safe and productive, to be in a place with walls and doors again. And I was reviewing the profile for a large dataset with, well a kind of forbidden technology that Alonso says I shouldn’t use, but with it I noticed a growing structure in all the numbers. A kind of… Well. I am bad with the metaphors. It is a significant ordering of the data and it reveals a kind of meta-mechanism for the life here.”
“I see.”
But Flavia can tell Miriam doesn’t see. “No no no. This is what Plexity is all about. Mapping connections, yes? Well, at least that’s what we thought. But it might just be that the entire project is to reveal this one single process. It is… I mean… If it translates to the wider world we might have figured out an entire new dimension or process of life. It may answer so many questions.”
“Brilliant.” But in Miriam’s mind, these structures must be like hidden cratons in the mantle, only detectable with sophisticated seismic mapping. “So it’s like, what is it? A new molecule or, uh, metabolic pathway? I’m out of my depth here, love.”
“I have no idea. That is for Alonso and his geniuses to figure out. But no. Here is why it is important for us. So far, I’ve detected this kind of universal mathematical expression everywhere here. It is a signal that appears as soon as we put samples in any kind of context. Once the variables increase, we get this data signature. So. Having identified it, it was easy for me to create a, well a kind of compression algorithm. You know zip files? In your computer? How they are compressed so they have less data, but then you can un-compress them and they grow larger again? But for this, my new compression algorithm, well, it kind of packs much more of Plexity’s collections into a small space, and all that is really left is that new signal. It is the only tab hanging out. So then you get a whole series of these tabs, like millions and billions of them, and you are looking at vast amounts of data at a scale that we hadn’t even considered. And the dynamics, which are so important to Plexity, are preserved, and even revealed more clearly.”
“I have no idea what you mean, except that when you said that nothing is sticking out except the tabs, I thought of the label on a shirt. That’s kind of right, isn’t it? Shows where it was made, what it’s made from, eh?”
“Yes, sure. Billions of shirts.” Flavia doesn’t know how to extend that metaphor, nor does she care to try. “So anyway. Your husband will be very excited. I am not saying that we need to stop collecting, it’s that we probably already have a kind of working baseline of data and all the work we do now just refines the models and increases resolution. But it works, Miriam. Plexity works.”
“Cracker. He’ll be thrilled. So…” Miriam levers a fractured bit of peridotite into her collection bag. “What is it? The new dimension of life? If you had to guess.”
Flavia shrugs. “I have no idea. That is not my specialty at all. I just get paid to make the computers happy. What about you?”
“Beats me. The only thing that makes sense to me are rocks.”
Ξ
Maahjabeen has been paddling for a couple hours. And she wishes that it will never end. It’s a beautiful day, with a calm sea. Her pod of eleven? twelve? orcas dash ahead then circle back, leading the kayaks around the island counter-clockwise. Pradeep is right on her flank, Aziz cutting through the green water with ease, his huge smile responding to her brief glance.
“Hungry?” he calls out, fishing in a pocket for an energy bar.
“Starving.” But Maahjabeen doesn’t slacken her pace. “But the orcas are leading us somewhere. I’ll eat when we get there.”
Pradeep puts the energy bar back in his pocket and takes up the paddle before he falls too far behind. She has such a strong stroke. And now she’s being carried away on the backs of cetaceans like a goddess of the sea. This is his beloved Maahjabeen in her element. He didn’t think he could love and admire her more. But he is so happy to be wrong.
“There. Look.” Maahjabeen turns back to him and uses her paddle to point ahead at the far northern horizon.
“Oh my god.” Pradeep finally clears the last point of the island’s eastern shoulder and sees the unbroken Pacific stretching to the north, turning gray at the horizon. It is the most profound sense of vastness that he has ever experienced. They really are the tiniest dot of terrestrial life on this great big water planet, aren’t they?
Now the orcas lead them past the unbroken cliffs of the east coast toward the north shore. Here, the currents get tricky, as a strong eastward swell tries to force them out into the open water. They have to paddle strongly at a corrective angle to make headway, their noses pointed nearly directly at shore. The orcas are patient, the currents seeming to not affect them, circling the laboring humans as they escape the current.
At one point, a juvenile orca rises silently beside Pradeep, blinking at him with a dark eye. It opens its toothed mouth like it’s greeting him, or laughing at him, and waves a pectoral fin. Is this what Maahjabeen meant when she said they spoke with her and welcomed her to their ocean? Pradeep bows his head. “Thank you. Uh. I am honored.”
The cliffs of the north shore are of a lighter gray, sharper and covered in darker trees. Pradeep frowns at them and shades his eyes from the glare to study the curve of their branches. “Is that…? I think it’s a whole forest of Sitka Spruce up there. Extraordinary. We didn’t even know they were here. Until now.”
“What, those trees?” Maahjabeen tries to share his enthusiasm. It is evidently important.
“Yes, that’s one of the main forest trees of the north. Oregon and Washington, Canada and Alaska. It’s all Sitka and Douglas Fir. But on this island we’ve now seen Sitka and firs and pines and even redwoods. All together. There is nowhere else on earth where these trees grow together. Sitkas aren’t found as far south as California and redwoods aren’t found as far north as Oregon. This is a dendrologist’s fairy tale. Amazing.”
“Okay, yes, Mahbub. Now I am very hungry.” Maahjabeen allows Pradeep to hand her an energy bar. She tears at it with sharp teeth under the gaze of the orcas. She figures they must approve, yes? They love to fasten their teeth in their prey and pull it apart. But maybe they’re disappointed in the lack of blood.
Fingers of gray rock break up the sea, leading to a ragged series of ridges descending from the island’s spine to the water. The orcas lead them between two of the wider fingers, which eventually curl into a tiny protected harbor, hardly large enough for the orcas and the boats to fit in. The orcas cycle in and out, cackling and blowing their blowholes, slapping their fins on the water. Their antics echo up the forbidding faces of the cliffs. This goes on for minutes.
Finally, the orcas all file out of the little harbor. But when Maahjabeen tries to follow them, their splendid matriarch stops and rolls on her side, chattering at the woman in the kayak.
“What is she trying to say?” Pradeep calls out.
“She say,” a hoary old voice from the cliff behind him answers, “you stay. Stay with old man.”
Pradeep yelps in surprise and backs his kayak around. There he is, a decrepit figure at the water’s edge. What in the world? Where did he come from? Perched at the base of the vertical cliffs, it is unclear how the man got there. At his age it’s unclear how he gets anywhere. A great mass of gray curls sits atop his dark and drawn face. His eyes are clouded orbs staring sightlessly over Pradeep’s head. He’s blind too?
Maahjabeen silently paddles up beside Pradeep. They regard the old man together. After a series of urgent glances and shrugs and glares, she ventures to say, “Thank you. Very nice to, uh, meet you. Is this your home?”
The man cocks his head upon hearing Maahjabeen’s voice. “A woman. Aahh.” A groan of pleasure rattles in his throat. “Yes. Home. Last home. Come.”
The old man makes no move. “Come…?” Pradeep echoes. “Come where?”
“Come. Come.” The old man waves them forward. The waves here lap harmlessly against the stone, tamed by the curving fingers of rock. So they can easily paddle right up alongside the spot he perches. As they near they can see the hidden notch behind him. He must have emerged from it.
“The orcas. They knew he was here,” Maahjabeen breathes. “They called to him with their noise. Then he came.”
“Yes. Kéet. Black and white whale. Kéet know my name. Come.” The old man uncoils long limbs and stands. He is taller than nearly every other Lisican they’ve seen, with a spidery gray goatee depending from his pointed chin.
Something in his hair stirs. Eyes blink. There is a fox hidden in there, under the dreadlocks. It blinks rheumy eyes at them.
“What in the world…?” Pradeep paddles close and grabs an outcrop. This won’t be easy but he should be able to haul himself up onto the rock shelf without getting too wet or damaging Aziz.
“What in… the world…” The old man mimics Pradeep, stretching his mouth around the words. “Old language. Enga-lish. Forget, uh, most. Most not all. Understand?”
But Pradeep is busy with his efforts. “Hold on to me, babi?” he asks Maahjabeen, using the stability she provides to slip out and clamber onto the rocks. Then he lifts Aziz, finding no room for the boat anywhere here. He stands the big blue craft endwise, leaning it against the cliff, so he can help Maahjabeen out of Firewater. Then they lean the second boat beside the first.
“I don’t like that.” Maahjabeen frowns at the kayaks.
“Very precarious, yes.” Pradeep casts about for rocks. He finds several long dried strands of bull kelp that nearly do a good job of lashing the hulls together. But they won’t actually tie into a knot. More rocks help, pinning the tubes of seaweed down.
By the time they finish securing the kayaks, the old man is gone. They examine the fissure behind him. Yes, quite narrow, but cut upward at an angle in the fractured cliff face.
The passage never encloses them. It always remains open to the sky, just a deep cut zig-zagging its way deeper into the cliff. It ends in a tiny pocket of a valley, surrounded by thin streamer waterfalls and flowering trees.
A rude hut, only a meter in height, rests against the bare wall of a cliff. It is a filthy little hovel, perhaps the best a blind old man could do. He sits before it, cross-legged, waiting for them. He eats the green rind of an unripe fruit, revealing stained black and brown teeth. Maahjabeen grips Pradeep’s arm as they stand uncertainly before him. “Why?” Maahjabeen asks. “Why did the black and white whales bring us to you?”
But the old man just eats his fruit, grimacing at the bitterness.
“Is it to rescue you? Bring you back home? Which one is your home, anyway? Which village?”
“This home.” The old man indicates the hovel behind him.
“And you’re… doing okay?” Pradeep is unsure what he’s supposed to do here. “Survived the winter like this, did you?”
“On the north shore too,” Maahjabeen murmurs. “The storms must be fierce.”
“Storms bad here,” the old man agrees. “So bad nobody come. Leave all the nakée coast to Aan Eyagídi, human of the land.” He presses his hands against his hollow chest. The fox stirs around his neck, staring sullenly at the two intruders.
“Oh, you want to be here?” Pradeep frowns. “Alone. Is that your name? Ah-an Leen-giddy? Did I say it right?”
“No name. Title.”
“I see.” But Pradeep does not see. He wipes his hands on his shorts and shares a blank stare with Maahjabeen. She is even more out of her element than he is. “Well, since we’re here… Maybe we could give you a hand. Plant a garden. Uh. Build you a better house. You sure you don’t want to come back with us? See some of your people?”
“No people.”
“Right. So… Who…? I mean, what made you move? Did you used to have a… like a family somewhere?”
“No family. Storm doctor.”
Both Maahjabeen and Pradeep look to the sky. It is a ragged band of light high above, crowded on all sides by the towering cliffs. “Storm doctor…” Pradeep repeats, hoping that doing so will peel back a layer or two of confusion.
“Who taught you English?” Maahjabeen asks.
The old man smiles to hear her voice again. “Ahh. Woman.”
They wait for more of an answer but none is forthcoming. Pradeep shrugs. “Maybe he’s kind of deaf as well as blind.”
“No deaf.”
“Oh. Oops. Apologies.”
They stand there in an awkward silence. The old man is patient, waiting for them in a sense. But for what? He knows why they’re here? “So what is it? There something you want to tell us?”
This makes the old man laugh. He lifts his hands and spreads them in an expansive gesture. “All. Tell all.”
“Grand.” But Pradeep isn’t sure it’s grand at all. This sounds like it will take quite a bit of time here. And the smell is already starting to get to him. “Well, let’s get started, Ah-an Leen-giddy. What do you most want to share?”
“Ehhh…” Now called upon, the old man casts about for words. “The sky. Crack open like egg. One, two, three time. Next after that, sky give birth.”
“Damn it, why does this always have to be so bloody esoteric?” Pradeep fights himself to silence after seeing the old man twitch in response to his irritation. “Sorry. It’s just… Why don’t any of you say, like, ‘Lisica has four hundred people. The capital is this village we call Ussiaxan. Our main industries are fishing and foraging.’ Like, what’s the demographics? The median income? Why can’t we just get the Wikipedia page for once? That’s all I’m asking. But okay. The sky cracks open one, two, three… Hey.” Pradeep thinks back to the artwork of the Milky Way in the cave. That was just this morning, although so much has happened since. “You mean you see the stars. The clouds crack open and you see the sky.”
“Clouds are eggshell. We are egg.”
“Oh, wow…” Pradeep falls back. “Lisica is… I mean, you hear that, babi? They believe they’re inside a gigantic egg and the whole island is just like waiting to be hatched. Fascinating.”
“Who taught you to speak to the whales?” Maahjabeen repeats her question but with a different subject, one more near to her heart. “And will you teach me?”
“Storm doctor. She teach me. I teach her. Yes.” The old man nods sagely at the empty air.
“Okay. I will teach you what I can.” Maahjabeen sits before him, trying to make herself comfortable. “What shall I teach?”
“English. She teach English.”
“If you like. Out of practice, eh?”
“First teacher.”
You’ve never had a teacher before? I’m your first?”
“No. She. She…”
“Ah. I think our new friend has trouble with past tense.” Pradeep sits beside Maahjabeen. “You had a teacher. A woman before. She taught you English?”
“Yes. Yes. She taughtet. Old language. When I am boy.”
“Oh, you learned English long ago? From a woman who…?”
“Yes. Miss Maureen. She my taught it.”
“Maureen Dowerd.” Pradeep sits up straight. “You knew her?”
“I think…” Maahjabeen reflects on this old man’s life. “Storm doctor… It’s like shaman, yes? Like, uh, what do we call them? Like Sherman. Well, that’s just our name for them. And Wetchie-ghuy.”
Now the old man’s face grows fearsome. A towering rage fills it and his hand shakes. He holds it out, pointed at Maahjabeen. “No Wetchie-ghuy. No. He is…” But the old man has no words.
“Wait.” Maahjabeen recalls Katrina’s words from her night with the village of the golden childs. “She said, she told us… There was an old shaman. And then Wetchie-ghuy like deposed him. Are you that shaman?”
The brittle fury in his eyes is all the answer they need.
“I see. That must have been… I mean…” Maahjabeen shares a wondering look with Pradeep. “It must have been like fifty years. Just how old are you, Aan? How long have you been here?”
He answers with a question of his own. “How many mothers? In Lisica?” Using the tip of his thumb, Aan Eyagídi indicates the interior of the island to the south. “How many now?”
“Ah. I know this.” Pradeep stirs, recalling what Jay told him of Kula and Jidadaa. “Fourteen. There have been fourteen mothers.”
“Four… teen…” The old man counts out the number on his fingers. “Yes?” He is so shaken his breath hardly makes words.
“Yes. Fourteen. Maybe fifteen by now. We haven’t met any young mothers ourselves yet but…”
Aan Eyagídi falls back against his lean-to with a despairing moan. The sudden weight tilts a wall of his hut and knocks it over.
The old man rolls away, then scrambles to his feet and, still moaning, wanders among the waterfalls, hands over his face.
“Is that what happened?” Pradeep asks Maahjabeen. “Wetchie-ghuy said he’d killed this old fellow but he’d really just locked him up in this little valley for ages, eh? And now we’ve ruined his house. Come on. Let’s see if we can help him…”
Pradeep bends to lift the fallen wall. The stench is really too much now. They should just completely disassemble this heap and like sanitize it before building him a better one.
Pradeep stops, holding a rough panel of bark. “Oh, dear.”
“What is it?” Maahjabeen appears at his shoulder, looking down at the ruins of the little hovel.
Within it is a corpse. It is a soldier of some Asian nation, his face sunken in death. He wears a torn suit of black coveralls and a molle harness filled with small attached sacks and bags.
The corpse’s hands are crossed upon his breast like a pharoah. But instead of holding an ankh, this figure lying in state grips in their withered hands a cell phone.
Ξ
“We must make a decision.” Alonso’s voice is a satisfying rumble. Even if he has lost control of this entire situation, it doesn’t sound like it. He still speaks with confidence. That’s something, isn’t it?
They all look to him for further direction. Mandy and Esquibel. Miriam. Flavia. Jay and Katrina. And Jidadaa, who brought them this latest crisis. Why did she have to arrive now, just as Flavia was lifting his Plexity hopes with her stubborn use of cellular automata? Now he can’t even focus on the import of her words until he resolves this latest crisis. “Jidadaa…” Alonso continues. “How can we be certain the entire Ussiaxan village is now empty?”
“They go. All go. Into night hunter hills. I watch. They scared.”
“And you think this is our only chance to retrieve our lost thirty thousand dollar drone?”
Katrina and Mandy exchange a glance. “Well, that and, well, I was really thinking more about that cottage in the woods, mate. I mean, we can get the drone back, yeh, although I’m fairly certain that it’ll be broken beyond anything we can fix here. But that cottage. It’s where the Dandawu says all their treasures are kept. Jidadaa is sure of it. If we can sneak in there for a quick peek…”
“Must hurry.” Jidadaa looks from one to the other. “Ussiaxan people come back with shadow. Hide from sun today. Very scared. But with night they come back.”
“Are we really doing this?” Alonso looks soberly from one resolute face to the next. These weeks have transformed them all, hardened them, given them direction to their lives that is not so easy to surrender, even against spearpoints. “If they find any of us there they will kill us, yes?”
“Take you koox̱.” Jidadaa shrugs. “Maybe die.”
“Slavery or death. No thank you.” Flavia shakes her head. “My plan over the next eight days is to rework the Plexity data instead, as Alonso has agreed. I think, what I heard, is a tacit admission from him that we may want to depend less on a classic binary codebase? That we may be open to more experimental…?”
“I said what I said,” Alonso grouses. “Send your harmonics through the data and let me know what you discover. I am not ready to grant you any more than that at this moment.”
Flavia laughs wickedly and claps her hands. “Oh, you will not need to grant me anything at all. It is the data, signore dottore, who will show you. Ha. So count me out of your suicide mission. Go ruin your lives without me.”
“Thanks.” Katrina makes a face. “Feel like this is mine to do. I’m the one who lost the drone. I’m the one who talked with the Dandawu about the treasure house. Nobody else has to come.”
“If it is anyone’s mission, it is mine.” Esquibel looks steadily at the ground, unwilling to meet any of their gazes. She has not been able to properly present her mission with the Japanese agent after it was recklessly revealed by Mandy and Alonso at the beginning of this meeting. It had been a very ugly scene and now they trust her even less. It is all a tremendous mess, especially with the loss of the drone and the evacuation of the enemy village. “I will slip in and out, correct our mistakes, gather the drone—”
“By correcting the mistakes do you mean actually handing the Plexity data to the Japanese?” Alonso’s question is quiet.
Esquibel spreads her hands. “Those are my orders. I am a naval officer. There is no option here. I must follow those orders.”
“Well, can we give them an earlier version of it, perhaps?” Flavia opens up a folder of backups on her laptop. “I have a snapshot here from third April, when we were just getting started. We have barely any collections yet. Nothing for them to steal.”
“No.” Esquibel speaks haltingly, choosing her words with care. They don’t know she has already shared a version of Plexity from a full month past that. “There’s, uh, a strict agreement. If I don’t give them the entirety of Plexity, they’ll just come back for it.”
“Well then Flavia, perhaps you can insert a bit of self-destruct code,” Alonso asks, “so that it is only viable for like a week and then it eats itself, leaving nothing but—?”
Esquibel shoots to her feet, pleading with them. “Impossible! I am supposed to be establishing a long-lasting relationship here. Get in deep. Over years. I have to be trustworthy. I am sorry, Alonso, everyone. The American Defense Intelligence people are trying to develop me as an asset.”
Flavia laughs, bitter. “This is the impossible part now, Esquibel. Because you have told all of us and your cover is blown.”
“I told you nothing!” Esquibel hisses, losing her temper. “It was Katrina, putting clues together! Gah. You reckless civilians and your stupid plans ruined everything! Now I must depend upon the discretion of you all or I will be arrested or maybe killed. By the Americans or the Japanese or even the Kenyans. Understand? Once I am compromised, my entire life is basically over. I am already in too deep.”
“I am sorry,” Alonso tells Esquibel, “but I cannot play a part in this. It is Plexity. It is too precious to steal.”
“You knew the risks, Doctor Daine.” Flavia doesn’t even look up from her laptop. “I do not have any sympathy for you. I have been a victim of corporate espionage before. A whole year of my life wasted. It is why I got back into academia. Now you will do it to me again? No.”
Esquibel is devastated. Here is the bill coming due. She knew that she was playing a dangerous game, certainly, but she was only motivated to save those she loves. But now she can see that her loved ones will not do the favor of reciprocating any of the trust and support she has given them. They truly are the most spoiled and self-involved people she has ever known.
“I’ll go with you, Skeebee.” Mandy’s voice is soft but resolute. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Oh, this is an offer she had no right to hope for. Tears spring into Esquibel’s eyes. “You—you will…?” This is a miracle beyond imagining, that Mandy would forgive her and stand with her against all others. “Oh, Mandy G…”
“She had really bad student loans,” Mandy explains to the others. “Poor Esquibel was never given much choice, were you?”
Esquibel realizes her only hope is to beg for their forgiveness. “No. Again and again. I needed to make terrible choices to escape my past. And it has all led me here.”
“You will go to the village, and I hope you find your Japanese spy.” Alonso speaks with conviction, trying to fuse the separate strands of this scattered mess into a single line. “You will speak with them, and tell them what has happened. The truth. Tell them everything if you like. I don’t care. Just explain why they are not getting Plexity and why they must leave us alone. Beyond that, how the Japanese and the Americans handle it is not my concern. And, in the end, Doctor Daine, it is not yours any longer as well. You have been relieved of the responsibility of that decision. Tell them that and then, well, we let the cards fall where they may, yes?”
It is a solution Esquibel cannot accept, but she realizes it is the best offer she will get at the moment. She drops her head and meekly nods. “Yes.”
“I just can’t for the life of me figure out,” Miriam wonders, “what it is about Plexity that is making the Japanese of all people want it so bad?”
“My contact…” Esquibel figures there’s no harm in telling them this much. “He reached out to me before Alonso was even released from the gulag. Their recruitment of me started before Plexity did. It isn’t the specific data so much as how it compromises me and makes me theirs. This is the bridge I can’t ever cross back.”
“Yeh, I’m still going too.” Katrina stands, brushing her lap clean of crumbs. “Curiosity’s about to kill this cat. If I don’t ever get a peek inside that treasure house I’ll die unhappy. You say we’ve got til nightfall, Jidadaa? Like nine hours? And we need like what, four? That should be fine, shouldn’t it?”
“If you can even get across the creek.” Jay stands. “That’s why I’m coming too. I’m the only one who—”
“No,” Esquibel and Mandy say in unison.
“No,” Katrina echoes, a half beat behind.
“No no.” Alonso waves the idea away.
“Damn, people…” Jay shakes his head, sad. “I knew I wasn’t popular here but I am the only one who’s gotten across that creek. And it ain’t easy. What if I—?”
Miriam interrupts him. “No.”
But Jidadaa claps her hands. “Jay come! Me and Jay!”
“No. Not Jay. Just you, Jidadaa.” Esquibel pulls her by the wrist into the circle of four women. “Let’s have your boyfriend recover a bit from all his injuries first.”
Ξ
Jay has spent most of his life in solitude. He has his surfer buds, for sure, and a whole host of other friends and families spread across the world, but when he looks at his life in totality, he’s alone way more often than not. So he doesn’t need any of the others here at this camp. He’s perfectly fine all by himself. Fuck em.
Wandering the pines above pine camp, he realizes for the first time that they aren’t being patrolled any longer by the golden childs. In fact, he hasn’t seen a single pollen mask since the storm blew them off. Their season is indeed over.
What a trip. They’re on like some twenty-one year epicycle, only reappearing when the time is right. This is the mindset of big wave surfing, where sometimes years can pass before the conditions line up just right. You just got to keep your bag packed and schedule clear. “Keep your mind zen, bro.”
But he isn’t sure what zen gains him here this afternoon. Pradeep is gone again. Triquet is back in the sub. Now four more of them are about to dip. And Jay’s got a real bad feeling about that Ussiaxan village. His hand grips his left side, where one of their young hunters scored it. Why do any of them got to be so aggro? This is paradise. They got everything they need.
Pine camp below is peaceful. At the kitchen tables, Mandy is making them snacks for their mission, like it’s a family picnic. Esquibel is filling a huge black backpack with all kinds of shit. Like any amount of gear will help against sixty spearmen. They don’t know how fast those dudes move! How intent they are on running these outsiders through…
Crazy how this narrow band of water can so completely divide two sides of the same family here. They really let their fights get in their way, didn’t they? They could be one big happy laughing tribe here on the meadow but no. Fools always got to wreck it. They tell their whack stories. Sing their songs…
No. No songs here. They write those prophet poems. Jidadaa said there’s like seventeen of them on the island. Some bad and some good. It’s time for him to hear these poems, Jay is pretty sure. If he’s being forced to choose between the Lisicans, then he’ll like bro down with the nicer ones and throw down with the others. Damn. That’s a nice refrain. Too bad they don’t have music here. Jay could… “Heh.” The idea pops fully-formed into his brain. “Write my own prophet poem. Make my own destiny. Bro down with the best. Throw down with the rest. Heh.”
He starts idly beatboxing, wandering through the grove. These are mostly Shore Pine and Monterey Pine but there’s some real beautiful Sugar Pines mixed in here. Such a weird and unique coniferous amalgamation.
“It’s all about the birds. Yeah. Yeah.
I said it’s all about the words. I’m spitting.
And it’s all about the trees. I’m seeing.
How they got across the seas. I’m saying.
“Now here’s a little tale about a storm and a bird and a seed
And how one carried the other to a land he’d never seen.
This bird he carried a seed from a pine he’d been eating
and when he dropped a deuce on the island he started seeding
it with pines and firs and brambly burrs from across the world
and his brothers and the others flew in to meet some girls
and that’s how their song got all mixed up together,
they never would have found each other if it wasn’t for bad weather.
And now that they’re here getting weird dropping deuces,
they found that the ground gives them options so he chooses
to stay, never fly away, live out his days on the cliffs with his eggs
and the partner he has claimed in a monogamous marital state.”
But his song, never long, now starts to always go wrong,
and his little bird brain can’t explain how he doesn’t belong
to all the tribalism and hate and whack shit they create
here in the land of plenty, where birds eat rich and wreck their fate.
It’s the song that you sing, the way you think about everything
that keeps you from having the wind beneath your wings,
it’s the poem you write, mad prophets with spite
that fills you with the envy that keeps you up at night.
“So we fighting for the future with our poems? I’m your teacher,
your lyricist and linguist, my lexicology I’ll feature.
You tell me that each part of this land is a verse?
Then you tell me who’s good and which one of them’s worse?
And you want me to cap one and take him off in a hearse?
And skin his ass and bring him right back as a purse?
And I say nay, no way, Wetchie-ghuy, just go away.
And Sherman, you’re vermin, let the fox finally catch you, and
these shamans need a lesson about the end of Rasputin.”
“It’s all about the birds. Yeah. Yeah.
I said it’s all about the words. I’m spitting.
And it’s all about the trees. I’m seeing.
How they got across the seas. I’m saying.
“Lisica lost me, you tossed me and broke me.
Took my health and my wealth, made my voice super croaky.
But I can still sing, which is better than what you got,
this prophet poem is flowing. Listen up. It’s my last shot.”
Jay passes deeper into the trees, just warming up. This is an epic rhyme. Homer ain’t got shit on him. The bars just keep dropping from his mouth like they’ve been waiting for him to discover them in there.
He passes into the gloom, birds taking wing when they hear his emphatic verses. Behind him, trailing enthralled, Jidadaa absorbs every word.
Ξ
Pradeep glides up onto the shallow rocky beach and pops out of the hull, dragging Aziz clear of the surf line. Ta da. That was neatly done. He turns back to Maahjabeen, still on the water, hoping she’d seen how deftly he moved after hours stuck in the boat. But her face is preoccupied, bruised with memory. Ah, right. She hasn’t seen this western beach since her ordeal with the first storm. Patience. His patience is what she will need here.
She pulls herself out of Firewater and totters up the beach, dragging her boat. “Bring them… higher…” Her voice is distracted, her stamina spent. Preying on her weakness, shards of trauma lance her, half-remembered black and gray images from those long deadly days. Hypothermia. Starvation. Hopelessness. She loses track of what she was saying, then finds it again. She shakes herself like a dog and stares at Pradeep, who watches her with concern. “Big sleeper waves here. At least, last time. Get them on this shelf.”
They carry the boats over the rough sand and lift them up the small bluff at the back of the beach. From here Pradeep sees the second bunker for the first time, hidden back in the trees. It is more dilapidated than he expected, a smaller building that is nothing more than maybe two-and-a-half concrete and timber walls stained green and brown. He picks his way toward it.
Now Pradeep feels the exhaustion. They’ve nearly paddled all the way around the island today. Something like twelve kilometers. Started at like five-thirty on the dial and gotten all the way around to nine o’clock. Just an epic amount of boating. When they’d left the old man, the orcas were gone and the current back to the east was impassable. So they’d surrendered to it and let it carry them around the island to the west, discovering on their way perhaps the largest prominence on the entire island, a bare peak looming above the northwest coast. Then they’d gotten into all those seastacks and finally, about an hour longer than he felt he could go, this beach.
“Do you think your housemates are still in there?” Pradeep turns to ask Maahjabeen. But she is back at the boats, making no move to join him. She watches the water instead, her face closed, arms crossed. He returns to her. “Ah, babi, what is it?”
“Not my favorite beach.” She leans her head against him.
“Understood. But I’m afraid we might need to spend another night on it. It’s getting late and I don’t think I can… I mean… How are you? What is your plan?”
“No plan. I just… miss the orcas.” Maahjabeen knows she has been part of some mythic day, and that it is drawing to a close. The currents had carried her out of their magical realm back to the ordinary, the cruel and ugly. The bunker with that broken femur poking into the air.
Pradeep kisses the top of her head. “Ah. Yes. That was magic. So I have to confess my weakness to you. I’m afraid my arms are about to fall off. I don’t think I can paddle all the way back to the sea cave without a break. That’s probably, what, another few hours? I’m not even totally sure where we are here.”
Maahjabeen lifts her hand and points down the coast to the south. “Down the coast is another maybe three kilometers to the lagoon and our first camp. That is all. But no. I can’t paddle any more. We need food. Do we have any? Maybe we can fish or find some shellfish. Can we make a fire?”
“Esquibel would say no. Maybe in the bunker?”
Maahjabeen shivers. “Ehhh. Maybe we can sleep on the beach?”
“Not in the bunker? Because of the bodies?”
She nods.
But he is intrigued by them. He turns back to the overgrown ruins, pulling out his phone. “Let me just take a quick peek.”
When Maahjabeen was here before it was the middle of a storm and she was preoccupied with her own survival. Now, with the care of a clinician, Pradeep enters the structure, recording a video. The gray light illuminates moss and lichen all over the walls, ferns growing from the top of rotten timber posts. Birds flit in the eaves above, nothing too large nearby that he can tell.
He steps over a fallen sapling and ducks through the narrow door. Quite a mean little space, no more than three meters by five. The windows were narrow. With a roof and another couple walls it must have been a dark little cramped bunker. Ah, there are the bodies, their uniforms the same color as the dead leaves covering them. Pradeep bends over them to do his examination.
Outside, Maahjabeen pulls packets of ramen from her dry bag. She doesn’t care what Esquibel thinks about a fire. She will never know they had one here. And dry wood is in abundance. The latest storms have brought a great amount of wreckage to the high tide line and it’s been enough time for the smaller pieces to dry.
Pradeep rejoins her as she’s making a hasty yurt out of the limbs and branches nearby. “That’s right, my babi,” he laughs. “We’ll build our own little love palace.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 