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hike in the darkness across the rough terrain had taken his breath away. We packed quickly and refilled
our canteens; there had been little rain the last few days, and there were not likely to be water-filled
reservoirs in the rocks. Shatro led us back along the path in the dawn light.
Mount Bedouin stood between us and the sunrise, a black serrated triangle against the brightening
sky. One small moon rose over the northern slope of the old volcano, and after a kilometer or so, we
turned toward the moon and that slope, where Isabel lay. It was a ten-kilometer hike from Cleopatra,
through what had once been impenetrable silva, and we reached the fifth palace by late morning. Randall
and his team had drained the chambers and surveyed most of them by the end of the previous day,
leaving only three chambers to breach. With a little energy left over, Randall and Cassir had decided to
knock a hole in the wall of an inner chamber, to get a head start on the next morning's work.
"We were about to return to our tents when Cassir shined a lantern into the chamber," Randall
explained, taking us down into the bowl. We carefully avoided the crumbling supports for the roof
beams, crawled through a succession of holes knocked through the chamber walls, and came to the
second-to-last chamber. Randall had no words to describe what they had seen. He entered the chamber
reluctantly behind Salap. Above, standing gingerly on the walls, Shimchisko -- the only sailor present --
waved down at me, but with little energy and no cheer.
"I've never heard of ecoi eating humans," Cassir said, his voice quiet in the shadowed stillness. We
splashed carefully between piles of odorless, colorless brown and white bones. From the walls,
uncataloged scions the size of soccer balls, shriveled limbs tightly curled close, like dead spiders, hung
from twisted brown cords. Drops fell from these into the dark, cloudy puddles below.
Salap pushed aside the piles to see what Cassir and Randall had spied from above. It lay half
submerged, empty eye sockets staring at the sky, toothless lower jaw slumped to one side, giving it a
grimly joking expression. Salap hesitated before stooping, and held his hands out for several long
seconds before touching the round shape, or the scatter of slumped and broken bones and a section of
feeble gray carapace, like a tarnished cuirass, covering what might have once been a chest or thorax.
"It's small," Salap said. "Less than a meter long."
"A child," Randall said, his voice shaky.
"Never a child," Salap said, shaking his head. "Not a human child."
"The skull," Shatro said loudly, lips curled as if offended.
"Leg bones and ... hands," Cassir said.
I knelt beside Salap and turned my attention to the hands. They had five fingers, but the fingers were
unjointed, flexible as rubber. The wrist was likewise one unit, and the joint that connected it to a long,
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two-boned forearm -- the bones given one twist around each other, with a smooth cartilaginous material
between -- was not the joint of any human.
"I've doubted her story from the beginning," Shatro said. "Why would they leave her here? What
could she and Yeshova have done -- or did she bury her husband -- "
"This isn't Yeshova, or any other human, and there's been no murder here," Salap concluded,
standing and coughing. "Whatever it is, it isn't fully grown. It's unfinished."
Randall's face became even more pale, his eyes staring at us as if we were dreadful angels. "My
God, what, then?"
"Made here," Salap said. He held up his left hand imperiously, palm up, and coughed again into his
other hand. Something in the cloudy water irritated him. Then he looked between Randall and me, and
said, "Get the largest jars. Throw other specimens out if you have to." He suddenly swore under his
breath and glared at the men and woman standing on the walls overhead, and peering through the hole
gouged in the chamber. "Not a word of this to Nimzhian, and not a word to anyone on board ship. We
will tell them after we've studied the specimen, and in our own good time. Master Randall, will you
guarantee this for me?"
Randall nodded, face still pale.
"Good."
Digging around the bottom of the chamber, within an hour we found three of the unfinished scions --
if indeed that was what they were. I helped Salap photograph the remains, using our hands and a metric
ruler for size comparison, in case the specimens disintegrated, as some already had. "Send down some
hot wax," Salap instructed as the glass jars were lowered. I filled the jars with water from the chamber,
and one by one, we lifted the fragile remnants and lowered them delicately into the jars, through the
muddy fluid to the bottom.
As he sealed the jars with paraffin, Salap looked up at me and said, "A fair imitation, no?" He gave
me a grin that seemed more than a little ghoulish.
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