ADRIANA

My name is Adriana Alameda Almenara. Yes, I know: AAA. I’ve heard it all before. Honestly, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I love word games and anything involving combinations of initials.

But I should get to the point. I was born thirty-two years ago in Santander, a small city on the northern coast of Spain. Twenty years later, with only the odd black mark on my stunning life record, I finished my degree in history with a fairly decent string of As on my transcript. I spent the next few years digging around in the subsoil of all the major archaeological sites of Europe and its surroundings. Now I can boast a dense five-page ré sumé earned with a pick and shovel.

Mornings I’d break my back pounding barren sediment with a pneumatic drill. Middays, kneeling on foam-rubber cushions, I’d be involved in more delicate work: paintbrush, patience, and sharp eyesight, assisted by a miner’s headlight, all—if luck was on my side—to find the fossilized bones of Pleistocene rodents. Afternoons, while we washed and sieved tons of material, I’d bombard the project directors with questions. I gleaned all I could from the paleontologists, anthropologists, and prehistorians—the experts, the people in charge; the people I aspired to become in the future. In this way, grant by grant, I honed my skills on all the excavation sites that came my way: Lascaux, El Sidrón, Çatal Hüyük . . . and the holy grail of every archaeologist, the fossil-rich caves of Atapuerca.

In any event, prehistory is the only thing I do well. In all other respects—family, boyfriends, lasting friendships—I’m a total disaster. I seem out of step with everyone else, like a spinning top with an unstable axis. Archaeology is my self-made center of gravity, something I impose on myself in order to simulate a normality my life quite simply doesn’t have. The rest is chaos, geographical instability, disorganization, and anarchy.

Don’t get impatient; the action is about to begin. Let me see . . . the most noteworthy aspect of this story began on a very cloudy day in 2012. So, without further ado, I’ll tell you about that day, when I met my first longevo —one of the Ancients. He was the one who, millennium after millennium, persisted in keeping the ancient family united.