WHEN SHULGI REACHED THE fallen egg, people were converging on the site from the surrounding fields. He ordered them to leave the area, but they weren’t eager to obey. He was a strange naked man bearing no marks of authority, attended by no retinue, wearing no regalia. But the horse and his weapons were enough to impress them. They didn’t leave, but backed away to watch from a distance.
The monster scrambled backward through the mud and squeezed itself inside the egg. Six legs, yes; the barley farmers hadn’t been mistaken. Perhaps two had been lost in battle. Was it a human turned half-octopus or an octopus turned half-person? Was its spirit half-beast, or just its body? And where were its companions?
When Shulgi’s soldiers joined him, he would find out.
* * *
Through the whole flight back to Home Beach, Minh stuck close to the barley field feeds. Her camera orbited above the dead men, showing flies landing delicately on their ears, their lips, their staring eyes. Within a few minutes, a dozen soldiers arrived from a camp on the western ridge. When they spotted the bodies, they ran through the sodden field, gathered the dead in their arms, and wiped the mud from their blank faces. They hauled the corpses to the river, piled the carcasses on a barge, and floated them downstream.
Minh followed. But by the time they dropped into downskip over Home Beach, she’d seen enough. Every time someone looked into the eye of the camera overhead—into Minh’s eye—she saw the same thing. Anger. Fear. Confusion. It was too much.
After they landed, Minh put her fake on duty, crawled into her cubby, and slept for fourteen hours straight.
When she woke, whole sections of her work plan were overdue. Tasks blinked red and demanded to be time-shifted. She could grab them all and shove them into tomorrow, but it would cause more problems down the line. She needed to prioritize, delegate, problem-solve, but she couldn’t bear to think about project management. Not after what had happened.
Ten years back, she’d been a good project manager—hadn’t she? She’d always thought so. Prided herself on it, in fact. But if she’d ever had the skills to run a large project, they’d atrophied from disuse.
Or maybe she’d always been a disaster. Yes. Six dead people proved it.
Minh sat on the beach, running analyses on the climate data until she was feeling normal again. She picked her microclimate survey points and assigned cameras and sensors to their positions. The sun was about to rise in Mesopotamia, and when it did, she’d supervise the vegetation surveys. Anything that couldn’t be automatically identified or was likely to have significant genetic variation from samples in seed banks would be prioritized for sampling, and their locations would inform the choice of the next landing site.
But when the Mesopotamian dawn came and the cameras shifted from low-lux mode into full color, Minh stepped away from the feeds. Those sunlit vistas took her right back to the barley field, the soldiers splashing to the ground, the sickening scent of burning green barley and fertile mud. She stared at the ocean and let the surveys run unmonitored.
Hamid sat in the sand at her side. He handed her a bowl of food and a water bottle. They ate in silence. Minh could only swallow a few bites. The food sat under her heart in a lump.
Hamid’s bowl was half empty before he finally spoke. “Listen, Minh. I don’t like what you’ve been doing to your endocrine system.”
“It’s none of your business,” she said. “Stay out of my biom.”
“Okay. But I need you to be more careful. If you hadn’t reduced your adrenaline, fear would have kicked in properly and brought you back to the skip without cutting it so close.”
Minh nodded. Her eyes prickled. She pinched the bridge of her nose, like she’d been doing all day. The flood would have to break through eventually.
Hamid dug his toes into the sand.
“According to TERN, past population members don’t die, not really,” he said. “This is a new baseline. When we leave, the timeline will collapse. When TERN comes back, those soldiers will be alive.”
Minh pulled her legs into a ball. “It’s a comforting thought.”
“You don’t look comfortable.”
“That’s because I don’t buy it. Do you?”
He gave a gentle laugh, and his eyes disappeared behind a web of wrinkles in his weathered face.
“Ah, Minh. You know me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You only care about animals.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, but as far as I’m concerned, human deaths are nothing compared to the mass extinctions. Bringing back animal populations is worth a few human lives. More than a few.”
“Would you have been okay if I’d died?”
“No, I’d be devastated.”
“What’s the difference between the soldiers killing me, and Fabian killing the soldiers? Why would I be more dead than them?”
“If you died, we couldn’t go back in time and find you alive again.”
“Can’t we? Can’t TERN travel forty years into the past? Or two weeks? They could grab me out of the past and put me right back into the present.”
Hamid looked thoughtful. “I suppose. But we would all know you’d died.”
“Exactly. Like those soldiers died. They’re not less dead because we don’t know their names.” Minh swirled her legs, stirring the sand under her. “I’m sure TERN has a tangle of metaphysics justifying their health and safety protocol. I bet their physicists split time travel hairs down to the nanometer, in that awful hell of theirs. But right here, right now, the plain fact is—”
We’re on an island with a killer.
She bit the words back. Hamid would lock down her biom and dial her full of sedatives. And he’d be right to do it. She was overwrought.
And it wasn’t Fabian’s fault the soldiers were dead. It was her fault.
She dialed herself down, and calm closed over her like a warm blanket. Her gut unclenched. She scrubbed her hands through her hair. She should have cut it before leaving Calgary. She watched Hamid through the shaggy locks hanging in her eyes. He looked tense, like he was expecting her to say something irredeemable.
“The plain fact is we’re here to do a job,” she said. “We’ll finish what we came here to do, go home, file the final report, invoice the client, and move on to the next job.”
Saying it made it true.
* * *
Minh immersed herself in her work. She time-shifted the work plan and then dived into the live remote feeds. The vegetation survey was engrossing, the cultivated areas of the landscape as biodiverse as the wild. Plants and landscape, rocks and lichen, water and algae, pure and simple.
Eight camera feeds filled her eye. When humans strayed into the survey areas, the cameras avoided them, either zipping to a new location or rising high overhead. The cameras were usually spotted—pointed at, exclaimed over, chased, but it didn’t matter. Cameras couldn’t hurt anyone.
In a vineyard survey, a woman in a pink tunic padded barefoot down a dusty track. When she spotted the camera, she raised her arm and part of her costume flew off.
Minh maximized the feed and scanned backward in slow motion. A dark winged mass flew back and latched onto the woman’s arm. Minh zoomed in. A small falcon perched on the woman’s leather wrist cuff. When Minh jumped back to the live camera feed, outstretched talons raked at the lens, reaching for Minh’s eye. The camera dropped low and looped behind the bird, trapping a close-up of the bird’s fanned tailfeathers quivering in the wind.
The falconer recalled the bird to her wrist with a sharp whistle. She stared up at Minh’s camera, eyes narrow, jaw tight, lips drawn into a thin line.
The falconer snatched a stone from the track and pitched it. The camera dodged easily. Minh sent it up to two hundred meters and paused the survey. It could wait until the falconer moved on.
Minh bookmarked the incident and shot the feed to Hamid and Kiki. Hamid got back to her right away with more information about the bird’s species than she wanted to know, but Kiki didn’t reply. When Minh climbed up to the cubbies—late, too late, she’d worked too long into the night—Kiki’s cubby was sealed. So was Hamid’s. Fabian’s was empty.
Kiki hadn’t whispered to her all day. She’d been working hard—the work breakdown was thick with her timestamps. A day ago, Minh would have said Kiki couldn’t go an hour without chattering at her.
Now, it appeared, Kiki had pulled away. The trust was gone. It left a hole, right under her ribs. Minh curled up in her cubby and wondered when she’d begun caring what Kiki thought of her.