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THE HEAT MADE NEL'S head pound and her heart flutter. She kicked the shovel into the ground, heaving another scoop of dirt into the waiting screen. She paired the crew off for such things, but preferred to work alone. There were only three more test pits left in between the stone lines. I want these done by the end of the day. Henri probably had another level, at least, before he came down onto the C horizon, but there had been precious little in the unit, save for the beautiful point. Still, one unbroken diagnostic was enough in Nel's book.
She dropped the shovel in the pit and stepped over the hole to raise the screen. The sound of dry, rocky earth against 1/8 inch metal mesh drowned out everything except Nel's pounding heart and the hot breath billowing in her lungs. She paused, rough hands brushing through the pile of pebbles and potential flakes. Nothing. She flicked the examined rocks onto the back dirt pile and was about to lift the shovel again when Mikey's whistle shot up the hill.
She shielded her eyes. He waved her over to Henri's unit. His mouth was thin and his brow furrowed. Fuck, what now? This site is a mess as it is. She grabbed her field book and jogged down the slope. “What's up?”
Mikey jerked his chin at the unit. Henri crouched on the edge, eyes wide and trowel pointing at the bottom of the level. “Dr. Bently, I think we've got something big.”
The soil was not the uniform brown that the B horizon should have been. Instead a dark stain covered one full corner and disappeared into the wall. Nel leaned down, scraping some of the dirt into her hand. She ground it between her fingers, tilting her palm so the light caught on the tiny grains of silt and sand. It was dark and slick, as if someone had spilled cooking oil. She sat back on her heels. Preservation of bodies only happened under the most ideal circumstances. Usually, all that was left were bone fragments and residual grease from ancient decomposition.
“Yeah, this is big alright.” She glanced up at Henri. “I'm putting Chad with you—not because you're doing poorly, but because he has more experience with this. You're going to go down by 5cm levels now, and stop at anything unusual. Bone will be like dry tan clay. At each level, please map in the staining and anything you find.”
“This is a burial, isn't it?”
“It's something, that's for sure. Can't say if it's human or not, but my money's on yes, especially with that point above it. Could be that was a grave good.” She grinned. “You just put this site on the map.”
•
THE HEAVY ENVELOPE survived only until Nel’s door latched behind her. She tore it across the end and tugged the tri-folded composition results from safety. She peered at them, lips thinning. Spectroscopy results were hard to understand on the best of days. “Complex hydrocarbons? Magnetized metal dust?” None of the molecules looked familiar. She wasn’t a chemist, but she could recognize the spectrometer’s readouts depicting charcoal, various rocks and metals. “Ugh, this is a mess!” She grabbed her cell and dialed the lab. “Could I have Dr. Danilo Salinas. This is Dr. Bentley.” She flipped through the other pages, finding similar results.
The line clicked. “Salinas’s Taco Stand.”
Nel wasn’t in the mood for his usual jokes. “Just got the results. What the hell am I looking at?”
“Lemme pull up the data so I can walk you through it. Alright, got it. The control samples you sent are the usual — actually looks like a remarkably clean site. Came back with your local dirt make-up for that strata — silica, trace clays. The kicker was the black stuff. It’s metal, almost completely, and the composition is from all over. We isolated it and ran some other fun tests — it’s extremely light, but magnetized somehow. The black stuff is metallic, and it's got some sort of petroleum residue.”
Nel stared at the report, phone held between her ear and shoulder. “This isn’t fucking right.”
“Sorry, Nel. We ran it three times. Looks like you got a contaminated site. We’re running the dates and we’ll get them to you as soon as possible, but at this point it’s just a formality. I very much doubt the paleos had rocket fuel.”
She hung up without saying good-bye. Danilo took a bit too much enjoyment from her difficulties. He could join Los Pobladores and I probably wouldn’t notice a difference.