Ammonite

In her dream, she walked along a long, bleak shore littered with bladderwrack and feathers and seashells. Someone was down by the surf. Thenike. She held something out to Marghe, something hard and bright, crusted with wet sand. A chambered nautilus. “Do you see, Marghe,” she said, opening it as though it were on a hinge, “shells are not empty.” Chamber after gleaming chamber was filled with soft, wet life. Such a fragile and beautiful thing. Precious. Then the shell and Thenike were gone, and Marghe was running up and down the beach, listening desperately for the cries of her mother, who was trapped inside one of the shells and being swept away on the tide.

But something caught her attention, something dark and wet, gleaming in a nest of seaweed. She stooped for it. A fossilized shell, an ammonite. It was cold and heavy in her maimed hand, like stone. But her mother was being swept away. You can’t lose me now, it whispered, you’ve onty just found me. And while she watched, it sank into her palm and disappeared. When she looked up, all the other shells were gone.

Marghe jerked awake. Her left hand was numb; she had slept on it. She shook it until it began to tingle, shivered as her sweat dried. She remembered her dream, the fossilized shell…

Or do you just study people like shells found on a beach? Thenike’s question had passed Marghe’s barriers and gone deep; it demanded an honest answer. To herself, at least.

Very well.

She had lived alone for as long as she could remember, her father and mother had always been so busy. She had buried herself in study, in observation and analysis. People were there to be watched, not related to. And now her mother was dead and her father estranged, and she had no friends. She had no friends, because whenever she began to get close to someone it felt like unknown territory, and it scared her; she ran away to a new place, to find new people to study, people to whom she did not necessarily have to be a person back.

To be a person back. She was not sure she knew how.

She was staring at the coverlet, trying to digest that revelation, when Thenike came back.

“How are you?”

“I don’t know.”

Thenike sat on the end of the bed. “What is it?”

Marghe did not dare look up from the coverlet. But she had to talk to someone about this, make it real. “There are some things I haven’t told you.” So many things.“About my mother. About what happened to my face.” She touched her nose, the break that only she could see. “About… about why I feel so alone.”

Thenike took her hand. “You’re not alone. I’m listening.”

“Sometimes… sometimes I feel that all I’ve got is my job. I study people, that’s who I am: studier of people. What you said this morning was true. I treat people like interesting specimens, not like humans. And I do it because… because I don’t know how else to behave. It’s as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there’s nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and brittle exterior. But I don’t have that job anymore. No shell. But If I don’t have that, then what do I have?”

She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, sinking heavy and solid, complete, into the bones of her hand.

“What did you have before your job?”

Slowly, Marghe told Thenike about how her mother, Acquila, had been an anthropologist before her, how Marghe had taken up the studies because it was a way to be close to her mother when she wasn’t there, which was often. She told her about Company. About her beating. About the death of her mother and her fear of the virus.

It was not everything, not nearly everything, but it was a start.

They were sitting peacefully, watching the fire, when Gerrel came in with lunch for herself and Marghe.

Thenike looked up. “That smells good.”

“There’s some left in the kitchen. Do you want me to get it for you?”

“Thank you.”

“Here, then. You two start in on these and I’ll bring another bowl for me.”

“If you put them by the fire, they’ll stay warm. We’ll wait for you to rejoin us,” Marghe said. She suddenly needed the company of this unconcerned child and the woman who denied she was wise. She felt depressed and uncertain, not yet ready to be alone with her new and fragile thoughts.

Marghe and Thenike talked every day. Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n’gus, queen daggerhorn, sky—stately and slow-moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.

She did not know what Thenike learned, but Marghe told her of coming to Jeep, of the trata agreement with Cassil in Holme Valley, of how Holle and Shill had lent her Pella and given her the knife that helped keep her alive. She spent one whole afternoon talking about Aoife.