Minutes to Burn

She dumped the body on the fire and watched the flames eat into it. Her expression had hardened, her face steeling itself with resolve. She stoked the fire with a forked stick.

Savage was crouching just like her on the far side of the fire, and she could barely see the outline of his shoulders and his thickening beard through the flames. For a moment, Cameron imagined she was looking into a mirror and seeing herself lit in fire, but the sensation passed like a warm spell of water in the sea.

"Three more," she said.

They sat silently around the fire until exhaustion finally caught up with them, and they drifted off to their respective tents, one by one, to steal a few hours' rest before the morning recons.

Having cleaned her hands with antibacterial gel, Cameron settled in for first watch, resting the spike across her knees. Diego sat, exhausted, leaning against the base of a log, the radio between his legs. He clicked tediously through his SOS. By now, Cameron knew the pattern by heart.

"Would it help if you told them I'd be willing to run future expeditions here, monitor the island life?" Diego asked, his eyes on the radio.

"I don't know," Cameron said.

His keying the handset was the only noise in the darkness. After a few moments, Diego raised his head. "They would really do it?"

Cameron looked at him blankly.

"Bomb the island," he clarified.

"If they deem it necessary, yes."

"Necessary." Diego laughed a short, sad laugh. "It'll leave this place nothing but barren volcanic rock. A dead hump of stone protruding from the sea, just like it was three million years ago." He clicked the handset. Long short long. "Three million years. Three million years of life taking hold here in minute, painstaking increments." His ponytail swayed as he shook his head. "One third of the plants here are found nowhere else. Half of the birds and insects. Ninety percent of the rep-tiles. These tortoises could be the same ones Darwin himself saw on his expedition. The very same ones."

Cameron did not respond.

"When you look around here," he asked "what do you see?"

Cameron shrugged. "Rocks. Trees."

Diego laughed his sad laugh again. He pointed to a small fern that rose from the matted grass past the fire. "Spores of ferns can resist low temperatures. They were sucked up in the air, probably blown out here all the way from the mainland, and they dropped to the earth with the condensation." He gestured to the Scalesia forest. "The first Scalesia seeds, probably carried over in birds' stomachs, or stuck to the mud on their feet." He spread his arms wide. "Legumes are plentiful here because the empty space between the embryo and external shell makes their seeds like little rafts. Cotton-resilient to long stays in salt water." He raised a hand from the radio, watching an ant work its way along his forearm. "Ants carried here on palm tree logs. Turtles using the pockets of air between their upper backs and shells to float out here, spiders surviving windstorms, dropping to the islands from three thousand meters."

He dropped his hands heavily to the ground between his legs. "You see rocks and trees. I see order and reason and design and beauty." He lowered his head. "Don't let them bomb this island."

"It got to this from bare lava," Cameron said. "It can do it again."

Diego studied her, and she grew uncomfortable under his eyes. Finally, he looked away. His voice was hoarse when he spoke. "Some people never realize how valuable something is until they destroy it."

Chapter 55

30 DEC 07 MISSION DAY 6

For the first time in nearly 120 hours, Derek slept. He dreamed of Jacqueline's eyes, enigmatic swirling pools as dark as blood. He could have sworn they were lighter once, that they flickered with some hidden illumination, but maybe that had been his imagination.

The Night Of, he'd gone alone to midnight mass. The drive home afterward was peaceful, but the air had choked out of him when his house first loomed in view. It had looked different, imperceptibly yet ter-rifyingly altered. Branches had curled into the sky, skeletal fingers straining toward the moon. Shadows had fallen in chunks and blocks about the yard at all the wrong angles; the yellow paint had grown wan; the front door had gleamed as if afire. He'd known at once that something was dreadfully wrong within.

He stirred from his sleep, the inside of the tent lit green from the can-vas. His dreams had been painfully vivid. He raised the flap of the tent and peered out, feeling like a captive, which he supposed he was. Tank sat on the log facing the forest. A spike leaned against the log beside him.