6.7

  Suddenly, she found she couldn’t stop herself from talking about it anymore.

  She and Ray had been hiking for a few hours, and, just like before, they had found it easier going than they would have initially expected. It was noticeably steeper and had a few sections where they had to slow down and make sure to be careful over rougher terrain. But it didn’t feel actually wild at all.

  And she was still looking at everything around her as a potential relic, some source of insight into whomever made the arch and the other little artifacts. They didn’t see much as they ascended: there were some rocks at the base of large trees, but not according to any pattern she could see, and they might just be rocks.

  And Ray was just walking. He was putting one boot in front of the other, the same as any other trip. And maybe what made that so annoying was that she didn’t have a specific other thing he should be doing — there wasn’t another priority or anything and they did need to move quickly. But she probably let her annoyance show when she asked him, “Is this not new to you? Have you seen this before?”

  He didn’t acknowledge the tone, but he looked back at her and said, “They’re all new. That’s the whole idea.”

  Adelaide rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. The arch, the cairns, all of it — is that something you’ve seen before? Is this a secret Triangle veteran thing? Do you all find traces of alien civilizations all the time and just keep your mouths shut?”

  She hadn’t articulated the thought to herself before she shared it, but she couldn’t deny its plausibility once she did. There were always rumors about secrets kept by the GUides, and there weren’t as many Guide tell-alls as one might have expected. And what was more likely: that she stumbled onto this sort of discovery her second time through, or that artifacts were common but suppressed?

  “I don’t know that what we’ve found counts as a civilization,” Ray responded.

  “Stop being evasive. Have you found stuff like this before or not? Are you tripping over pottery every time you cross over?”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “You’re not thinking about what most journeys are like. Most people aren’t following some science thing around all the time. They go in, they cut trees or mine or hunt, and then they go home. My job is to keep people safe, so I’m thinking about weather, wildlife, sometimes the terrain. I’m working. Not that I’m not working now, but it’s not normally my job to think about history or where things come from. I just make sure the people who pay me and the stuff they pay me with gets back through the Triangle on schedule.”

  Adelaide paused for a moment, imagining that kind of voyage. She knew that was the most common thing, intellectually, but Ray’s description made her reflect on what it would be like, setting foot on a brand new island and barely taking a look around before clearcutting it.

  After a minute of silence, Ray spoke up again, unprompted. “I have to admit, you have me wondering. A week ago, I would have said I’d never seen an artifact or a trace of intelligence. I never took any of the elf stuff seriously, never even worried about it. But now, now that we’ve seen this, I’m thinking back on things, and now I’m less sure.

  “Once I was placing a base camp around a mining operation, and I saw this little cave. When people think of caves in a movie, they imagine this little like Fred Flinstone hole, but that’s not what they’re really like, they’re really these whole sprawling networks that run from too narrow to crawl through to absolutely massive, and they are mostly underwater. But I remember seeing this one cave that actually was like the Fred Flinstone thing: a little carved-out hole in the side of a cliff, connected to nothing. And I remember thinking how funny that was, but I moved on and hadn’t thought about it again until today. Until right now.

  “Or another time we were hunting, and I wasn’t in charge of the hunt but I was with everyone, and we hear this guy yell out, so we all rush over. And we get there, and he’s fine, he just took a step backwards and fell into this pile of bones, just tons of them. We’re in the middle of a hunt, so no one does anything other than tell the guy to stop scaring off the game. At the time, I assumed it was just where the hunters left the carrion, or like an elephant graveyard. And maybe it was, but now I’m trying to remember it and the skeletons seemed like they were sort of all in one piece? But maybe that’s wrong.”

  “So that’s what I’ve been doing — I keep tripping over old memories and wondering if I missed something because it never occurred to me to look. I’ve seen trees stripped of branches only on one side, I’ve seen rows of coral extending off of islands, I’ve seen leaves covering ditches. But all of those could have been natural. They probably were. But now I’m thinking about them.

  “You’ll probably think this is weird, but it’s like when you look at clouds or trees and you see faces even when you know there aren’t any faces. That’s what it’s like.”

  Adelaide smiled at him. “Yeah, I know what that’s like.”