Six
Teddy poisedher fingers over the keyboard and stared at the screen.
No words came.
Then she closed her eyes, imagining the scene, and settled her fingers on the keys.
No words came.
She opened her eyes and sighed, took a drink of coffee, then set the mug down and closed her eyes again.
It’ll come.
She opened her eyes and stared at the blank white screen.
* * *
Oscar was absolutely not going to think about what happened on the top of the lighthouse last night.
He took a shower—steaming hot—and carefully kept his mind blank during the whole thing by picturing the table of elements and reciting each one, in order, with its chemical symbol.
As he toweled off and dressed, he hoped he wouldn’t run into Teddy in the kitchen. She hadn’t said anything last night once they left the top of the lighthouse, but knowing her, that meant she’d saved up every thought, comment, exclamation, and question overnight and would soon be bludgeoning him with them.
All he wanted to do was bury himself in his work, and now he hadtwothings from which he needed to distract himself: Marcie’s wedding and that—whatever it had been—on the top of the lighthouse.
The word “ghost” teased the back of his mind, but he thrust it away with the same alacrity he’d have done to the lethalZaire ebolavirus.
Though when he came out to the living room he smelled fresh coffee, Teddy wasn’t there. Evidence indicated she’d made the brew (enough for both of them, it appeared) but retreated to her wing of the cottage.
Good. That meant he could work in peace.
And he did. After plugging in his earbuds and today queueing up Coldplay and Kings of Leon, he set to work preparing a few slides of samples from the hot spring.
Once he had a plate ready, he placed it on the microscope dash. He turned on the lamps, made a few adjustments—magnification, light—and took a look.
Normal water molecular structure. Tardigrades, ostracods, phages, and a variety of other, harmless microbial specimens. Wait.
“Hm.” Oscar frowned, squinting a little more.What the hell was that?He dialed back on the magnification to see the full image. A little jump of interest spiked inside him.Never seen anything like that before.He adjusted the magnification and looked closer.
Instead of the soft, organic shapes he was used to seeing, Oscar was examining something that appeared crystalline and spiky. Shiny and silvery, even under the microscope. That little jump of interest turned into something more like a leap, and he moved the slide around to see if there were other examples of this unfamiliar microbe. There were…randomly, but more than one example. He quickly pulled out samples from a different Cubitainer—maybe that first one had somehow been contaminated.
But no. There they were, the unrecognizable crystals, noticeable only at one hundred magnification. His spike of interest had blown into full-fledged curiosity.
Was it possible? Was there something unique enough about the hot spring to make this trip actually worth something? Oscar had never seen anything like that spiky crystal organism before. It didn’t look like anything else.
Impossible. But…
“I should go get another sample,” he said. Just to make sure what he was looking at was uncontaminated.
He’d get it himself this time. He’d climb into the pool, gather three samples himself, making sure it was done correctly…and then he’d take another look.
“Another sample of what?”
He turned, jolted out of his music and thoughts.
Teddy was there. She must have walked into the kitchen without him even noticing. She looked determined, for her hair was pulled back into a messy knot at the back of her head and she carried a slim silver laptop that looked as if it weighed hardly more than a magazine. In the other hand was a steaming mug of coffee.
Oscar pulled out his earbud, leaving Chris Martin to mutedly sing into the room. “How’s your writing going?” he asked.
