Green ate and scratched his scalp. He felt greasy from being alternately too cold and too hot. Valentina said that he would get used to going without daily hot showers. He hadn’t yet.
“When you’re finished, I’ll be waiting by my trailer.”
“I won’t be long. What’s the plan for today?”
Valentina shook her head.
“It’s technically the weekend, a concept to which I am still acclimating, but if you don’t object, we have some catching up to do. Data. We still need data. And if it’s within my control, we’re going to have a gentler week, lest you think our entire profession is fear and chaos.”
A dim skull peered at Green from his recent dream.
“It’s hard to imagine we could have a less gentle week,” Green said.
Valentina spat a word Green didn’t know.
“Mr. Green, I’ve outlived many of my old superstitions, but just the same, don’t say things like that.”
He took a big bite of toast.
“Yup. Regretted it as soon as I said it,” he said with his mouth full. “Anyway, no, I don’t mind working on the weekend. It’s not as if I had plans. Another hike?”
“No, we will be staying in camp today. Probably for the next few days, at least.”
He thought of the stakes behind their need for data. He wondered who else might be heading their direction while he chewed his toast, traveling for a fishing trip or a school hike. He wondered what they might meet when they arrived.
“Teacher…we don’t need to stay in camp for me. I mean, I think we need to do whatever we can to protect people. Right? I don’t think the wolf is going to go away just because I’m…struggling a bit.”
“Admirable, but there is only so much we can do. Our power is in information. Knowledge is our best protection.”
She left him to finish his breakfast.
Green dressed and Valentina led him to the makeshift structure she called “the laboratory.” Its walls were part corrugated metal, part wooden siding, part roofing shingles. It fit in with the rest of the camp insomuch as it didn’t break the pattern of vastly diverse, mismatched structures laid out like spilled Lego bricks in front of the library tree.
They entered and he was surprised by the sparse orderliness of the interior.
A large steel L-shaped worktable occupied a third of the space, surrounded by tall cabinets full of labeled drawers, glass vessels, and equipment Green couldn’t identify.
The room was uncomfortably hot. A little electric heater whispered to itself in one corner.
“Why is it so hot in here?”
Valentina paused by a cloth-covered tray on the table.
“Close the door behind you. Are you squeamish about anatomy, Mr. Green?”
He honestly wasn’t sure. It had been many years since he dissected a frog in high school biology.
“Can I turn that heater off?”
“Just a moment.”
She removed the cloth to display several birds in different stages of dissection.
They didn’t look real. A cardinal, pinned to the work surface, was opened to display its vital organs. The bird’s internal structures gleamed pink and ocher, musculature peeled back, heart and liver framed by delicate white bone.
Green furrowed his brow and looked at the tray. His memory flashed to an afternoon dismantling bargain-buy clocks with Mr. Reynard.
“Did you learn anything?”
