It landed like a hand on the center of my chest. Steady. The kind of pressure that didn't push you backward but held you exactly where you were and wouldn't let you retreat.
I opened my notebook again. Wrote nothing, because my hand wasn't steady enough to write.
The light changed. The gold deepened, went amber, and the shadows on the water merged until the river's surface was more dark than light. The sky turned from rose to violet, and the first stars appeared.
"Watch the margins," I said. "The shallow water along the south bank. That's where they'll start."
The first flash came from low in the grasses. A single pulse—yellow-green, two-thirds of a second, then dark.
A second flash. A third. A dozen.
They rose from the bank like something the earth was breathing out. Not all at once—in waves, starting low in the grasses and lifting into the air in slow, drifting arcs, each flash a precisely timed signal in a language that had been running for a hundred million years.Photinus carolinus—I was almost sure of it from the synchrony, the way clusters of males flashed in near-unison and then went dark together, a coordinated pulse that swept along the bank like a wave.
They moved out over the water. The surface caught their reflections, doubling every flash, so the river became a mirror of light—above and below, real and reflected, until I couldn't tell where the air ended and the water began.
I had the nets in the dry bag. The sample jars were right there.
I didn't reach for any of it.
I sat in the raft and watched the fireflies fill Hadley Bend. For the first time in my career, the scientist in me went quiet, and the rest of me opened up. Not because the data didn't matter. Because something was happening that was bigger than data.
Bishop was sitting three feet away, and he was watching me instead of the fireflies. I could feel it without turning my head. Not the way men usually watched me—the assessment, the inventory, the quick decision about what I was for. He waswatching me the way he watched the river. Like I was something worth learning by heart.
"You're not looking at them," I said.
"I've seen them before."
"You've never seen them like this. The synchronous flashing—that's rare. That's?—"
My voice caught. Not because of the science. Because of the way he was looking at me, and the fact that I wanted him to keep looking, and the fact that wanting that felt like the most dangerous thing I'd ever done.
He guided the raft toward the south bank, settling the hull into the shallows where the current couldn't reach. He caught a low-hanging branch of river birch and held it, keeping us steady. Anchored. Fireflies drifting above us and reflected below us, the current moving past in the dark beyond us.
We weren't going anywhere. He'd made sure of it.
"I don't do this," I said. "I don't—this isn't?—"
"I know."
"Stop saying you know."
"I'll stop when it stops being true."
"You don't know me. You met me yesterday."
"I know you drove three hours because the work mattered enough to drive three hours. I know you sat in a diner booth and told me about bioluminescent signaling patterns for forty-five minutes and apologized twice for being interesting." His voice was steady, the way the river was steady—not still, just constant. "I know you showed up tonight with a sampling kit you haven't opened because something happened on this water that you didn't plan for and you're trying to figure out whether to be scared of it."
"Iamscared of it," I said.
"I know."
"If I let this happen—if I let you—" I stopped. Started again. "My entire life, people have looked at me and decided what I am before I open my mouth. Pretty. Friendly. Not serious. I have spent years proving that I am serious, that the work matters, that I'm not just—that I'm not?—"
"A girl playing scientist."
I flinched. Not because he'd said it wrong. Because he'd said it exactly right.
"If I let this happen," I said, "every person who ever looked at me and saw something decorative gets to be right. ‘She went out to do fieldwork and came back with a boyfriend.’ That's the story. That's what they'll say."
