“I find I no longer care what such people may try to do to me. If you allow me to, I will bring all my power and privilege to bear on your behalf, and damn the consequences. When you—” He stops, takes a breath, starts again. “When you care for someone, you want your life to look different. You want that person to be happy, even if that means they’re happy without you.
“I’ll go if you want me to, Ripley. But for your sake and mine, I beg you to let me stay.”
Ripley’s hands clench on the wheel, indecision ripping her down the middle like a piece of paper whose edges will never come together properly again. She can’t be objective, and neither can he. They’ve tangled up themselves and the dig and their wants and needs beyond any reasonable ability to pick the threads apart.
Three weeks. That’s all they have left. In the span of a lifetime, it’s nothing.
For her and James, it might be everything.
“Youshouldgo.” She watches his chest crumple in her peripheral vision. “Staying would be the stupidest thing you’ve done in your life. If I know Will at all, he’ll be trying even harder to destroy me. To destroyus.You should lawyer up,” she says. “If you decide to stay, that is.”
He takes a jagged breath, lets it out on a broken sigh. Ripley heard him make that sound when his medication kicked in. It broke her heart a little then, and it breaks it a little now.
“All right, then,” he says softly, putting his hand over hers on the gearshift. “We stay.”
33
August 13:
Fifteen Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
“I heard the drone first,” Finn insists.
“But I got the video,” Fiona says triumphantly.
The two of them are still pissed at each other over Mindy. Neither is satisfied with Ripley’s conciliatory “You both did a great job.”
The twins wander off, still arguing. Ripley and Cara huddle over Fiona’s phone to rewatch the blurry, distant video of a four-propellered machine hovering over the canyon, adjusting its position in quick, insect-like movements, then zipping away across the Shipman property.
Those things have good cameras, Ripley’s pretty sure. Maybe a drone can’t see every detail, but the canyon tells its own story.
Any paleontologist would know what it means that two weeks before summer’s end, the site is still going full tilt instead of gradually closing up. The tools and people are all clustered at the south end of the canyon, all the excavations inactive except one.
She and Cara might as well have spray-paintedWe Found Something Big and It Can’t Waiton the cabin roofs.
“We don’t know it’s Will,” Ripley says grimly, zooming in on a still frame until the drone turns into a senseless, pixelated gray blob.
“Oh, it’s him,” Cara says. “At least, it’s some kind of asshole, which makes it statistically likely to be him.”
“I wish we’d let the twins make that Wi-Fi network they wanted. Maybe they could’ve hacked a drone.”
“Maybe, but that was a big machine. Big battery, big transponder. It was probably uploading its footage continuously. By the time the twins saw it, it was already too late.”
Ripley puts a hand to her belly. Lately, her stomach’s been bothering her even though she’s cut out most of her coffee intake, which hurts her feelings. Thinking about the drone wrings her stomach like a washcloth. It’s not possible for the team to work any faster.
“Breathe, Rip. We’re going to make it.”
“Eight days to the scanner,” she replies. Beauty is safely capped, turned, and crated, but it’ll take everything they have to get Beast out of the ground by then. They don’t have time for fine exploratory work, so they’re leaving huge margins around him to minimize the chance of overlooking stray bones. To lift the giant chunk of matrix, Ripley will have to rent heavy equipment, which costs money, which makes a paper trail.
Yet another path Will can follow straight to Clever Girl.
“I am so, so sorry, Cara. I led Will right to our door.”
“Don’t be stupid, Rip. And don’t disrespect me by pretending I didn’t make every decision right along with you.”
“Maybe. But this still feels like shit.”
“Yup,” Cara says matter-of-factly. “It’s shit.”
