Of Bones and Organs Past

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” Marissa says. We sit knee-to-knee in a small, freshly-dug trench, wide enough to spread our arms out. The walls of the trench––packed with dry, gritty dirt and pockmarked with the hollows of fallen rocks––reach high enough to escape the night’s bitter wind, but not enough to escape its raking howl. I lean in closer.

“Back home, some believe they’re as old as the Valley itself. You remember the stories, I’m sure.” Her lantern crackles as she tenderly brushes at something on the ground beside her. “But no, they weren’t always here. And that’s the important thing to remember, Olivia: there’s always a time before, and a time after.” Her soft voice barely rises above the wind. “As fate would have it, we happen to be here after them. So we’re the ones with the brushes.”

Every stroke of her brush whispers up dust clouds that engulf us. The dust cakes onto my skin, sticking to the cold sweat of the long, anxious trek here. I shiver and try to avoid inhaling it. It had taken Marissa months of wary, sporadic digging, but tonight, she found what she’d been looking for. And finally, finally she brought me. I stifle a cough.

“Well, go on,” I say.

“The first dragons came to the Valley nearly a hundred million years ago. From Earth, like us. Whether they knew what the Valley is, or what comes after it, we’ll probably never know.” She pauses to exchange her brush for a chisel, which she begins tapping into the rock. “All we can do now is guess.

“But we have the important details. Once you get those, it becomes a story in its own way, a long one, an epic, I suppose.” She speaks with a confidence well beyond the few years she has on me. I envy the time she’s been able to spend out here, so far removed from the sort of life I’ve lived. “You’ll hear it all later.”

“Sounds dry,” I say. The tapping stops.

“Oh,” Her knees piston slightly against mine as she shifts her weight away from her side to face me. I brace, realizing what’s coming. “It’s bone-dry.” She grins. “Bone-dry,” she repeats, speaking with the lilt that only escapes just before she laughs.

I throw my hands up. “I regret saying anything.”

She laughs. “Hey, give me your hand.”

I reach out my right. She takes it and guides it down past her side, to the ground, onto something wedged in the dirt. Not wedged––buried. Barely exposed, surrounded in fine dirt that she must’ve been brushing off. Marissa directs my hand a little bit more. And I find it.

I first notice its remarkable smoothness, smooth to the point of feeling unnaturally cool. It reaches about a handspan in length. Both ends duck back into the dirt. Within the dirt it is a preserved island of life. Or one of death.

In my head, I already know what it is. How many times had I asked Marissa to take me here? How many times did I dream of being out in the field too, for once? For exactly this?

My fingertips linger there for a while before I realize how quiet I’ve been.

“Wow,” I whisper. I clear my throat. “Wow.”

“I know.”

“Is it always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Magical,” I say despite myself.

“Every time,” she whispers back, fully child again, too.

It takes Marissa nearly all night to exhume the fossils. I hold her tools and hand her what she needs when she asks. Occasionally she hands me a bone she’s extracted and invites me to describe it, which I take great pleasure doing.

“Serrated hand rail,” I say about one bone neither serrated nor banister-shaped.

“Absolutely not!” she says, laughing.

“Yes, but you still have to write these down. It’s fieldwork. I’m doing fieldwork.”

“I am not writing that, that’s just so––” she stops, her body tensing ever so slightly.

I wait a moment.

“Just so…?”

She grips my hand tight, her heart pounding through her fingers. I quiet my breathing and listen. Dense fabric muffles the lantern. She’s covered the light. I hold my breath and strain my ears and hear… nothing.

I figure if they’ve seen us, we’re dead already. I lean close again. “What do you see?”

“I thought I heard them.”

I pause again. “I don’t hear anything.”

After a few seconds, her grip slackens. I feel both of our heartbeats begin to slow. We share a few moments of silence.

“There’s more I want to do here. We should leave and finish in the daylight, in the afternoon, just in case,” she says. “But tonight… tonight I’m going to request that the observatory make all their… hand rails serrated.”

“You are so evil,” I say, trying my best not to smile.

There are only enough bones to fill one of the small wooden containers she brought, about the size of a shoe box. She has four, each filled with this soft compressive material I don’t get the chance to ask about. A kind of stuffing to keep the bones from banging around, I assume. She offers to carry the three empty ones on the way back and let me carry the fourth, which feels naively trusting even by her standards. But I don’t mind.

By rooster-crow, we’re back in her office, which sits at the base of the Post’s observatory and abuts the Valley’s great eastern plain where we were hours before. A small window welcomes the rising sun that warms my legs. The wind, a bit subdued now, plays the shutters like a set of drums.

Keeping my eyes open and my head upright gets harder with every second, but so does sleeping––the excitement to finally meet her friends and peers is mounting, so I opt for a strong coffee before I make a fool of myself. I sit against the wall and drink and listen.

Time doesn’t seem to affect Marissa as it does mortals, and if she’s disappointed by the find, she doesn’t show it either. Instead, she whizzes through her office like a hummingbird, collecting fossils, scratching words onto paper, mumbling to herself when she thinks I can’t hear her. Her heart is beating nearly twice as fast as mine. She’s frenetic. I can’t help but smile again at the chaos.

“You seem calm.”

She sighs. “My friends are a little intimidating sometimes.”

“I’m not worried about it.”

“I’m glad you’re not.” She hustles past me toward her desk, briefly blocking the sunlight. “I was more worried about myself, actually.”

“They’re your friends. I’m worried about them.”

“You’re on all the time, aren’t you? They’re just incredible scientists. It’s crazy for me to think of them as peers. They’re so much older than us.”

I laugh. “What are you, 25 now? You’ve got a few years on me.”

“Eh,” Marissa says, distracted. “Sometimes I forget we’re not the same person. You know, because we look so similar.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

We meet up with her peers at the only bar close to the Post. From what I can tell, it’s not much more than an outdoor vendor with barebones seating, but that doesn’t stop the drinks and good times from rolling.

I meet the three of them at the same time. There’s Dr. Mallory, a massive brute of a man with a thick beard and two peg legs. He has an octopus tattoo that stretches from his shoulder, around his neck, and up the side of his face. Then Griselda Orrin, whom I determine is insane when she tells me to call her Griselda and not Doctor. She’s ancient and about as thin as my wrist with long, curly hair and a sharp nose. She’s taller than Dr. Mallory, and she sports an extra eyeball on one temple that’s constantly disagreeing with his face tattoo. The last is Maxwell, who introduces himself as such. Maxwell has no features yet; Maxwell is just a formless blob. All of these details are faithful, sort of, from my perspective.

Being blind, in a lot of ways, is freeing. Not the helpful, convenient ways of course. But in the little private things that I try my best to appreciate. I get to imagine people as I wish, or how they make me feel. In some ways, I find that it’s harder for people to hide themselves from me. They can’t paint themselves gold. That works for me. Marissa seems less worried about appearances around me. So I feel the same way with her.

“So, Olivia, you work in eschatology?” asks Dr. Mallory.

“No, my parents do. I’m just along for the ride.”

“I didn’t think they allowed married couples passage into the Valley,” says Griselda quietly.

“Not until or after me. Just me,” I say. “They are the best at what they do, so I guess it was a necessary evil to bring them out here.”

“Hardly an evil,” says Dr. Mallory. “It’s a pleasure to get to know you and see what you two found.” What we found? I raise my eyebrows and kick Marissa’s leg under the table.

“We’re excited. There’s a bit of a hiccup though.” Marissa pauses. “The dig site is close to sector F.”

A chorus of exasperated sighs come from across the table. “That’s not a hiccup, Marissa, that’s a legitimate problem,” says Dr. Mallory.

“An eructation, at least,” says Griselda. “How close is it to sector F?”

“Well,” says Marissa. “It’s in sector F.”

Griselda scoffs.

I jump in. “What’s wrong with sector F?”

“It’s where Denis’ men operate,” says Griselda.

“Allegedly,” Dr. Mallory says. “But Denis’ men are ruthless nonetheless. He’ll stop at nothing to get what we have, or to beat us to the next thing. Denis is a dragon bone collector, and a damn good one at that. His collection rivals the Post’s, but he’s selfish with little regard for what happens on Earth, or here, for that matter.”

“All the more reason to get out there,” says Marissa. “It was a good spot. There’s a little more digging I want to do, but I have a really good feeling about it. And if we’re back before nightfall, we should be fine. They don’t roam during the day. I think.”

“I say we go,” says Dr. Mallory.

“I say we stay,” says Griselda.

Marissa sighs. “Maxwell, I’ll leave it up to you.”

There’s a pause as we wait for him to speak.

He doesn’t respond, but perhaps nods. Marissa continues. “Looks like we’re going, then. Let’s make this as quick as we can. Keep the group as small as possible.”

They begin to stand. “It was nice to meet you all,” I say.

Marissa puts her hand on my shoulder. “Are you not coming?”

“If it’s dangerous, wouldn’t I be a liability?”

She tsks. “You’re our ears. Plus, I’m hoping we’ll need an extra set of hands on the way back.”

It doesn’t take long before the five of us are out in the plain. They’ve all brought their equipment, findings, and records with them. Their boxes and bags rattle with each step. We reach the trench and all of them descend but Dr. Mallory, who stomps next to me and stands in silence.

“Are you going to join them?”

“Not enough room,” he says with a hint of disappointment. “But I’m more of a bird guy than an archaeologist or draconologist.”

“Birds? Did they descend from dragons?”

“Oh, no. Despite some striking similarities, they evolved separately. Evolution is a biased guide.”

I think for a moment, listening to the chirp of hammers and chisels working away at the ground. “What do you mean, ‘biased?’”

“Well, what are the odds that two drastically different animals independently develop the same, never-before-seen advantages?”

“Obviously good enough.”

He laughs. “Yes, that’s true. Given a few hundred million years, the odds are good enough. And with evolution comes incredible physiological innovations.” He pauses. “Like bird lungs.”

I smile. “Are you going to make me ask?”

Dr. Mallory shifts to face me, his voice a bit louder in my face. “Breathe in,” he says, closer now. I do. “Hold it. You’re filling your chest with oxygen. Now breathe out. You’re releasing carbon dioxide. It’s a mutually exclusive cycle, in, out, in, out.”

“Right.”

“You can’t do both at the same time, I can’t either, none of us weak, fleshy, puny humans can. Agh, poor us. Whatever. But birds can. They’ve developed highly efficient lungs, a unidirectional lung where oxygen is absorbed both when the bird inhales, and when it exhales. Birds have these balloon-like air sacs attached to the lungs that store extra oxygen. That means they always have oxygen, even when exhaling. Brilliant, brilliant!”

He turns back to the trench, now speaking toward the others. “And, most important to their research, when these air sacs inflate, they expand into chest cavities built into the bone called pneumatic fenestrae. These cavities are encoded into the DNA. So even if we don’t have the fossilized lung of a dinosaur––”

“The bone’s structure is a dead giveaway.”

He turns back, even louder. “Precisely. Precisely!”

“And you learn all this just from looking at rocks and bones.” I make sure to phrase it as a statement. It feels less naive.

“Not so. From reading it, feeling it out,” Dr. Mallory says. “The important things, Olivia, one can only feel out.”

A few hours later, Dr. Mallory and Maxwell have wandered off. I sit with Marissa and Griselda in the trench, listening to them catalog and discuss their findings before boxing them up. I fidget with the stones around where I’ve been sitting, fitting them back into hollow indentations in the wall where some of them fell out.

“Another tooth. A sparker, I would guess?” Marissa says.

“B4?”

“B3, I think.”

Griselda pencils it down.

“Sparker?” I ask, driving another rock into the wall.

“You take this one,” Marissa says to Griselda. “I’m too deep in thought.”

Griselda sighs and turns to me. “Well, I’m not going to waste your time with breathing exercises. Dragons are often referred to as ignispirators, which incorrectly suggests that they breathed fire. Which they did not. They breathed oxygen. And like us, they exhaled carbon dioxide. Which is also not fire. I’m not a fan of the taxonomy here. However, dragons are theorized to have had specialized air sacs for accumulating and discharging this methane gas out of their oral cavity.”

“That’s what the special tooth was for, generating sparks!”

“Theoretically. It’s mostly unclear because they rarely seemed to use fire. We’d see more burn marks on the teeth. They were vegetarians after all, which is how they got their methane.”

“So… fire was just a defense?”

“Probably, or for finding a mate, but that was likely once in a lifetime. They were such solitary creatures, not communal, apparently not extremely intelligent. Very territorial. Their remains are rarely found in similar areas, as you might see with pack animals that perish together in a flash flood, for instance.”

Marissa grunts. “What lives together, dies together.”

My hands idly search for more rocks. “Why not intelligent, then?”

“Besides the other reasons? Because they couldn’t make it out of the Valley,” Dr. Mallory says, returning to the edge of the trench. “Every living thing is programmed––no, fundamentally designed––to follow Nature’s given path. Earth, then the Valley, and then Beyond, in that order. And somehow, for some reason, they simply could not make it any farther than this.”

“Or worse,” says Maxwell.

I clench my fingers around another rock. I’m almost afraid to ask. “What?”

His voice is unnervingly high and quiet. “Something kept them out.”

There’s a too-long beat of silence.

“Anyway, it’s a question for your parents,” says Dr. Mallory. “I’m sure they know better than anyone what comes after this place.” He thumps to a sitting position on the edge of the trench.

Marissa clears her throat. “Hey, guys, I can’t get a feel for this one. The structure seems like a chain on the upper spinal cord, maybe C3, but look at this fracture line here. It goes all the way around. It looks like it broke and then healed.”

Dr. Mallory clicks his teeth and speaks slowly. “Well, no, because that breakage is a death sentence for any avian.” But he sounds unconvinced.

Marissa sets the bone down. “That’s why I’m confused. It shouldn’t have healed this well. It shouldn’t have healed at all. The creature would have starved or died of thirst, or been eaten, or literally anything else.”

My fingers clamp onto another rock. I try to pull it up, only it doesn’t come. It’s wedged deep in the ground.

“Well,” says Dr. Mallory, grunting as he stands back up. “Except for a miracle.”

I brush the dirt off until it’s smooth. Exceptionally smooth. “Marissa?”

“What is it?”

“I’m probably crazy, but is this a rock?”

She takes a few steps toward me. “That is not a rock, Olivia,” she says, surprise in her voice. “That’s another fossil.”

“That’s not just a fossil,” says Griselda. She shuffles forward too, then twists her torso back and forth between me and the pile of fossils on the other side of the trench. “That’s another dragon.”

Marissa sighs. “Well. Shit. Do you know what that means?”

“What dies together, lived together, maybe?” I offer.

“That’s a lot of papers to throw out.”

There’s movement out of the trench a ways away, scattered steps.

Dr. Mallory laughs. “Well, about that miracle––”

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Dr. Mallory’s body tumbles into the trench and smashes into the box of cataloged bones. I hold my breath for a quiet instant. And then screams erupt around me.