Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  She is right to have chosen this way. The loose stones grow into boulders and then into craggy canyon walls and soon open up to pathways between them. There is fresh growth within this sheltering ground and water that runs free of ice. She drinks with joy, the liquid so sweet from its passage through the stone. She senses that other kinds of life may be hiding here but she sees no tracks yet, the snowfall is too fresh. This is a good place to set multiple traps and wait. She takes note of all the best positions for a snare before choosing a winding walkway to explore.

  And then she knows that they are not alone.

  Her pace quickens with her pulse. Every sense springs to readiness, blade-sharp and alert. Skin prickles over muscles that are tight yet ready for action. She listens beyond the breeze, smells the dusty heartbeat of the earth. This is the feeling of the chase. Except this time, they are the prey.

  She has heard it, felt it, knows it is circling them… following.

  How big? Too big to fight. Too powerful to outrun. Is there anywhere safe to climb? But then she will have to outwait it and she can’t. It is a battle of patience she may not win. She knows she must outsmart it.

  *

  Impasse. Eloise struggled to hold back her frustration, it was never useful to the method. The teeth had been a dead end, no useable preserved dentine. The skeletal yield was little better, and worse, it seemed the first batch of bone powder had been contaminated beyond the expected presence of microbial DNA.

  Despite careful cleaning of the samples with enzymes, tests had revealed the presence of human Y chromosome fragments. As X was undoubtedly female these should not have been there, unless at some stage during the process present-day male DNA had come into contact with the remains.

  Eloise could not believe this had happened at her lab, but there was no point in seeking or apportioning blame, these were the risks inherent with handling ancient bones. She did wonder for a chilling moment, however, whether anyone unauthorised could have come into contact with Female X? All staff, from management to services, were fully vetted and trained, access to the clean room was highly restricted, but there was a new senior caretaker being eased in to take over from a retiring predecessor. Could any errors have been made? Could curiosity have got the better of anyone else in the building? No, surely not. Whatever the source of the contamination, the result remained. They would have to start again.

  Back at her desk, she logged on and entered her password (a varying recombination of family birthdates with those same four, protean letters: GTCA) and then opened an ominously brief message from Eugene Vanterpool calling her into a meeting. Eloise felt a spasm in her solar plexus. A summons from the Director rarely boded well. The long walk to the west wing of the building did little to help her mood. When she reached the restored oak door of the ‘bank vault’ (as the Director’s office was unlovingly known) it was an inch open. She knocked once and walked in with as much confidence as she could muster.

  ‘Dr Kluft! Thank you for your time. Please, come in, sit down, Eloise. The Java’s still hot. A sweet tooth as I recall? How many sugars again?’

  ‘Three. Thank you, Eugene.’

  To take up this invitation, Eloise had to move his crocodile attaché case from the armchair he kept for visitors, but struggled to find space for it on his antique desk – despite its imposing dimensions. Eugene may or may not have been aware of this necessity as he turned away from her and towards his fully equipped little galley.

  ‘This is good stuff, you know!’ he announced from over his shoulder, ‘I brought it back from the islands myself.’

  As Eugene busied himself with beverage-making, she realised how much she’d enjoyed the three weeks without scrutiny while her boss had holidayed in his native Caribbean. He appeared well-nourished from it, his white shirt straining slightly at his expensive belt, the salt and pepper in his close-shorn curls a touch more luminous, a glow to his deep-brown skin. Eloise hoped his patience and understanding had been equally recharged.

  ‘How was your trip?’ she asked, not really wanting to know.

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful, thank you. The materfamilias is still going strong. Ninety-two, can you believe it? Still chasing the birds from her mango trees. It makes me hopeful for my own hard-earned retirement!’

  His familiar baritone had a light and unfamiliar lilt. A little forced perhaps? Oh dear, thought Eloise, if he is this jovial, it must be bad news.

  ‘So. How are things, Eloise?’

  He knows how things are, she thought, she had updated him on their progress (or lack of it) by email only yesterday. She resented having to tell him again. Out loud.

  ‘Well, no change from the last report, but we’re still very positive…’

  ‘No, no, with you, my dear, with you. What’s happening in your life?’ he asked with what appeared to be genuine interest.

  Eloise tried very hard not to squirm. Did he really want to know about her personal life, and if so why? Could he be concerned that she was not 100 per cent committed and focused?

  ‘Nothing but this really… Eugene, what’s this all about?’

  ‘Well, my dear Dr Kluft. I have just come back from the High Commission. The Kenyans are keen to hear of progress, as you can imagine. They need to know that they have made the right decision for their girl.’

  Confusingly to Eloise, Eugene was still smiling.

  ‘And you, of course, assured them that they have?’ she asked, smiling too, through the rictus of anxiety.

  ‘Well, of course, of course. I know how much effort you poured into that pitch, Eloise, both on paper and through your various contacts. And we are all in awe of your enthusiasm. Indeed, I didn’t mind too much when you went over my head, because, after all, this will be a feather in all of our caps. So long as we can pull it off. However, it seems that we now have another player on the field.’

  The knot in her stomach tightened.

  ‘Another player? Who, Germany? Look, I know they would have been the obvious first choice…’

  ‘No, no, my dear. The Americans. A laboratory in the US claims to have developed a new sequencing technique. They are lobbying for a handover…’

  No! Eloise wasn’t sure whether she had shouted this out loud or not, but Eugene carried on regardless.

  ‘… Furthermore, the Foundation is becoming, well, shall we say, a little concerned. Perhaps if the Americans can push forward faster or can offer more, we may have to hand her over? Though your grant may be portable, Eloise, and we may be able to second you to the project somehow as well? But, yes, there would be a risk to the grant’s renewal. I mean, you know very well how our funding has been squeezed, how much competition there is between all of our projects. First, since the financial crisis and now with this EU disaster.’

  Fucking bankers. Bloody bumbling politicians and lying bastard, tax-dodging media barons, Eloise cursed silently, thinking briefly yet fondly of the fearless soul who had taught her to profane without remorse (and how, for reasons she was yet to fathom, she had begun to miss him more than ever, even if he might have become that real-life distraction for Eugene to fret about). But this threat to control over her ‘baby’ was a potential disaster. And she would need that grant renewal, was counting on it if she was going to publish.

  If there was a hell, Eloise decided, then its depths must be populated by whoever pulled the purse strings against enlightenment. (Even if the same inferno scorched the feet of those forced to make Faustian pacts in order to do the work.) Eloise was tempted to swear again, outwardly, but then managed a more measured voice than she’d anticipated.

  ‘No. No, we cannot give her up lightly, Eugene. We cannot even consider it!’

  X belonged to Eloise now and she had grown close, was beginning to know her. A rendered 3D print of the skull was in the Netherlands for facial reconstruction, along with scans and measurements of the skeletal remains. Soon, soon, she would meet her quarry face-to-face. Female X was destined to add her own chapter to the unfolding revelation
that would change things forever, and Eloise would publish it. She could not risk losing her.

  ‘I will fight it every step of the way, Eugene. And you know how stubborn I can be! Look, if it comes to that we’ll raise the money from somewhere else if we have to. We could crowdfund it?’

  ‘Now, now, calm down, Dr Kluft, calm down. I don’t want to see this happen any more than you. There have been no decisions as yet, only discussions. I merely thought that you should be, let’s say, aware. And if the worst comes to the worst, well, I suppose you can go back to your clinical epigenetic work that much sooner. There is, at least, some economic potential in that.’

  Eugene was somehow still smiling. Eloise, meanwhile, was arming for a fight.

  ‘Yes, but you know that Female X could potentially inform that project too! Who knows what we might learn… and then share! The Americans will try to take over, try to patent anything they can develop, you know that. We can’t give her up, Eugene!’

  ‘Sarah.’

  This inexplicable statement from Eugene threw a sudden bafflement into the fray.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Eloise, her eyebrows unsure of whether to rise or furrow.

  ‘Something else you should know,’ he said with impossible satisfaction, ‘they have decided on a name. Sarah. After Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandmother. Catchy, isn’t it? And very ‘apt’ in the light of how much he is missed, don’t you agree? A little more media-friendly, too, I imagine.’

  Dear god, she thought. Now the bones were part of some political name-checking game, as well as a financial tussle. She had rather liked ‘Female X’, preferred its wide-open vistas, its lack of imposition or presumption. No matter, she thought. The moniker was a minor issue, she had bigger battles to fight.

  The alternative reality of losing the bones, losing the project (and all the fresh inspiration it had brought into an otherwise sterile phase of her life) haunted every step of her walk home, and it had been necessary to power away the cortisol that was coursing through her system rather than suffer the Tube. Finally, somewhere between the pierced, dyed and tattooed throngs of Camden and the gradual gentrification of Kentish Town, Eloise had formed an idea. Darius!

  He must surely be on her side, as he had been (somewhat to her surprise) since the first tentative email she’d sent him about the rumoured discovery. Darius could pull some serious strings if he had to, and Eloise had no qualms about calling in every marker that she could.

  *

  Long before sighting the creature she realises its name, its nature, recognising the rare essence that had entered her soul so many seasons ago, during her first vision quest under the guidance of her grandmother. At the time she had expected (wished for?) a wolf, or an owl, but it was the bear that came to her then… as it comes to her now.

  And suddenly, she knows what she must do. She finds a good place, a cleft in the rock face of a small escarpment through a narrow canyon, about three men’s height above the ground. No wind. Laying the infant on the ground, exposed, she climbs up and leaves it to cry. The stench of the beast reaches her first, announcing its steady approach. Heavy, hungry.

  She waits. Her spear is sharp enough, but is it strong enough for what it must do? Is she? She has placed a few large stones around the bait (oh, please, please, no) in case the weapon and her falling weight cannot finish it, or her aim cannot find that crucial spot between two ribs right next to the spine. But the spear is part of her once more, she guides her intention through to its very tip and feels where it must go. She waits.

  5

  An interminable delay while negotiations were settled, this unseemly wrangling over the remains. Their transatlantic rivals were offering to build a new museum in Nairobi as her ultimate resting place. Eloise could visualise ‘Sarah’ (it was growing on her) checking in for her flight. Not fair. Limbo. She had tried to concentrate on other projects (on the gift of some pancreatic cells waiting to have their genetic information extracted and then experimentally corrected, too late unfortunately to save the donor) but she was tethered to this African adventure now and determined to see it through. She found herself present at her desk and yet absent from its demands.

  Eloise wanted to hate the poachers, but academic jealousy was never attractive. She might not be justified in resenting their enthusiasm, or their new technology, but certainly she could resent their funding. Where was it coming from? Surely not government, the myopia on both sides of the ocean when it came to investing in science that might enrich the public sector as much as the private was unforgivable to Eloise. Philanthropy was a possible source for the rival backing, and if so this was almost forgivable, even if it had originated in some historically ill-gotten gains. The death-bed bequest of a guilt-ridden dynamite baron perhaps?

  Most probably the capital was corporate. Yes, thought Eloise, owning the future by buying up the past and the present. Reprehensible in so many ways, but very smart. The whole morass was exhausting but she needed to stay sharp. Needed to be reminded of the imperative that she resist such professional larceny.

  She suited up, went into the clean room and eased open the cabinet containing the bones. Each one was tagged and laid alongside the other, unnaturally, in neat little lines. Her skull in the middle. What kind of a brain had been held within this cradle? What did it contemplate, what were its confusions, its struggles?

  ‘What did you have to fight for, my friend,’ she asked aloud. ‘Did you argue? Did you talk very much at all – and were you listened to? What did you inherit, what did you change, what did you pass on? And was life really so much simpler for you – or harder than I, for all my contemporary complaints, can ever imagine? Would you care one jot about who gets to keep what’s left of you, or what they might discover, or what they might do with that? I wonder whether you would be as pissed off as I am about this undignified tug of war. Or are you furious about being here at all? Do you long for the mountain again, for home… indeed, where or what (or who) was home to you?’

  ‘Sarah. Do you mind the name?’

  And how crazy am I to be asking any of this. Is it a fault as a scientist or as a human, or is it a tendency of my particular neurological loading… to want to know the hidden stories, to envision beyond the obvious? But you are so much more than a pile of discarded minerals to me, or some mindless residue for investigation, whatever your name. So much more than a potential profit margin, or a PR windfall, or a tourist attraction. This grail of DNA that we are all chasing once informed a complete human being, a vital and unique individual. And I suspect that you were a battler, my girl, weren’t you? Up there, all alone on that mountain. A singular soul, I’m sure of it. I can’t help feeling that you deserve whatever destiny you were trying to fulfil, and I for one will be going into battle on your behalf.

  Eloise began to close the cabinet drawer, but then stopped. Something didn’t look right with the bones. She checked all the tags, then felt a spike of nausea. Two of the smallest fragments were out of order, swapped around. Oh hell. A mistake, nothing more, surely? Someone not concentrating. But the kind of mistake that they could not afford. She took a much needed pause for breath and with a gloved hand, moved each bone delicately back into place.

  *

  The fall is too long. She has mistimed the jump. Misjudged the distance. She will miss the animal’s back. It will reach the child before she can recover from whatever damage the hard ground will break upon her body. Worse, the fall will finish her.

  No. She must change this. Re-imagine it. She must move the world again until the distance is right. She closes her eyes once more. She has practised this deadly task so many times in the blackness behind her eyes. But there is no time left to perfect it. She must remember the most successful unfolding of this story, and pull it into the light.

  Because now, here it comes, in heaving, breathing flesh, no longer imagined.

  So much bigger than she had foreseen, rippling with power in every pulse, its hide so thick she wonders how any weapon
will pierce it. And yet what it boasts in brute strength it seems to lack in awareness. It treads forward with no sense of what waits for it in absolute stillness, above. Thankfully the child has ceased its whimpering, its cries would only rip at her resolve and shatter her focus. She would struggle to bury her baby’s fear beneath her own determination. Yes. She realises it is her daughter now who inspires and directs her courage and she begins to understand from whose destiny she must draw her victory.

  Without thought, without doubt, she leaps.

  The sound it makes. She has never heard the howl of death this way before, so that it rings within her own bones. Is this death? No, not yet.

  The bear still breathes and she must stir herself from the shock of impact and act. She must rise to her knees on its vast, blood-darkened back and force the spear in further. The beast rises too and roars its fury but she holds on hard. She must hold on.

  It shakes, it shudders. Its cries are scarlet streams from an agonised mouth, blooding the infant with the mark of her first kill. A kill made in her name, at least. This slaughter must be played out for the child alone and by borrowing from her unblemished spirit, otherwise her mother will have torn away her own totem.

  It must be so, or the cavern of darkness that opens up behind her suddenly misted eyes will draw her in completely. Its embrace is too inviting. But while her own passage through this place might be a welcome release, she knows that she cannot go through if the child is to survive. She knows that even if by any unimaginable, unacceptable outcome this beloved child does not live that she must live to try again. That she must withstand that anguish and keep going. Now the mist settles and she can see herself within the cavern, bathed in light, holding out a handful of seeds and then blowing them to the wind. The vision’s meaning becomes clear. She must gather strength from all this scattered future life and bring it back into her own body if she is to complete the kill.