Discovery
Chapter three
Ethan’s phone alarm went off well before dawn, but he was already half awake.
While he’d stayed up a bit after sunset, sucking down a protein shake and studying his maps and photos a bit more, the chill of the night and the exhaustion of the long overland drive had convinced him to turn in early, climbing the ladder he’d wedged securely in the sand up to the tent he’d unfurled from its square case.
Though chill was perhaps an overstatement—the thermometer in his kit had said it was in the low fifties.
Perfectly normal for this elevation at this time of year.
But he’d already acclimated to the hotter temperatures back in town, and it would take him time to adjust. And it was good, the difference.
Comforting. Like opening a door instead of closing it.
With a sigh, he grabbed his phone and silenced the alarm. There were zero bars of service—if he wanted to contact anyone, he’d have to break out the satellite phone. That was another good thing, that he couldn’t just call or text anyone on a whim. Not Sarah, not anyone connected to Sarah…
And hopefully he’d stop relating every decision to his ex over the next three months.
He dressed quickly by the dim glow of his LED light and descended the ladder to the desert floor.
The landscape was blue in the ambient predawn light, and the cloudless sky in the east was starting to glow gold, the higher peaks in the distance already rimmed with sunrise.
He went about his morning ablutions, perked some coffee on his Coleman stove, and dug into the Jeep to drag out the equipment he’d need for the morning’s explorations.
As he tied his hair back, Ethan considered his drone.
He’d want some aerial photos and footage at some point, but…
The whole point of fieldwork was being in the field.
He’d already seen the satellite photos hinting at what he’d find, but he still wanted the rush of seeing it with his own eyes, discovering what the digital breadcrumbs had led him to.
He’d deploy the drone later, when the initial thrill had faded and the hard work was underway.
He locked it in the Jeep—not that there was likely anyone else within miles—and started to gear up.
When he’d first started going out in the field, in undergrad groups supervised by teaching assistants, he’d been frustrated by the entire process.
They’d been advised to wear heavy jeans, sturdy hiking boots, and long-sleeved canvas jackets for protection, but it had quickly become clear that they would only protect so much when every cactus and bush and tree in the desert was covered in skewers tiny and large, some of them heavy and barbed, some of them hair-thin and soft-looking, all of them dangerous.
Time and time again their group had needed to retrace their steps when confronted by conditions too dangerous to proceed.
“You’d need to be a knight in shining armor to get through that,” one of his classmates had joked after one of their retreats, ruefully plucking a cholla stem from the fabric of her jacket.
Ethan hadn’t laughed. He had gone home afterwards and dug into his closet, dragging out his old Army-surplus duffel bag from the back of his closet, dumping the contents onto his bed.
He’d been single then, living in his first tiny off-campus apartment, and had just moved the majority of his possessions from his parents’ house across town.
Why he’d brought this particular duffel bag, he didn’t know, but now it seemed serendipitous.
And maybe what he was thinking was stupid, but it was worth a try.
The next time he’d gone out in the field wearing his kit, everyone had looked at him like he was crazy.
But he hadn’t gotten stuck, and he’d managed to get to places nobody else could, just by virtue of being less stickable.
Later, he’d added some additional pieces to his kit, converted it to work more specifically against hostile cacti instead of hostile swords…
or rattan facsimiles thereof. He’d even helped a couple of his classmates to make suits of field-botany armor; he’d made his own, after all.
There were advantages to growing up in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Knowing how to make protective gear out of canvas and pickle-barrel plastic was just one of them.
From what he could see just looking at the hill across from him, he definitely needed to armor up.
Just a few yards up the hill, there was a line of prickly pears so densely packed it was as if someone had deliberately planted them as a barrier.
They were just tall enough he wouldn’t be able to step over them, and just close enough together he wouldn’t be able to fit between them safely.
Possibly not even with his armor. But he was prepared for that, too.
Once he’d strapped his segmented armor over his jeans and hips—he preferred to keep his upper body free to move—and donned his gloves and hat, he slung his backpack over his shoulders and strode across the sandy wash and up the hill, a masonite panel in each hand.
He’d had the panels trimmed down to match his height and the breadth of his shoulders, to cut down the weight, and attached leather straps to make them easy to carry.
They were dusty from storage, like most of his gear, but the rivets were still secure.
It took a partial circuit of the ring of cacti to find what he was looking for—not so much a space as an opportunity, a point where the prickly pear paddles were arranged just so, in a way that they could be pushed aside without breaking.
He slid the two masonite panels into the almost-gap, carefully separated them until they formed a V a foot or so wide, and stepped between them.
Watching where he placed his feet, he eased forward. The paddles on either side of him shifted and opened, but did not break off, and a few shuffling steps later, he emerged on the other side, laughing. God, it felt good to be outsmarting the desert again!
The cacti were much less crowded in front of him; he leaned the masonite panels against a big barrel cactus and proceeded uphill, watching his step and twisting his upper body as needed to avoid scratches.
If he had measured the photos correctly, the anomalies had started about fifty yards up the hill.
He ducked under the arms of a saguaro, gave a wide berth to a huge cholla, sidestepped a few low bushes and…
Holy fuck.
It was a good thing he wasn’t carrying anything in his hands anymore, because they went limp with shock at the sight before him.
It wasn’t unusual for saguaro blooms to linger into early June, or the occasional prickly pear.
He’d seen a few scattered along his route here.
But he had never seen anything like the vista of color before him, not even in the botanical gardens where they carefully nurtured and coaxed desert plants to bloom as much and as showily as possible.
There were saguaro wearing crowns of blossoms—but not just the expected white and yellow.
These were crimson, violet, even blue. Prickly pears, their paddles brilliant green and purple, were edged with ruffles of blooms in every color of the rainbow.
Barrel cacti bore their own froths of color, cholla were studded with flowers, and scattered ironwood and mesquite trees sagged under the weight of dripping blossoms. Among the larger plants were scatterings of wildflowers—poppies gold and red, desert lupine and owl’s clover, fairy dusters and desert mallows and honeysuckle.
The air was filled with a haze of drifting pollen.
Brightly colored hummingbirds zipped from plant to plant while honeybees buzzed more slowly on their own nectar-gathering missions.
It was impossible. It was not possible. Not for all of these plants to be blooming at once, not for them to show the colors before him.
He knew of no chemical or mineral or environmental factor that could produce even one of the effects he was seeing, let alone all of them at once.
He was amazed, he was astounded, he was—
Ethan barely restrained a whoop of victory.
He was going to be fucking famous! Tenure was his!
At least once he figured out what the hell was going on.
He took a deep breath and calmed himself.
He’d seen the wonder. He’d marveled at it and let his soul lift from the sight.
But now it was time to get down to business.
He rolled his backpack to the ground and started to record his observations, starting with the nearest cactus.
Photographs and sketches—bad ones, as he’d never been a good draftsman, but they helped him notice things.
Soil samples. A blossom, carefully plucked and pressed to show off its features.
A very tiny piece of the cactus flesh, a few needles, carefully bagged and dated and tucked in their own container.
He finished that one, moved on to the next, and the next, forcing himself to take regular drinks of water from his canteen, angle himself away from the sun as it rose higher.
And then he ducked past a cholla, and…
There she is.
The thought rushed through him like a freight train before his conscious mind could even comprehend what he was looking at, but when it had run its course, leaving him quivering, he took in the sight before him.
A woman, asleep on the sandy ground beside the blooming cacti.
She was nestled into the earth, almost as if she had been lying there for years, sinking deeper and deeper until she was a part of the landscape.
Her hair was a rich loamy brown, long wavy strands spread about her shoulders and upon the ground, the brown fading at the tips to a pale green.
She had golden brown skin, and though she was wearing some sort of flowing nightgown, it draped lush curves, covering her body from neck to ankle, leaving her arms and her feet bare.
Her exposed skin was lightly dusted with sand.
A spotted cloak of cream and green and brown spread along the sand behind her, its edges dagged like the sleeves of a houppelande or a butterfly's wings.
The woman's shoulders rose and fell with slow breaths, and as he watched, she rubbed her cheek deeper into the sand and sighed.
There she is, he thought again, the words echoing strangely in his head. But who is she?
“Hello,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“Hello? Are you all right?” He moved closer, circling, and dropped to his knees a few feet away from her.
He was suddenly very aware of his size, the sweat wicking into his undershirt and soaking his hair where he’d bound it into a ponytail, the fact that he was wearing plastic-armor-plated particolored legpieces, hip armor, and groin protection over his jeans.
In an SCA context, the alternating red and black had looked damn fine, but it wasn’t the sort of thing people normally wore in this century.
He probably looked like a Viking clown who’d lost his way.
Terrifying. “I don’t want to frighten you, but… Did you fall? Are you hurt?”
The woman shuddered abruptly awake and sat up, staring at him, her breath accelerating like a Formula One race car.
Her eyes were green. Not the usual kind of eyes-green, either, muted and sagey and warm.
They were the green of lime popsicles, the green of spring leaves, the green of his beat-up Jeep, and the green-ness loosened his tongue again.
It was a movie line, he realized as he said it.
Howl’s Moving Castle. One of the DVDs that had ended up in his boxes, not on Sarah’s shelves.
He was quoting a fucking movie. But it still felt right.
“There you are.”