Chapter 39
After several hours of threatening to press charges for trespassing against Ripley and “any accomplices”—which she takes to mean the rest of the crew successfully slipped away—the chief of security returns Ripley’s phone and lets her go with a warning.
She scampers out the side entrance of the conference center like the place is on fire, determined not to give them the time to change their minds.
She easily locates the bus stop on the route she researched earlier and ducks under the glass-ceilinged shelter, hoping the after-midnight schedule isn’t too spotty.
It’s quiet at this hour, the pavement glistening from a cloudburst that must have come and gone while she was being detained. It smells like rain in the city, clean and dirty at the same time, with a waft of the Pacific coming in on the breeze.
She prefers the dark of the dig over an urban nightscape, but she’s safe enough here. She’ll check in with Cara, then pull up the bus schedule.
Her lock screen flashes to life with an avalanche of notifications.
She only uses social media for lurking on her favorite dinosaur accounts, but somehow people have found @pip.the.dino.girl despite the fact that her bio is Mammal from the Early Anthropocene and her location is Gopher Crotch, Montana.
Her profile photo—an action figure from Alien—probably gave her away.
She ignores the hundreds of Follow requests. These people most likely want to yell in her DMs, which she’s grateful she set to private. She’ll delete the notifications tomorrow.
Unfortunately, a number of resourceful trolls have found her phone number. She has to scroll past pages of texts from unknown senders to find the Clever Girl group chat.
Cara 9:47 P.M.:
Made it to the hotel w Griff! Everyone send proof of life unless you’re in jail. In that case, save your phone call for my dad aka your legal counsel
Matteo 10:12 P.M.:
At Casa O’Malley in Oakland. We stopped to eat at Great China. Egg rolls don’t compare to Golden Palace
Jordin 10:20 P.M.:
SO MUCH FOMO
Cara 10:42 P.M.:
Rip?
Cara 11:30 P.M.:
RIPLEY
Ripley 12:01 A.M.:
Not in jail! Catching bus to hotel, see you all tomorrow. Today? Whatever
Finn 12:02 A.M.:
Pleasure working with you, everyone. Please consider Twin Tech for all your future lawbreaking needs
Ripley 12:03 A.M.:
Whippersnappers, all of you
Fiona replies with a picture of herself, Finn, and Matteo wearing deeply blank yet somehow disdainful Gen Z expressions.
There should be a bus in twenty minutes. Ripley’s peering hopefully down the street when footsteps approach. She’s surely only imagining that they sound familiar. It’s just that she’s lonely and in a strange place, not that—
“There you are,” says a man’s voice.
She looks up with a startled intake of breath.
Twenty feet away, James stands with his hands at his sides, as if he’s not sure he should come any closer. His hair is good and ruined. He’s unbuttoned the neck of his French blue shirt, and his jacket and tie are both missing. His right index finger restlessly taps his pants pocket.
He’s smiling, though—not a double curve, but an arch of his mouth that’s a little happy and a little sad. It snaps Ripley’s heart in half so cleanly, she can almost feel her chest go pop.
Ripley feels a happy-sad smile spread across her own face. It’s good to see him, and it hurts too. “How did you find me?”
“I asked Cara to let me know when she heard from you. We were all very worried. Obviously. She said you were taking the bus back to your hotel, and I…well. It wasn’t hard to figure out. Are you all right?” He shoves his hands into his pockets, then immediately twitches them out again.
She ventures out of the shelter into the now-misting rain. She wants to rest her head against his chest so badly that she figures it’s safer to stop a little out of reach. Up close, she can see his collar isn’t unbuttoned but torn open.
“I’m okay. Are you?”
“I’m quite all right, thank you. It’s—pardon me for saying so, but it’s odd to see you here,” he says, gesturing at the dark cityscape. “If you know what I mean.”
“I do.” A dig is so vivid that the rest of the world feels monochrome by comparison. “Oh, James. Your glasses,” she says, spying a lump of white tape at one side. She catches herself reaching for them, then pulls her hand back.
He carefully pushes his wobbly handiwork higher on his nose. “They fell victim to the fracas in the ballroom, I’m afraid. As of twenty minutes ago, it was still rather a scene in there. You, erm, dropped quite the bombshell.”
“You led the way.”
He waves away her praise. “If you want to come back inside, I could introduce you to some people who’d very much like to meet you.”
Ripley winces at the thought. “Thanks, but I already got kicked out of there once today. I don’t think I have any more crime-ing in me tonight.”
He looks down, nodding, his finger tap-tap-tapping his pocket. Ripley finds herself straining to catch the metallic sound of his pillbox, but it’s lost in the wet hiss of tires from a passing SUV.
“Tomorrow, perhaps? I wouldn’t ask for myself; I promise I will never ask you for anything for myself ever again, Ripley. They might be able to help with the birds, is all.”
“Oh. Yeah. I could stick around for a day or two, if it’s for the birds. Thanks, by the way,” she adds. “You kind of went down in a blaze of glory tonight.”
The streetlights are just bright enough that she can catch the flush that mists his cheeks. They’re both getting damp out here, everything ending the way it began.
“If I’d known you would be there, I wouldn’t have done anything without asking you first. It was simply the only right course of action. For science,” he says.
Except to Ripley’s ears, when James Smithson says For science, it sounds like For you. She both loves and fears the tiny sprout of hope that unfurls high in her chest.
“Did they kick you off the planning committee?”
“Oh, immediately,” he says, the tiniest twitch raising one corner of his mouth. “But I would have stepped down if they hadn’t.”
“Was it pretty rough in there? The crowd sounded unhappy when I was on my way out.”
He stares at her for a moment, his brows drawn down.
“People were unhappy. Most of them because they were watching an incredibly brave woman get dragged out of the room for daring to blow the whistle on corruption. Granted, some were unhappy because they don’t want changes to a system that has benefited them at others’ expense.
And some were unhappy because they had stories of their own to tell.
” He pulls out his phone, taps the screen, and hands it to Ripley.
Trending: #freethebirds
There are jumpy videos of Ripley’s speech at the gala.
Calls for Will to submit his specimens to an independent lab for testing.
Again and again, a photo of Ripley’s hand clutching the poster of Beauty, the rest of her obscured by a swarm of security personnel.
There are links to National Geographic articles about how the #MeToo movement hasn’t yet made a mark on academia and photos of male scientists who’ve deflected multiple accusations of harassment, sexual abuse, fraud, and worse.
The trend is spilling from paleontology into physics, engineering, medicine.
“There’s so many,” Ripley says, amazed.
“You touched a nerve.”
“Apparently. But I don’t know that it would have had as much impact without you.”
He shrugs, tapping his finger. Whatever’s in his pocket, it doesn’t make the clinking sound Ripley’s heard before. “It was the least I could do after—after everything.”
Ripley feels every molecule of the distance between them, every unchanged reason they can’t be together.
“Do you believe in past lives?” he asks suddenly.
“Heck of a conversational left turn, Professor.”
“Indulge me.”
“Okay,” she says, curious. “Sure I do. In my past life, I was a tyrannosaur.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yes. And you would have been some cute little herbivore. Very bite-size.”
He shakes his head. “Seriously, Ripley. Do you think we live more than one life?”
“Seriously? No. I think this life is all we have.”
“I’d like to believe in reincarnation,” he says, earnest and wistful. “It’s nice, thinking we could have another chance to get things right.”
“I don’t think so, James. I wouldn’t count on it, anyway. If there’s something you want from this life, you should probably go after it.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“I usually am, but I won’t hold it over your head.”
He makes a sound like he’s acknowledging the joke but doesn’t have it in him to laugh. “If you could do this summer over again—no, that’s not right. If I had told you the Smithson Foundation was your anonymous donor, would you have refused the funding?”
She pulls her mouth to the side, wishing she could tell him what he wants to hear, knowing she can’t. “Yeah. I would’ve told you to shove it up your ass.”
He takes a shallow breath like he was expecting this but hearing it still surprises him.
“I’m sorry, Ripley. I meant not to bother you with more apologies, but alas, it appears I can’t help myself.
I shouldn’t have kept the truth about the funding from you, and I knew it. I’m so terribly, terribly s—”
“I wasn’t done,” she interrupts. “I would have turned your money down, yes. And it would’ve been the wrong decision.
The dig would’ve shut down in mid-June. Beauty would still be in the ground, and Beast would never have been found.
Cara and Geraldine would be worse off financially.
Will would be the Marsh Chair. And I might have left paleontology for good.
“If anyone besides a paleontologist had offered me the money, I would’ve taken it. But you are a paleontologist. You’re fucking James Smithson.”
He inclines his head in a courtly half-bow. “Despite my best efforts.”
“Exactly. You couldn’t be anyone but yourself, but I wouldn’t let you help unless you were someone else. I could have—should have—accepted that you’re not like Will. I could have trusted you to do right.”