Chapter 28
Chapter
Henry gave me the tour of Palmanaeus House. The upper level was mostly offices and specimen display rooms, the shelves filled with fossils, minerals, and rock samples.
“I was thinking of this one for you,” Henry said, cracking the door. Henry waved a hand, and the reliq-lamps flicked on. “It’s been empty since Alfred Ejlersen passed last year. Go on, then.”
I stepped inside cautiously. The still air had a musty smell, but not unpleasant.
The windows were draped in a worn, patterned velvet, a chaise and two armchairs upholstered to match.
The walnut shelves were empty, only patiently waiting for books and fossils to fill them.
The desk was enormous, stretching half the length of the left wall, with built-in shelves and slots and spaces for papers.
“It’s magnificent,” I managed to breathe.
A fierce squawk undercut my words. Ajax. My fingers twitched as my head whipped toward the familiar sound.
“He’s just next door,” Henry said softly. “I thought you might like to be close by.”
“I’d like to see him,” I said, and Henry nodded, as if he’d expected as much.
Ajax was being kept in a converted specimen room, in the golden aviary from our initial presentation.
Rows of benches had been added on each side, to enable observation.
Eight geomagicians were already gathered, scratching notes and sketches as Ajax hopped across the bottom of his cage.
I recognized a few. Gideon Mantell gave a cheerful wave as we entered, and Elias Goldsmild nodded respectfully.
Thomas Whaley scowled before smoothing his features, and his companion, Thomas Reed, looked quickly between Henry and me before plastering a false smile on his own face.
The pterodactyl screeched when he caught sight of me, his wings spreading and flapping. One of the men began sketching furiously.
I wanted to run and crouch next to Ajax and stroke his head through the bars, but I keenly felt the eyes of the geomagicians on me.
“Join us, won’t you?” Mantell said, patting the space beside him on the bench.
“I will, later,” I said, grateful for the warm welcome. “Mister Stanton is giving me a tour of the Society.”
“Yes, Miss Anning has agreed to serve as my research assistant,” Henry said, and every eyebrow in the room shot up.
Thomas Whaley’s jaw dropped open as well. “But—Stanton—she’s a—”
“She is a very accomplished fossilist,” Henry said sharply, and Whaley took the rebuke with a wince.
I winced as well. Now I would have to race to tell Buckland myself, before someone spilled the news. I’d hoped there might be a bit more time.
“That she is,” said Goldsmild. Whaley’s Adam’s apple bobbed, but he nodded stiffly.
Henry’s palm pressed at the small of my back, and I nearly jumped. “Would you like to see the library now?”
“One moment,” I said, and walked—confidently, I hoped—toward the golden cage. I knelt and poked my fingers through the bars. Ajax crept forward and slipped his scaly head under my hand, closing his golden eyes as I scratched at his ridges. He made a soft croaking sound that shattered my heart.
“I’ll see you soon, my friend,” I whispered, then straightened, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Ready.”
Geomagical theory divides fossils into two categories: body fossils and trace fossils. In a body fossil, all of the hard-body components of an animal have been preserved and are intact.
Body fossils are my bread and butter: the rare and precious skeletons of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, yes, but also the shells and internal structures of mollusks and cephalopods like ammonites and belemnites.
Trace fossils are overwhelmingly more common than body fossils.
It was the nature of fossils for pieces to be lost to time, for the earth to consume the body and leave only the trace.
So much of the geomagical evidence we have is in these traces: footprints in the rock, or the imprint of a fern, or the outline of a body long decayed.
These traces are a vital record, and an important tool for geomagicians working to piece together a geomagical timeline or understand a species.
But there’s a reason I trawl the beach in Lyme Regis hunting for the rarer body fossils: only body fossils can be turned into reliqs.
So this was the first hypothesis Henry and I decided to test once we finished our tour of the ground floor of Palmanaeus House.
My heart hammered with excitement as Henry set up the table, and I quickly scrawled in my notebook:
Hypothesis:
Reanimation requires the skeleton—or body fossil—of a creature. An imprint or trace fossil will be insufficient.
From his drawers, Henry selected several salamander-like samples he’d collected in Scotland. We’d both agreed to wait on aquatic creatures until we could procure some seawater. He had also gathered and prepared a four-sided glass tank—just in case.
I took a seat, and Henry laid out three samples on the table between us: a trace imprint of a hind leg and tail, a full imprint of a skeleton, and an intact skeleton.
The tiny, fossilized bones were too fragile to remove from the stone in which they were embedded, but it was a body fossil nonetheless.
I sketched them quickly. Figures 1A, 1B, 1C. Hypothesis Body Fossil: Alpha Attempt.
“Are you ready?” Henry grinned boyishly, and I grinned back.
I was more confident this time. I knew I could do it.
Still, my breath fluttered nervously as I laid a hand over the trace imprint.
I tried to keep my expectations low. Maybe I could only reanimate creatures from the Lyme Regis region anyway.
Well, if this fails, then that can be Hypothesis Beta, I told myself.
I’d hardly closed my eyes when I opened them again.
“There’s nothing.” I shook my head. “The trace won’t work.”
“How can you tell?” Henry leaned forward. “What does it feel like?”
“It’s like…” I frowned, thinking how to describe the strange sensation. The sudden knowing. “When I reach out, I find only darkness. No…no thread of life at all. There’s nothing to grab hold of.”
We each dashed off a few sentences in our notebooks. I laid my hand on the next, the imprint of the salamander. All the tiny bones had long ago dissolved instead of becoming fossilized.
I felt a flicker, that time. I sat straighter, trying to picture the salamander, crawling through the wet mud and moss.
But where the other fossils—Ajax, the ammonite, the belemnite—had pulled me deeper, had turned into something richer and more real than my own imagination could possibly summon, this was a shallow, pale image.
It was my own thoughts, and nothing more.
I shook my head again, and we didn’t even speak before dropping heads to our journals.
But we both held our breath as I laid hands on the fossilized salamander skeleton.
I started again with my own, conjured image.
But it quickly transformed, and my heart leapt as I was pulled into the scene.
It was working. The glittering ferns, slick with dew.
The smell of wet earth, and the feel of it, the dirt breathing under tiny, pattering feet.
The air, washing over glassy gills, sweet and clean.
Henry whooped with joy, and I threw off my hand just in time to watch the salamander rise from its bed of stone, leaving a hollow in the shape of its body.
Henry scooped the salamander into cupped palms.
“Hello, little fellow,” he said softly, stroking gently with his thumb at the orange-brown head. “And welcome back to the world.”
We ran the experiment several times more with other salamander fossils, trying to pinpoint the exact conditions required for resurrection, before settling on a revised working hypothesis.
Revised Hypothesis:
Reanimation requires at least 95% (approx.) of a complete skeleton—or body fossil—of a creature. (See Figures 13-18A)
I reanimated one salamander that was missing its front leg bones, and the creature rose up nonetheless with four intact limbs.
Henry and I both jumped from our seats and actually embraced across the table.
But when I tried with another incomplete specimen that was missing its back half, I couldn’t catch hold of the thread.
After another test, we settled on the ninety-five percent completeness as a “tipping point” threshold, but agreed we ought to try again later with another specimen.
By then we had three salamanders in our glass tank, and the sky outside Henry’s window was pitch black.
“I suspect this means you’ll be most successful with invertebrate marine species,” Henry said, as we returned the fossilized specimens to their drawers.
Invertebrate marine species, like the belemnite, ammonite, or bivalves, were considered unaltered fossils. Their hard-body component—the shell—was already in one piece. No fiddly little bones to get lost to time.
I nodded. “I was thinking the same. And we can also rule out any difference between altered and unaltered fossils.”
“Oh, excellent point. Shall we make that Hypothesis Gamma, then?” Henry proposed.
“Perfect,” I said happily, nestling a salamander imprint back in its drawer.
Marine shells were already formed of geomagically stable minerals like calcite or aragonite, so they simply bounced along through time and geomagical change until someone like me dug them up.
But the salamanders were altered fossils.
In an altered body fossil, the original bone was long gone.
The skeleton had, over many thousands of years, been replaced by other minerals, like silica, dolomite, or hematite.
My great discoveries—the plesiosaurs, and ichthyosaurs, and even Ajax’s mother, the pterodactyl—were all altered, their bones turned over time to stone as they lay in the earth.
A little giddily, I wondered if Henry was thinking the same thing I was. That maybe, just maybe, I could resurrect those, too.
“Now, what are we going to do about those?” Henry gestured at the three live salamanders in their tank. “Do you want to…er…put them back?”
I frowned. We hadn’t yet tested what would happen if I tried to reanimate something I’d put back, as Henry said. I was hesitant to test the possibility on the salamanders. “Let’s keep them,” I said. “Do you think you could smuggle them out?”
Henry nodded. “Shouldn’t be a problem. But I do wonder if we won’t need a longer-term solution.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Well, if we’re going to build out a little menagerie”—he said the word playfully, and I chuckled—“then we may want to start doing these experiments away from Palmanaeus. I have a flat only a few blocks away that we could use. I can even hire caretakers for the specimens you reanimate. Discreet ones, of course.”
I cocked my head. “You’ve thought about this.”
“I told you, I already knew you could resurrect them. I was just waiting on you to catch up.” He shrugged, a little sheepishly, and I saw a hint of pink rise in his cheeks.
Heat rose in mine, as well, as I realized I was staring at Henry and feeling, well, rather fond of him.
He believed in me. He trusted me.
I was not so foolish to believe our partnership was wholly altruistic, but still, it was a partnership.
Henry gave a little jerk of his shoulder, and his fingers twitched at his side. “Listen, Mary. Earlier, when you said that—that I left. I need you to know—”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Please. I told you before, on the ship. All of that was so long ago. We were children, playing at love. It was nothing.” I tried to laugh, but it came out a hoarse, strained chuckle.
“It wasn’t nothing. It was everything.” He stepped toward me, his lips parted so I could see his tongue slide over the edges of his teeth. “I have regretted leaving Lyme Regis every day since. I—” Henry’s voice cracked.
“Don’t,” I managed to whisper.
He was very close now, his face above mine, and an ache in his gray eyes. I wanted to slap him. I wanted to kiss him. I wasn’t sure which I wanted more.
I cleared my throat. “Don’t be silly.” I waved a hand, as if that could clear the tension from the air, then opened and closed a random specimen drawer, just for something to do.
Somewhere to look that wasn’t his face. “You said you wanted to be allies. Well, we’re allies.
Now, let’s just focus on the work, shall we? ”