Ashes and Bones by Dana Cameron Page B

a smart kid, but a very new soul,” I agreed. “Ah, well, now she has a bit of dated jargon, which she will probably think of as ‘lore.’”
    The fact that it was just the two of us had struck me from the moment our plans were set. Meg and I had been alone on the Point before, and bad things had happened. Good things too, but the stuff that was on my mind was directly rooted in our first experience there, and a particular night that had involved gunplay, a death, and Neal being wounded—by Tony Markham.
    If Meg was bothered, then she didn’t show it; as far as I knew, she still thought the mention of Billy at the conference had been a parting jab from Duncan. For my part, after theflowers, mysterious deliveries, and fire, every noise that might have been a footstep, or might have been nothing at all, caught my attention. Finally, it was only the physical labor itself and the concentration that digging a neat square hole in the ground required that diverted me. The fact that Tony had used fire to destroy the house that had once stood on this site, and conceal the murder of my friend, just gave me an even worse case of the jumps.
    I finished the balk drawings that were left over from yesterday and Meg had just finished sifting and sorting the artifacts into carefully marked bags. As I gazed across the site, I realized something wasn’t right.
    Even as I felt myself frown, Meg asked: “Emma, how many meter squares did we do yesterday?”
    “I thought you and I each did one—it’s pretty shallow around here—and we did two more today. Four”
    “That’s what I thought. I remember because I emailed you to bring more string for today.”
    We both counted again, and finally Meg asked, “So why is there an extra test pit?”
    I shook my head, unable to figure it out. I flipped through the notes, and checked. Sure enough, our memories matched the notes. There was a unit that wasn’t here yesterday.
    “Do you think it’s looters?” Meg asked.
    “I don’t know. Was someone camping here? It looks awfully regular, though.”
    “It is.”
    We walked over to the hole that we didn’t remember digging. It was in fact, just as square and regular as the rest of our units, but smaller, and to my all-too-practiced eye this one looked to be exactly fifty centimeters square, each side roughly the width of two shovel blades. Every profession has their own informal metrics.
    The walls were straight and clean; I would have praised the student who showed me such work. The location of the unit also puzzled me; it was exactly where I would have placedanother unit, had we the time to spend on moving out from the core of the area I was most interested in.
    “We didn’t dig this,” Meg said.
    “No.”
    “But it looks…real.”
    “Like we did it,” I agreed. “But we didn’t.”
    “No.”
    A cloud passed from over the sun. Something was at the bottom of the unit.
    “Hang on a second,” Meg said, and she knelt down to get a better look.
    “Meg, wait,” I said. “This is bothering me.”
    She smirked. “What, are you afraid that there’s a land mine or something down at the bottom?”
    “You can laugh if you want, but…yes. Something like that.”
    She shook her head, serious now. “I won’t touch anything, I’m just going to get a better look.”
    She leaned over, and as she set one hand down on the opposite side, she suddenly jerked up. “Shit!”
    I stepped toward her. “What is it?”
    “Ah, nothing. You got my nerves going, that’s all. I put my hand down on a rock and it bit me.” She looked at her hand, saw nothing, and leaned over again.
    And jerked back much more quickly. “Ouch—goddamn it!”
    She held up her hand and this time blood was running down the palm of her hand. “There must be a piece of glass or something over there. Hold on.”
    “Meg, don’t,” I said. “Get out of there, please. Now.”
    She looked at me suddenly; it must have been the urgency in my voice. “Okay.”
    I did