“Why?”
“You seem somewhat strung out. I mean, Wyatt told us you misplaced your pills—”
“He stole my fucking pills.”
Another glance exchanged, like I was so bad off I couldn’t notice these things.
“Like I said, we’re just a bit concerned, that’s all. Have you been sleeping?”
“I was up all night reading these books on ancient Inuit culture.”
“Too stimulating,” Raj said. He tossed me a copy of their diving checklist. “Read this. You need something boring and tedious. This will do it. I’m serious.”
I stuffed the checklist in my pocket. “Can we talk about Sigrid now, please?”
“Has Wyatt seen the drawings?” Nora asked.
“Just the snake and bird ones, not the suns, I’m pretty sure.”
“Because she showed him or you showed him?”
“Because he snoops around my room when I’m not there looking at my shit and stealing things from me—” I thought of the journal I’d started and abandoned after my pills disappeared, convinced he would find it. After that I spoke all my notes into my handheld recorder, kept it with me at all times.
Raj poured me another shot. I willed myself to sip it, not inhale it.
I said, “Do you realize how old this girl is? These people hunted seal, narwhal, walrus—even whales!—from flimsy sealskin boats. They made sleds out of whale jaws. Lived in sod houses. Four or more families to these cramped underground dwellings pieced together from earth and whale ribs and driftwood. Windows made out of stretched seal intestine that barely let light in, all winter, ten months at a time. They spoke some ancestral language, which evolved into Greenlandic but is incomprehensible to me. And she won’t…” I dropped my head in my hands, struggled to lift it. “She refuses to try to communicate with me, to really learn, and I’m mystified, and terrified, because we’ve only got these five days…”
Raj set his drink down. “That’s one interpretation, Val, I can see that. But do you really believe she thawed from the ice alive? Much less that she’s hundreds of years old?”
“Well, did you look at the cells?”
“They were human, but the leap from that to Sigrid being… Well, it’s a bit rich. It really is. Wyatt’s got some fame-and-fortune scheme cooked up, which would rankle me except he’s going nowhere with it. He’s flailing around with pseudoscience, with science fiction, really!” Face drawn tight, he leaned forward, one fist clasped in the other hand. “The thing that kills me is that this girl has been taken from somewhere, and—mark my words—the minute we wrap up here and get back to civilization, Wyatt is going to pay for this. We’re going to get Sigrid back to her home and her family, and he is going to bloody pay.”
“I agree with Raj, Val,” Nora said. “He and I have talked a lot about this. When we first got here, all I said was let’s report this, but now—and probably this is selfish—we want to stay and finish our study here. It won’t be long. We never dreamed she’d get sick…”
“But her language,” I said. “It isn’t a living language.”
“Aren’t there obscure dialects few people speak anymore?”
“I’ve gone through all of them. Checked her vocalizations against every conceivable database. There’s no other conclusion I can come to. Her language, to me, is proof that—”
“Look, Val,” Raj said, regarding me with thin patience. “The minute I believe that girl woke up alive from seven-hundred-year-old ice will be the minute I believe she’s trying to tell us she’s dying. Otherwise, to me, she’s just some confused kid stolen from her family by some greedy prick trying to game the system.”
“Seems like you want to shut your eyes to every ounce of evidence that this girl is ancient, and that she’s dying. Why is that? Your research—nobody’s research—is more important than a child’s life.”
He flushed, threw a hand up in the air. “Let’s not go there, Val—”
“Go where, Raj? I think sometimes people believe what’s easiest for them to believe, and it sure is easier to think Wyatt found her on the ice. But nothing points to that, not the clothing she was found in, not her behavior, not her language, not her ground-down molars—have I told you about that?”
“Plenty of Inuit still work skins with their teeth—”