Page 7 of Fated, Allegedly

"They're in the truck."

Wyatt's voice comes over the radio at nine-forty, and it isn't the noisy version anymore.

"Nash. East wetland, the far pool." A long pause with breathing in it. "There's a drag furrow out of the water. Twenty feet, straight up the bank to a vehicle track. There's blood and there's… Nash, it's not wolf blood, or human, it doesn't smell like anything I've ever…"

"Don't touch it," I say. "Photograph it and get off the ground."

"Somebody took it," he says. Whatever it was, it must've been alive when they captured it.

I look at the porch where Erin's gone back inside, humming, sorting camera straps on her kitchen table like today is a workday.

Whatever they're doing I need to find out. And every hour I decide whether to gently give her the truth is an hour somebody else decides what to do about the woman taking pictures of their boats.

5

ERIN

It takes two days to rebuild my database from paper, and two weeks later, on Wednesday night my kitchen table looks like a crime board put together by a person with excellent handwriting and a deteriorating grip on their weekend.

Everything I lost off the laptop I had in field notebooks, because my father was a fisherman who didn't trust anything with a battery and I inherited the neurosis. So I plot it all by hand. Fish kill sites in blue. Missing bird colonies in green. Every mammal mortality or disappearance since November in red, plus the two collared wolves, and the moose cow nobody's seen since the thaw.

Then I sit back with my cold coffee and look at what I've made, and my stomach drops out of me. It's a ring, every single point sits inside a band roughly two miles wide that runs around the lake, and the band tightens on the eastern side. The wetlands, the old mine cuts, the exact ground Nash told me to stay out of on my first afternoon. Nothing is missing from the outer forest. The species that live entirely away from the water are fine. Whatever this is, it isn't a disease and it isn't a food-web collapse and it certainly isn't a bad cycle.

It's proximity, it's radius, and radii have centers. The next morning I head out with the loaner cameras and I find the drill cores instead.

They're in a slump at the foot of the east ridge where a bank has sheared off after the rains. At first I think it's fence post, cut and stacked. Then I get down in the mud and pull one out and it's stone, a cylinder of it, two inches across, sawn flat at both ends, with a machine-polished skin and a spiral of hairline scoring down its length. There are forty or fifty of them in the slump. Somebody dumped a core library.

I've handled cores before, at a hydrology field school in Wisconsin that felt very far away at the time and feels like another planet now. These are lakebed. Laminated silt, then a band of organic mud, then a hard gray section shot through with pale threads I can't identify at all.

The last twelve inches of one core doesn't behave. I hold it up to the light and the fractured face has a faint sheen, like oil on water, and it moves when I turn it. Not a reflection, the sheen moves against the tilt, sliding the wrong direction. I turn it four times to be sure. It does it four times.

I sit with a rock and hear myself say, out loud, "That's not a thing rocks do."

I send Nash a picture of the fractured core and tell him I need to see where it came from. He calls less than a minute later.

"I need access to the east cuts," I tell him.

Nash says no twice before he says yes.

"The east cuts are three miles of collapse hazard and no road out."

"Then you'll be very useful."

"Erin."

He's never used my first name before, and my pulse spikes ridiculously, but I keep my face professionally bland. "The cores came from beneath the lakebed. There is no legal drilling permit on this lake. I checked with the state, the county, I even checked with the Army Corps because I was feeling thorough. Someone drilled a protected waterbody, hauled out fifty cores, analyzed them, and dumped them in a ravine. I need to find the collar of that hole. If I can put a coordinate on it I can put a federal agency on it."

He's quiet, working his jaw. Behind him the water is doing its flat gray impression of innocence.

"Monday," he says. "First light. You wear what I recommend, you walk where I do, and when I say we're done, we're done. No negotiation on the last one."

"Deal."

"You agreed to that too fast."

"I'm agreeing in principle," I say. "The implementation is going to be a conversation."

He mutters something that might be a laugh.