The walls of the jar were thin enough that she could see the glow of light behind it, and the silhouette of a lumpy shadow inside. She photographed every angle, every detail, and made sure the pictures were uploaded and saved before grabbing her scalpel and tweezers. She both hated and wanted this part. Her pulse grew distracting, a pounding in her sore joints, and it would continue to rise until the beautiful thing in front of her was destroyed. And destroying the sample would destroy her career, or make it. Her hair stuck to her sweaty brow.

She cut away the cord that secured the flap over the opening and gathered the flakes of leather as they fell, dropping them into a jar of her own—bright glass, sterile, but otherwise little had changed in twenty-five thousand years.

The leather scrap was thin and fine like the tender skin of a rodent. It had dried to something almost like vellum. It shouldn’t exist at all.

Once the seal was pulled away, odor overwhelmed her, sweet and rancid like cherries and old cheese. She clutched her wrist to her nose until the wave passed. She hadn’t dealt with fresh remains in years. This specimen shouldn’t be fresh. Shining more light inside revealed dark clumps clinging to the illuminated walls. She dipped her scalpel inside and scooped out a trace of the substance, sending a fresh wave of odor down her throat. It stuck to the blade as she tapped it onto a glass slide. It was crumbly and clumpy, like wet, purple sand. She took more photographs, brightened them, and saw purple, red, gold, brown. Perhaps a desiccated organ. Or maybe the tongue, considering the placement of the jar.

Magnified under the microscope, it was a brilliant lattice of blood cells—platelets, red and white cells, stem cells, and fatty deposits. Myelorytes. Fragments of vessel. Bone marrow.

Ashley turned back to the crate with the skull and peeled back the gauze. She ran her fingers over the blossoms of bone again, ignoring the sharp snags, searching for a perforation in the bone. Then she remembered the arms and legs, each broken on every body. Not from the brittleness of millennia, perhaps, but as part of this strange funerary ritual. She wanted to get the rest of the bones—make a full layout of the body and examine the breaks. Look for manmade trauma. But she needed to finish her work with the jar. She grabbed the jar and held it directly above the light, peering into its mouth, trying to gauge the quantity of marrow collected, presumably from the man whose mouth it had filled. Though it was astoundingly preserved under its ancient seal, some evaporation had to have occurred. A slow concentration. She couldn’t tell how much marrow was there, but she didn’t want to disturb the whole sample.