“We’re taking one back with us,” Ashley said, tucking her book into her pack.

The camera flash paused, and Ashley felt Henri’s eyes scolding her through the darkness. There was something in the way he looked at her that made her skin prickle.

“I don’t think we should,” he said.

Ashley pulled another kit from her pack—a small plastic crate filled with chunks of polyethylene foam, and rolls of gauze and tape. She began assembling a nest that would protect the specimen as they hiked back to the research center.

“Dr. Knochdieb won’t like it. You’ll lose your post for sure if you disturb this site.”

“Isn’t that what you all want, anyway?” She was done with their bureaucracy—she’d come here to work. And the thought of leaving without something more to study—without some way to begin answering the thousand questions storming in her brain—was torture.

Henri’s scoff echoed off the walls, the drawings, the bones. “It’ll be dark before we get back as it is. It’ll be dark before we leave if we wait much longer. I can hike that trail in the dark, but you’re going to get hurt if you try.” He mumbled to himself in German as he changed the camera’s memory card. It sounded like a prayer. His hair was the brightest thing in the cave—the sort of blond Californians paid good money for. Perhaps he’d be her beacon in the dark. She imagined she’d disappear in the dark entirely, invisible against the sky, though Henri had earlier said that her height made her impossible to lose. She felt the telltale ache in her shoulders as she’d unconsciously slouched ever since.

He was right, though, about all of it. She could picture the red-faced spluttering of the department head when he learned she had touched an unknown burial site. It would be several shades darker than when he’d learned she’d be studying there to begin with. The program hadn’t accepted any foreign students since the dawn of digital record keeping. They weren’t keen to break the record. And, of course, they hadn’t known what she would find in the cave. Henri, in particular, was upset to lose what would have been his project—what now would be, at best, a third-author credit, behind her, if she stayed—and her behind the soon-to-be-furious Dr. Knochdieb.

But he’d be mad tomorrow. Tonight was her chance to learn what she could and put together a proposal to convince them to give her the project—this project, instead of the bears—or at least allow her to stay involved. An underling, even. She’d bring them coffee, up the mountain, if she could work on-site. Anything to stay with the bones.