Incidental report. Student 512. Posting area non-applicable. Independent study. Dock development area, grid ref TQ 381837. Solo. Verification location-tagged visual evidence, embedded.

Ellie’s voice. Always such a bounce to it.

Attendant material, specimen. One. Cast skin, larval exoskeleton . . .

Exuvia, he can’t help correcting her. It’s an exuvia . . .

The extraordinary husk, barely an inch long and caught as if alive in the tube,

. . . Odonata. Species unconfirmed. Dated as report.

The professor back-swipes.

Species unconfirmed. Dated as report.

Ellie sent the specimen from a development area near the Dock site. Part of the ground that will become the tow-track along which the iceberg will travel, up from the re-flooded river. The area cleared some two years now. A ‘guerrilla’ expedition, Ellie jokes, under her own steam.

. . . There’s mallow. White dead-nettle. Clematis (vitalba) establishing. ‘Old Man’s Beard’. I love that name. Wild clary. Hoverflies, good sign! Can’t see it, but there’s a dove somewhere.

Ellie holds the recorder up to catch the coo, but it’s faint, barely perceptible.

Cultivated roses. Hey! A comma. That’s beautiful. On a white buddleia. Some of your bees are here. I can spot their little wires.

The professor back-swipes again, to where she says, ‘a comma’.

Taps his finger further down the line of the recording.

. . . Ice Dock’s huge. Sort of in the distance but sort of not. It looks like pictures of the Colosseum!

Taps again.

. . . pile of dust and earth with bits of broken brick in it. But. So many grasses. Sainfoin. Oh! Campanula. ‘Bellflowers’. They’re so pretty, look. You can eat these, you know. Of course you know.

There are small rustles as she bends to pick a leaf.

Eeek . . . Stealing from a witch’s garden . . . Mmm . . . I can see why Rapunzel’s mum went mad for it . . . Turnipy.

The professor pauses the report, picks up the tube.

The package on the desk, split open down its middle just like the specimen. This thing of wonder he holds in his hand emerged from it; and he is startled. As if he has actually watched it climb from the wrapping and come to him.

Dehiscent, he thinks. Can I use that word for this?

No, that’s only plants. The splitting along a built-in line of weakness in a structure.

An unscientific nervousness starts in the professor’s middle as he looks at the exuvia.

Even with his naked eye he can see. A dragonfly larva in the last instar. The abdominal barb, he’s sure, on the ninth segment. But the segments are tricky to count with the eye. And just one skin.

If it’s what he thinks it is, they emerge to hatch en masse. So.

There must have been more . . .

He forwards to the time stamp Ellie’s given in her handwritten note. Odd to find the fact she’s scribbled to him with an old-fashioned pen more personal somehow than listening to her voice.