For him, the search was not answers, the search was for surprise.

Does Ellie know? Does she know the significance of this?

A dragonfly. A predator at the top point of a triangle. On the Red List. One of the few things the countries of the world agree on.

If a Red List species is present in a place, no action can be carried out that will disturb it until it has been relocated or moved on.

He dials Ellie. Needs to ask. Were there more exuviae? The water, was it running? Slowly? At all? But gets her ansaphone.

Ellie here. Can’t talk right now. I’m walking against the Ice Dock project. You should be too. Leave a message if you want.

Ellie, Ellie, he thinks. Were there more exuviae? Was the water running . . .?

Turns back to her recording.

Yay! Hopscotch. Kids must come out here to play.

He goes, without any need for conscious navigation, to the specimen vault, to the section ‘Odonata’. Logs on, keys the species number. ‘Odonota’ – from the Greek belief that dragonflies had teeth . . . presses Confirm.

The drawer emits a gentle beep and slides itself open.

A few metres down the vault, the integral inspection light casts a knee-high glow, and he feels a hum as he crouches to see the specimen, as if he finds it in the field.

There, vibrant under the light, Scarce Chaser. Libellula fulva. Male.

The powder-blue pruinescence of its abdomen. A wingspan the length of his thumb. Brown pterostigma. Veins as frail as a leaf skeleton.

He draws the hand lens from his chest pocket. His thumb tracing the comfortable scratch of the long-smoothed inscription on its case.

From above, the dragonfly’s eyes are a bottomless blue-grey. Seem gauzed, like the veil of his bee-keeping suit.

Dragonfly, he thinks. Savours their names. ‘Devil’s Darning Needle’. ‘Adderbolt’. ‘Ear Cutter’. Their strange helicopter movements, clicking as they take smaller insects in the air.

It’s almost impossible for him not to think that this imago clambered from the very skin he holds. The skin he could not leave behind him on his desk. That it crawled somehow from the accumulated silt in which for two years it fed and grew, and that this bright thing in the drawer broke from it.

That must happen. Mustn’t it? A dragonfly must land, sometimes, next to the skin of itself it crawled from.

Can they know?

He wants to pick it up and set it on his finger. But does not.

And suddenly and certainly he understands he’s going out there. Now. Out to the site where this was found.

That he’ll pack his field bag in a rush and go. Take the sampling rods, and nets.

That he will lie down on his belly and plunge his arm into the water.

This species lays its eggs in running water . . . The larvae two years in the silt. Before they clamber up and split.