What awaited this resilient woman in the States? Abby encountering America—an alien from another planet would have almost as much to relate to. But Abby was smart, and strong. Stubborn even, Kate thought, remembering how Abby had handled things at the village. She’d adapt to America. She’d have to.

The workers closed the jet bridge doors. Kate turned and walked back up the concourse. She needed to get to the Port Moresby morgue. She had an autopsy to perform.

Kate turned away from the body and threw up. Though she rarely performed autopsies, she expected to get used to the smell of corpses. It hadn’t happened yet. She looked over at the morgue’s head pathologist, Dr. Jonathan Mandoha. “I apologize. I can’t believe I still do that.”

The pathologist didn’t raise his eyes off the body. “You’re not the first.” He turned to an aide. “Pyande, get someone in here to clean that up, will you?”

Mandoha performed a visual scan of the village chief’s shaved head. Kate was glad she had refused Abby’s request to attend the autopsy. No one should attend the autopsy of someone they knew.

Kate leaned close and let her eyes follow Mandoha’s over the head. There were no identifiable punctures or incisions.

The pathologist spoke. “No external abnormalities. Are we cutting into the cranium, Dr. Sampson? If so, I need my technician to set up the equipment.”

“I’d like to do some brain scans first. I want a full neural imaging workup.”

In the States, of course, everything was done with imaging. But brain disease wasn’t a major health concern in New Guinea, not relative to the many others, and the neural imaging equipment here was decades behind the times, so they would have to cut. Nevertheless, it made sense to first see what they could with the available imaging equipment.

They placed the scanner around the corpse’s head. The scan took ten minutes, during which time Kate checked her taps on the morgue’s Grid access. The technician glanced over at her as she was watching her last message.

“Done, Dr. Sampson.”

“Transfer it over here, will you?”

A 3-D hologram of the chief’s brain appeared in front of her. Mandoha walked across the room, and they both looked at it quizzically. He spoke to the technician. “Pyande, what happened to the rest of this image?”

“What do you mean?”

“Here.” He pointed at the lower left section of the cranial cavity. “There’s nothing here. Where’s that part of the image?”

“I don’t know.”

The technician retraced the steps he had taken to project the image. “Everything looks right. Perhaps we should try another scan.”

Ten minutes later he projected a second image on top of the pathologist’s desk.