Free The Brittle Limit, a Novel by Kae Bell Page A

were looking for?”
    “Yes, in fact I do.” She picked up a large
glass fragment of her favorite green frog, its golden eye staring
at her. “Follow me.”
    She led Andrew into the main room. French
doors opened out into the night, street sounds filtering up into
the bright room. A lone moth darted in, seeking the source of the
light.
    Andrew looked around. There were papers all
over the floor, the desk, and the couch. Overturned cardboard boxes
lay ripped and strewn across the floor, the contents dumped without
care. They’d left nothing untouched. A night wind from the open
window fluttered the papers.
    “What is all this?”
    “Ben’s records. He kept meticulous notes of
his work.” She neatened a stack of papers on the couch, cornering
the edges. “Among all this, they knew exactly what they were
looking for. And they found it.”
    “How do you mean?”
    Severine picked up a black metal box, its
flimsy metal lock bent and misshapen. She opened the box and turned
it upside down. It was empty.
    “This contained his reports to the Ministry,
where he’d been, what he’d done, seen…found. He put all that into
his reports and kept a copy for himself.”
    “What reports? What Ministry?” Andrew felt
heady, with the slight buzz that he got when things were about to
light up.
    Severine scratched her chin as she bit her
lower lip. She was tired. She hadn’t slept now for three
nights.
    “Ben filed reports with the Ministry of
Mining. He reported on things he found out in the jungle.
Artifacts, remnants, old stone carvings. Nothing too big, usually
just fragments. He’d find shards of pottery, old tools, parts of
statues. Nobody has explored the deep woods out there because of
all the leftover land mines. There’s still a lot of stuff out
there, just waiting to be found. The Ministry rule is if it is
historical, the Ministry wants to know. It’s how they decide
whether to grant concessions to mining companies or to mark the
land for preservation.”
    Severine’s long hair framed her face. “And
that’s what they took. All of his Ministry reports.” She surveyed
the mess on the floor. “They made quite a mess finding them. But
they knew the reports were here.”
    Andrew stared at the empty box. “The report
would say what he found and who he was working for?”
    “Yes, that would all have been in the
report.”
    Andrew stared out the window, thinking, and
turned back to Severine. “But Ben couldn’t have filed a report for
this trip. He…never made it back.”
    Severine nodded, accepting the harsh truth.
“Yes, you’re right. But he had filed a report from his first trip
out there. He said he needed to go back again to this one site,
wanted me to go along.”
    Andrew started at this revelation, that Ben
had previously visited the site where he was killed.
    Severine picked at the stuffing on the
slashed couch. “If it’s helpful, I do know that he got paid in
cash. And a lot of it.”
    “How much?”
    “Five thousand dollars for two days
work.”
    “Is that good money? It sounds like very good
money.” Andrew didn’t know the going rate for working in a
minefield. His job was filled with risk, but not
take-one-wrong-step-and-you’re-dead kind of risk.
    “Yes. Very. He was thrilled.” She picked at a
hangnail on her left thumb, a nervous habit. She looked at her bare
left hand. Her fingernails were unpolished and short, bitten to the
quick.
    “Look. This might not be easy. But can you
tell me exactly what happened in the jungle that day? Maybe there’s
something you don’t realize is important.”
    “Yes, OK. I can do that.” Severine sat down
on the couch, took one deep breath, then another. She looked around
the chaos in the room and began to recount the afternoon in
Mondulkiri.
    *******
    For some time, the only sound was the
thwek-thwek of the machete as they moved farther into the grasping
jungle. Rounding a blind corner, they came upon a small sunlit
clearing, a deep inviting pool