Free Prophet of Bones by Ted Kosmatka

tomorrow.”
    “I understand. Is there anything else you require?”
    “Solitude.” Paul smiled. “I don’t want anybody in the cave for this part.”
    Gavin nodded and left. Paul broke out his tarps and hooks. It was best if the sampler was the person who dug the fossils out of the ground—or, better yet, if the DNA samples were taken when the bones were still in the ground. Less contamination that way. And there was sure to be contamination. Always. No matter what precautions were taken, no matter how many tarps or how few people worked at the site, there was still always contamination.
    Paul staked the tarps down at one end and slid into the hole, a flashlight strapped to his forehead, his white paper suit slick on the moist earth. He gripped the ladder as he descended into the dark cold, the bamboo rungs flexing under his weight like thin ice. He wondered how much heavier he was than the average worker on the site. When his feet finally touched down on damp clay, he turned and squatted. The working floor was two meters by two meters.
    From his perspective, he couldn’t tell what the bones were—only that they were bones, in situ, half-buried in earth. But that was all that mattered. The material was soft, unfossilized; he’d have to be careful. It was commonly accepted that bones needed at least a few thousand years to fossilize. These were younger than a lot of archaeological finds.
    The procedure took nearly seven hours. He coated the bone surface with sodium hyperchlorate, then used a Dremel tool to access the unexposed interior matrix. He snapped two dozen photographs, careful to record the stratigraphic context. Later it would be important to keep track of which samples came from which specimens. Whoever these things were, they were small. He sealed the DNA samples into small, sterile lozenges for transport.
    It was night when he climbed from under the tarp.
    Outside the cave, Gavin was the first to find him in the firelight. “Are you finished?”
    “For tonight. I have six different samples from at least two different individuals.”
    “Yeah, that’s what we thought, two individuals. So far.”
    “So far?”
    “We’re not sure how far down the cache goes. When we remove those bones, there could be more underneath.”
    “Is that common here?”
    Gavin shrugged. “It’s unpredictable. The deposits will go shy on you sometimes. You’ll have a dozen feet of nothing, just sterile soil, and then you’ll brush away the next centimeter and the dig will go active for another dozen feet: rat bones, and bird, and charcoal, and stone tools. Even Stegodon, a kind of pygmy elephant. Sometimes more interesting things.”
    “I’d say those bones were interesting,” Paul said.
    “So that means you’ll stay on with us?”
    “Yeah,” Paul said. “I’ll stay.”
    *   *   *
    Gavin handed him a bottle of whiskey.
    “Isn’t it a little early to celebrate?”
    “Celebrate? You’ve been working in a grave all day. Don’t they drink at wakes in America?”
    That night, around the campfire, Paul listened to the jungle sounds and to the voices of scientists, feeling history congeal around him.
    “Suppose it isn’t,” Jack was saying. Jack was thin and American and very drunk. “Suppose it isn’t in the same lineage with us, then what would that mean?”
    The red-bearded herpetologist groaned. His name was James. “Not more of that dogma-of-descent bullshit,” he said.
    “Then what is it?” someone asked.
    They passed the bottle around, eyes occasionally drifting to Paul like he was a priest come to grant absolution, his sample kit just an artifact of priestcraft. Paul swigged from the bottle when it came his way. They’d finished off the whiskey long ago; this was some local brew distilled from rice. Paul swallowed fire.
    Yellow-haired man saying, “It’s the truth,” but Paul had missed part of the conversation, and for the first time he realized how drunk they all were; James laughed at