* A hand in your making, a bird in the hand, hands forced, hand in hand, blood on your hands, washing one's hands of the matter
* First one to go
* One night, outside the clearing where the tower is, meets clone
* Clone guides her hand into the soil where it takes root, muscles loosened, unwound, thus unbound began to lengthen, strengthen, arch skyward, seeking stars.
The day began with the botanist giving the physicist a hand in setting up countless contraptions around the rim of the clearing, describing an invisible net of arcane geometries held five feet above the ground. She lugged the total station while he placed the equipment. He prattled on as he went, describing what he was doing, what tools he was using, what equipment she was carrying. She largely lost track after the word 'theodolite', though.
Theodolite.
*Theo*-dolite?
*Theodo*-lite?
The *-ite* put her in mind of stones. Of something semiprecious. Pretty, but not costly. And that *theo* stuck on the beginning got her thinking of gods and, perhaps, of God. Theology. That sort of thing.
*The god-stone? Does that make sense?*
Or perhaps it was the *-dol-* stuck in the middle. Sadness? No. Pain? Dolorimetry. Was at a science? A sub-field, perhaps. Not hers, not the physicist's.
*The god-stone, amber of the highest quality, embedded in which is a kernel of pain.*
Here the physicist was, describing measurements and chromatic aberrations and spherical lenses and timed strobes and...
And all she could think was *were I to stumble across it, would I know the god-stone if I saw it?*
The botanist jerked upright. She had been crouched. Or hunched. A near feral wariness had overtaken her and formed her body into a bow. Taut, ready. She put forth a conscious effort to straighten up, square her shoulders, let them relax.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, sorry."
"It's alright. Did you hear something?"
"No. Maybe. I don't know."
The physicist frowned, peered out into the trees in the direction the botanist had been looking. "I thought you might have heard something. You froze and started looking over there, over to the staircase."
She didn't remember which way she had been facing. She knew that she had turned to face the physicist, though.
"But then you just kept standing there. It wasn't like you were listening. You were just frozen."
"Yeah, sorry. Maybe this place has me a little on edge.
At that, the physicist's demeanor relaxed. "Right, yeah. The air's thicker, like there's too much oxygen."
"Mm."
They walked back into the shade of a tree once the physicist had strung wires between these arcane points, describing a sigil the botanist could never hope to understand. Ferns fingered the air and fronds like hands seemed to be reaching to touch them.
A flash. A sudden light from all five posts set the clearing in stark relief.
The physicist smiled dreamily. "Thank God that worked."
And then they unwound the entire procedure from before. Undoing the cabling, unearthing the rods, undowsing, in some strange way, the work of the theolodite.
On the way back to the camp, the physicist continued to chatter. He was measuring the way light and shadow moved within the reach. "No reason to think it wouldn't," he had assured her. Or at least assured her form, as she was elsewhere. "But you have to admit, everything's a little strange in here."
At the camp: quiet. The four sat, each in front of their tent, thinking or not, reading or not. At one point, the linguist asked after the architect, and the psychologist repeated, "He went back to base."
And then: quiet.
The botanist read for a few minutes, and then set her book down, tented up over the open page, and fingered instead the thin shim of metal that was her bookmark. Brass, or something like it, it had become her fetish over the last two days. A thing to touch. Something known. Something remembered. Something grounding in this most ungrounded of locations.
"What *is* that, anyway?"
"Mm?"
The linguist gestured to the bookmark. "That. Every time we're here at camp, you read like two pages of your book and then just play with that. What is it?"
She shrugged and handed it over. "Gift from my dad. We had a...complicated relationship, but he gave this to me before I left. Just a bookmark, probably from some tourist trap."
"'May the road rise up to meet you', huh?" The linguist looked as though she was on the edge of becoming snarky, but her gaze quickly softened. "Go n-éirí an bóthar leat. It's Gaeilge. Irish. Supposed to be 'may your travels be successful', but someone messed up the translation ages ago, and we got this version."
"You know it?"
"Yeah. I studied Celtic languages for a while and wrote a paper on the whole thing for an undergrad anthropology class. Write what you know, I guess." She grinned. "The whole thing goes, uh...'Go n-éirí an bóthar leat, go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl, o lonraí an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh, go dtite an bháisteach go mín ar do pháirceanna, agus go mbuailimid le chéile arís, go gcoinní Dia i mbos A láimhe thú.' I think. It's like, 'good luck on your road, may the wind be behind you, may the sun shine on your face, may the rain fall on your fields, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.'"
It was the most any of them had spoken in hours about anything other than...than work? Than whatever it was they were doing out here in Area X. All of them were listening.
And as she listened, the botanist felt that hand, felt God's hand, close around her mind. Felt it cradle, grip, tighten, squeeze. Felt it test her limits, and, on finding them, sit just shy of too much. She was sure there must be a hand print sprawled across her face, though none of the others said anything about it.
The physicist: "See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands."
Silence. He looked abashed. "Isaiah forty-nine something."
The psychologist lifted her sleepy head. "You're Catholic."
It wasn't a question. She knew already. Knew all of their profiles.
"Yeah. I'm, uh...gently lapsed. I still believe, still read the bible. Just don't go to mass much. I don't like it there."
Hands.
Hands.
Always hands.
The botanist had tuned out, and some distant part of her was surprised to find that she had stood, that she had pacing, that she had stopped and hunched and tensed, once more facing the stairs. The stairs. That finger pointing toward God.
The psychologist: "Are you excited, too?"
She frowned, let the tension drain from her as blanket settled over her unsettled mind. Turned, abashed, back toward camp. "No. Maybe. I don't know."
The hand of God had loosened its grip around her mind and here she was, back at camp, back beneath the trees, back by the tall reeds, back by the ferns fingering the air and the fronds like hands reaching out to them.
