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there: to her, Mike and Colin. It was their luck, their opportunity — their responsibility, too. Forget the rest.
    She tried and failed to catch his eye, poured cream into her coffee, sipped. If she did not have any time alone with him before they separated at Vancouver, then she would call him or send a note — something simple suggesting that they had both acted out of character and should put the incident completely behind them.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him glance at his watch.
    â€˜We’d better go,’ he said to Colin.
    â€˜Ready?’ Colin asked her. ‘The cab’s due.’
    â™¦ ♦ ♦
    â€˜June next year would be the earliest that we could begin a full-scale dig. It’ll have to come out with the matrix attached,’ she said as they stood waiting on the wooden dock. The sea, a calm, silvery blue, was decorated with webs of mist. ‘We’ll need a helicopter. That one close to the bank won’t be easy.’
    Mike, as if deaf, stared out to sea.
    â€˜Then, in terms of preparation, it’ll really cost,’ Colin said.
    â€˜Yes,’ she grinned at him. ‘So?’ It was a running joke that he did not have to cope with these kinds of problems, could bring what he wanted home in his pocket, more or less and keep an entire library of specimens on his office shelves.
    â€˜We were so lucky!’ she told him. ‘I wasn’t looking for it. I was thinking aquatic.’ The floatplane, its wingspan only a little larger than that of the creature she’d found, emerged just then from some low cloud on the horizon. Seeing it, they all picked up their bags, even though it would take some minutes to arrive.
    They sat wedged next to each other, Mike in the far window, Colin in the middle, Anna on the nearside. The roar of the engine was both deafening and soothing and the vibration and noise together seemed to scour her mind clean. The ocean below looked more than anything like the skin of some enormous animal, though as they progressed its appearance became more complex. Huge quantities of deep green algae formed viridian clouds, shifting and billowing beneath the surface. A school of thirty or so porpoises, dwarfed by distance, leapt and sank back into the water in apparent unison, sewing their path through the sea. The plane passed over forested and rocky islands, harbours cluttered with yachts and docks, and then they were approaching the delta, the water suddenly smooth, shallow, and heavy with reddish sediments.
    For a moment Anna let her eyes close, and allowed herself to imagine a huge winged creature, downy with brownish hair, its legs tucked up, its neck folded down, slowly beating its way through the air and tracked by its shadow on the water below. Its sight, far more acute than human vision, allowed it to see beneath the water — warmer back then and far more profuse with life, home to car-sized turtles, enormous squid. For a moment, she saw what it saw — and then the floatplane, rejoining the water with a bounce, jolted her back into the now: they climbed out into a breeze that still smelled faintly of cedar.
    Soon they were in Departures, a man-made bubble of recycled air and flickering fluorescence, a world of grey furnishings and static electricity filled with a subdued, brain-numbing acoustic of murmuring voices and the turning over of mechanical systems. Meanwhile, outside, dimly visible behind UV-filtered glass, the real world — ancient, vast, complex and extradimensional, continued without them. The three of them, marooned there in their dusty boots and practical clothes, could not afford to fall out.
    â€˜Mike — wait!’ She fell in with him as he made for security. He bent to retie his bootlace and then stood facing her. They examined each other: he’d shaved carelessly. His left eye, in its purple casing, was smaller but somehow far brighter than the right; the pupils of both eyes were