How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Sequoia Nagamatsu
- Language: English
- Genre: Romance Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
30,000 Years beneath a Eulogy
In Siberia the thawing ground was a ceiling on the verge of collapse, sodden
with ice melt and the mammoth detritus of prehistory. The kilometer-long
Batagaika Crater had been widening with temperature rise like some god had
unzipped the snow-topped marshlands, exposing woolly rhinos and other
extinct beasts. Maksim, one of the biologists on staff and a helicopter pilot,
pointed to the copper gash in the earth where my daughter had fallen shortly
before discovering the thirty-thousand-year-old remains of a girl. We circled
the research outpost, a network of red geodesic domes peeking right below
the tree line, before landing in a clearing. Maksim helped me out of the
chopper, grabbed my bags and a sack of mail from the back.
“Everybody loved Clara,” he said. “Don’t get weirded out if people don’t
talk about her, though. Most of us keep that kind of stuff to ourselves.”
“I’m here to help,” I said.
“Right, of course,” Maksim said. “There is, of course, another matter . . .”
I half listened as I studied the land, breathed air that, like the fossils beneath
us, seemed trapped in time. He explained that a quarantine had been put into
effect while we were in flight. No one had expected me to come finish
Clara’s work, let alone so soon.
Inside, the outpost’s central dome looked and smelled like a dorm
common room, with a big-screen television, worn recliners, and a stockpile
of mac and cheese boxes. The walls were covered with a mixture of
topographical maps and movie posters—everything from Star Wars to Pretty
Woman to Run Lola Run. Down the accordion-like halls, I could see unkempt
people emerging from their bunks or labs. A woman in a purple windbreaker
and running leggings sprinted across the room.
“I’m Yulia. Welcome to the end of the world,” she said, and disappeared
into one of the eight tunnels radiating out from the central domes, punctuated
with bunks like cells in a beehive. The team emerged from their workstations,
slowly enveloping me with the musty scent of more than a dozen researchers.
“Everybody, this is our guest of honor, Dr. Cliff Miyashiro from UCLA
—archaeology and evolutionary genetics,” Maksim said. “He’ll be helping us
out with Clara’s discovery. I know all of us lab rats will get even weirder
now that we’re not allowed to leave the site, but try to be nice.”
Maksim assured me the quarantine was precautionary since the team had
successfully reanimated viruses and bacteria in the melting permafrost. He
said government officials watch too many movies. Standard protocol. No one
at the outpost seemed sick or concerned.
Unwanted orientations into how Clara lived her life here soon followed—
where she drank her coffee and gazed up at the aurora; the route she jogged
with Yulia, the botanist; the tabletop lotus aromatherapy fountain she and
Dave, the epidemiologist, used for their morning yoga sessions; the cubby
where she kept her snow gear, which would become my snow gear since
we’re about the same size—and how for birthdays, some of the team would
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