Beneath a gaunt stare and filthy skin, a man holds a knife blade to Leone’s throat. He inches Leone forward. His eyes black bullets.
Joan does not flinch. In fact, she barely breathes. She holds the bullet eyes of the man in her gaze, returning something of her might silently back at him. He coughs. A tiny trace of blood where the knife presses in makes a line at Leone’s neck.
Joan shifts her attention to Leone’s face. Nose. Eyes. When Joan looks into Leone’s eyes, she sees two small blank pools. Without emotion. A jaw set against anything in the world. What other reason was there to survive? Leone’s eyes carried everything they’d ever been through together. Small familiar worlds.
Courage. Do not fall back. It was the look she’d given Leone in battle for years.
What, what does this idiotic half-dead man think he is doing in the face of their combined strength and experience? Has he no idea? With his tiny knife and clearly malnourished body? Is he an alien? Does he believe he’s stumbled upon two women from some past where women spoke of la cuisson and les enfants, rather than RPGs and improvised explosive devices? Is she supposed to consider him a foe? She waits. She can smell him as he nears. Dirt, sweat, urine, and the breath of someone who has not bathed or eaten or properly cleaned his teeth in a long while.
Across from her, with a knife at her neck, Leone closes her eyes. Then opens them and smiles.
Unbeknownst to the intruder, Leone has slipped her hand down low enough to recover her favorite companion: a Laguiole, a French fighting knife beloved for its cruciform blade and its ties to history. Little Bee.
Leone swings her arm up and punctures the man’s neck with the knife before he can react. Joan crosses her arms over her chest and tilts her head to the side, silently wondering if Leone has delivered a death stab or merely a wound. Judging from the blood flow, a wound. But this poor pale soul, grabbing at his neck and staggering around the dirt floor in circles, may die anyway.
She walks over to the man, who drops to his knees and sits panting, his head down, his shoulders heaving.
“What shall we do with you?” Joan says, squatting down to his level while Leone cleans blood off of Little Bee on her pants leg.
The man lifts his head.
Joan puts her fingers under his chin to tilt his face upward. He opens his mouth.
“C’est moi,” he whispers, “Peter . . .” Blood veins down his forearm between his fingers in rivers. “You are . . .” he says almost inaudibly, slumping farther toward the ground, sucking in a great chestful of air. “You are real after all.” And then his head thuds against the dirt.
A jolt of recognition shoots through Joan’s shoulders. She lifts his torso. She cradles his head. “Peter?” she shouts.
Leone at her side, wiping dirt from the man’s face: “Your brother?”
Chapter Sixteen
In the auroral glow of the cave’s light, now orange, then blue and green, shimmering, shifting, Joan watches a dozen or so tiny black worms traverse the landscape of her own palm.
Worms from hell. That’s what they’d named the tiny creatures upon their discovery long ago—unusual nematodes living and thriving miles below the earth’s surface in water hot enough to scald a human hand. She remembers reading about them as a child in school.
And yet here they are, surviving forty billion years without notice. That’s how dumb we are about our own origins, our present tense, our future survival. We always look up. What if everything that mattered was always down? Where things are base and lowly. Where worms and shit and beetles bore their way along. Halicephalobus mephisto, named for Mephistopheles, “He who loves not the light.” Lords of the Underworld. “Discovered” back in the day, as if they haven’t already been here forever.
Joan squats next to her dying brother and watches his eyelids twitch. Her thighs burn from crouching so long next to him. Not long now. He’s in that place between sleep and dead. Soon he’ll turn to energy. Dirt. Worms’ meat. She strokes his head. She remembers him as a boy: his dark thick hair, his eyelashes. Then she dumps the palmful of little worms onto his forehead. She doesn’t know why. He doesn’t move.
The first nematodes found in the rock-walled mines of South Africa were radiation-eating microbes, complete with nervous, digestive, and reproductive systems. What did it ever mean, discoveries of new realms of biology on Earth? At the time, scientists were giddy over the implications for extraterrestrial research, or astrobiology. A smile stretches over Joan’s face. All that looking up—it meant only that we barely had time to learn about the world around us before the whole shithouse came down. It meant that life not only went on in so-called impossible, inhospitable places, it flourished.
Absentmindedly, Joan’s fingers flutter at the blue light at the side of her head. Radical changes in morphology brought on by the temper of the sun. Halicephalobus mephisto.
Her brother moans the moan of the dying. She can see Leone’s figure approaching from a cave corridor. She smells her. Dirt and water and skin.
What she’s learned from the worms, in her life as a survivor, is more profound than any philosophy or volume of man-made knowledge. The hell-worm is resistant to high temperatures, reproduces asexually, and feeds on subterranean bacteria and toxins. The tiny black swirling colonies live in groundwater that is three to twelve thousand years old. They survive in waters with next to no oxygen. They ignore science and carry on.