The small man leans in and blows away a puff of dust. Then, with surgical precision, he removes what appears to be a skull, maybe human, though it seems too long. Some dirt falls from its hollows when he holds it up for everyone to see. Then he carries it to a table made from a sheet of plywood laid over sawhorses. Here it joins an arrangement of bones.
She has visited two archaeological sites for stories. A weeklong OMSI camp, themed around Lewis and Clark, that dug into a section of Fort Clatsop. And a summer class with UO that excavated a Paiute village in Christmas Valley. In both instances, the sites were gridded with string. The archaeologists were exacting about measurements, the precise location of every obsidian flake and broken bone and fibrous sandal found within the grid. She was expecting Indiana Jones, but it felt more like the slow disarrangement of a 3D jigsaw puzzle.
That isn’t the case here. No grid. No map. No sifting screens. Not even a ponytailed grad student in cargo shorts drinking from a Nalgene bottle covered with National Park stickers. Here instead is trouble—of this she feels certain.
Whoever Undertown is—whatever they’re building—they don’t want their project shut down by this discovery. So they must have erected high walls around the site in order to take care of it secretly. Actual walls that matched the privacy of their digital walls.
She snaps several more photos, wishing she brought the long lens, wishing she could get closer. There is an underground exit at the corner of the pit. A black hollow framed by a brick doorway. Maybe an entrance to the tunnel system that runs beneath Portland. She doesn’t notice it until someone—a black-bearded man—steps from it and calls to the others. They pause in their work and he waves to them, and one by one they set down their tools and follow.
A staggered ramp runs from the top of the construction site to the bottom. Lela tromps down it without hesitation. She tries to keep her footsteps quiet, but the ramp is loose on its scaffolding and the boards boom below her. At the bottom of the site, the air is cooler. There is a musty, almost sulfuric taste to it. The noise of the world falls away completely except for a muffled growl of a jet somewhere overhead.
She goes first to the table. It is clotted with dirt and busy with yellow-brown bones. She snaps a photo and reaches for the skull. Its deformity is clear now—too long and thin, almost snouted—what she imagines a baboon or warthog might look like beneath the skin. The teeth are as long as her fingers. Lines run across the bone, sometimes straight, sometimes curled, sometimes arranged into what appear to be pentagonal patterns. It reminds her of the beetle-bitten wood found on a tree when you peel the bark damply from it.
She hears the small man before she sees him. “No,” he says in a high, raspy voice. “No trespass!” His face is tight with anger. He stands in the doorway to the tunnel, the shadows thickly surrounding him. She is already backing away, already retreating up the ramp when he calls over his shoulder. She doesn’t recognize the language he speaks—could it be Latin, like something out of a Roman Catholic service?—but the meaning is clear as the other men kick their way up the stone stairs.
She’s talked and fought herself out of plenty of dangerous situations. She’s been threatened with a knife, a gun. She’s been undercover in a heroin den—a graffitied room with two soiled mattresses and a lava lamp—when an addict started feeling her up and paused his hand at the battery pack for her hidden camera. When he asked what it was, she said, “An insulin pump. I have diabetes,” and then offered to tie off his arm while he shot up.
Sometimes you talk and sometimes you fight and sometimes you run. She runs now, pounding up the ramp. It elbows, ten feet off the ground, onto its second level. Here she skids to a stop.
Down below, the small man is speaking rapid-fire in another language, making his hand into a blade and cutting the air in her direction. The men pour out of the tunnel and head toward her, some of them gripping trowels in their hands as though they were knives.
She doesn’t realize until now that she still holds the skull in her hand. She sets it down on the platform. Then twists off an anchoring clamp and hefts the bottom ramp. It scrapes half off the scaffolding. She kicks it—once, twice—and it loses its purchase and falls to the ground with a whoomp of displaced air that sends a cloud of grit into the approaching men.
She scoops up the skull, her finger hooking an eye socket, and considers hurling it down as well. Anything to stop their progress. She pauses her hand. She has photos, but the skull is hard evidence. Something tangible to share with police, professors. She shoves it into her purse and sprints the rest of the way up. The camera thuds against her chest. Her eyes water from wind or nerves, blurring her vision of the workers fumbling with the fallen ramp and the black-bearded man clanking up an extension ladder toward her.
Chapter 2
CHESTON’S APARTMENT—on Lovejoy, at the edge of the Pearl—looks out on other apartments, other offices, all of them walled with windows. He lives on the top floor, the tenth of his building. He owns a telescope, a Celestron Astromaster on a tripod, and when he isn’t working, he’s watching.
He’s watching a woman now. She skids around a corner and hammers along the sidewalk at a full sprint. A ginger-colored braid swings wildly with every step. She clutches an enormous canvas purse. A block away, she rips open the door to her car, an ancient Volvo jeweled with guano, and vanishes inside. A few seconds later the station wagon grinds into gear and lurches into the street and cuts off a delivery truck that lays on its horn. She speeds away, trailing a cloud of black exhaust.
Cheston whirls the telescope back to the corner where she first appeared. One man—soon joined by three others—stands there, breathing heavily. The telescope brings them close enough to see the whites of their eyes. They watch her car retreat and then say something to one another before returning back the way they came.
It is only 4:00, but this is October and the dark is coming. Cheston prefers the dark. That’s one of the reasons he loves Portland, where it rains 170 days a year and where it is gray-skied more often than that. Sunlight burns his eyes, forks a migraine up his forehead. Sometimes he keeps a forty-watt lamp burning in the corner, but otherwise his office is lit by the underwater glow of his computers. He wears sunglasses when hunched over his desk, staring at the bank of screens.