“Hey, Temi.” I waved and my stomach gurgled an even more enthusiastic greeting when it noted the canvas grocery bag in her hand.#p#分页标题#e#
She strode up the walkway, her limp barely noticeable, her face grim, but she nodded at my greeting. “There are army vehicles all over town.”
“National Guard, I think. We saw them come down this street.”
“The police have barricades up by that hotel and coffee shop we visited,” Temi said.
“Not surprising. Did you hear about the carnage there last night?”
She nodded. “I didn’t hear about any men in black leather being among the dead. When you were researching, did you...?”
“They’ve moved their motorcycles to the Best Western, so I’m sure they’re fine.”
“Oh, that’s only a couple of blocks away from our motel, isn’t it?” She gazed up the street.
“Don’t remind me,” I said. “Anything promising in that bag?”
“Not much.” Temi handed it to me. “There were only two people working at New Frontiers. These are yesterday’s leftovers.”
I pulled out several wedges of salmon, an entirely-too-healthy-sounding kale salad, and some promising cranberry coconut bars. “Looks a lot better than our usual breakfast. Yo, Simon, you want some salmon?”
He blinked and looked up. “Oh, Artemis. Hi. Uhm.” He waved shyly.
I dropped containers of salmon and coconut bars in his lap, knowing he wouldn’t touch the greens unless his mother was here—or he thought it would impress Temi. He’d already returned his focus to the screen, though, and didn’t notice.
Temi considered the brick front of the library building. “When you spoke of coming here to do research, I imagined you inside, at tables with books around you.”
“Yes, me too,” I said. “We’re still hoping someone might show up to unlock the door.”
Temi sat at the bottom of the steps and opened the containers holding her food. I contemplating returning to my research—Simon seemed to have the cave hunt in hand, but I wanted to look for information on the coin Eleriss had given us. I wished I knew of an archaeological equivalent of that DNA sequencer Autumn had mentioned. It’d be great if we could scan a picture of the coin and run it through some software that would spit out an identification of the civilization and era it had come from. As it was, I’d have to post pictures to some archaeology forums and see if anyone had any ideas. That could wait though; I didn’t have a scanner, so it’d take a trip to one of the shipping stores that had computers.
Breakfast in hand, I sat at the bottom of the steps with Temi, leaving Simon, his fingers flying again, in his spot against the doors. Another convoy of National Guard vehicles passed us by, and I wondered if we’d soon see troops marching through the streets with rifles.
“Your friend said she’d call when she’s ready to be picked up,” Temi said after we’d finished eating. “It sounded like she’ll be able to access a lab right away.”
“That’s good. I’ve got someone working on the language program, so—” My phone beeped. “That might be him now.”
The text message was indeed from Professor Wilkons. No matches. It’s weirder than Basque.
“Hm.” I typed in, What about single-word matches? If there aren’t any full language matches, might there at least be some shared words?
We’ll see. I have the computer running a deeper analysis.
Thank you.
I put the phone down and chomped on my salmon. I’d never been a fish lover, but I felt a vague sense of duty to my body to eat it and the salad before diving into the dessert bar.
“Basque?” Temi asked. She’d been peering over my shoulder as I texted. “That’s a Spanish language, right?”
“Not exactly. The Basque region is located mostly in Spain—it’s up around the border shared with France, but it’s a language isolate that doesn’t have anything in common with the Indo-European romance languages surrounding it. It’s not like any other languages, really. There are a lot of interesting hypotheses by linguists, trying to link it to more distant languages—all contested though. One of my school friends did a paper on the idea that the Basques are descended from the Neanderthals, because it’s widely known that they lived in Western Europe. She had some modern information on blood types and DNA analysis, speaking of all that stuff, to back it up. It was an interesting paper.”
Temi turned toward the street, her face thoughtful. “You guys have a wide breadth of knowledge. Is there anything that would be useful for me to study? To assist with research?”