Page 51 of Smoky Lake

“Really?” She gave him a glowing smile. “I like your confidence. And since you’re a scientist, you must have a very good reason for it. Did Victor share your confidence, or do you have something he didn’t?”

The kid looked like he wanted to tell her anything and everything she wanted to know. Gil decided he should give them a little space. He got up and stepped to a metal desk shoved against the wall. “Is this Victor’s desk?”

“Yeah, yeah, go for it.” Nyx didn’t even look away from Ani.

As Gil had expected, Nyx relaxed as soon as he had Ani’s attention to himself. Gil scanned Victor’s workspace. Computer terminal—screen locked, of course. No laptop, because Victor probably had it with him. A stress toy shaped like a mushroom. A small electric kettle and a one-cup espresso maker. None of it was remotely helpful.

It didn’t matter. Under Ani’s soft gaze and gentle questions, Nyx finally started talking.

23

“I’m not just a scientist,” Nyx said proudly. “I’m Indigenous, from a far-north branch of the Ahtna. Our stories have science embedded in them, you know?”

Ani gave him that encouraging smile that no man, in Gil’s opinion, would be able to resist. “That’s really fascinating. Did you tell Victor about some of these stories?”

“Oh yes. He loves that stuff. We still tell stories from the time the Russians first came in the fifteen hundreds. You know how usually when invaders encounter the native population, they bring diseases with them that the locals have no resistance to? If it’s a microbe you’ve never bumped into, your immune system doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“Right, that happened in the lower forty-eight, too.”

“It happens everywhere colonizers go. But this one time, the opposite happened. This area here.”

He gestured toward a map mounted on the wall, then jumped to his feet to show Ani the area he was referring to. Even from where he was at Victor’s desk, Gil could see it was incredibly remote. Even forbidding, an icebound expanse of tundra.

“It’s hard to believe anyone could live there,” Ani murmured.

“My ancestors were tough.”

“Are you from there?” Ani asked as she peered at the map.

Gil decided to join them so he could see exactly what Nyx was talking about. He got a quick resentful glance from the kid, but by now he was too into his story to stop.

“No,” Nyx admitted. “No one lives there anymore. My ancestors migrated farther south and got folded into the larger Ahtna community. But one of my great-great-grandfathers lived there, and I’ve heard stories. Before contact, they traded with the Ahtna who lived farther south, so they weren’t completely cut off. But they were pretty remote. And they always avoided this territory here. There was a legend that it wasn’t to be disturbed.” He spread his hand over a shaded section between two mountain ranges. “But that didn’t stop the Russians. They didn’t care about our legends. When the first group of Russian explorers came, they traveled all through here in the early sixteen hundreds. They’d set up camps, make fires. They dug deep into the permafrost looking for mineral deposits. Here in Fairbanks, the permafrost starts six feet down. Up there, it’s a foot. And then…they got sick. Half of them died.”

“Was it this same omegavirus?” Ani asked.

“That’s the theory, but it would be hard to confirm without testing a centuries-old frozen Russian explorer, and you can’t exactly order those on Amazon.”

Gil frowned at the map. “Is that the same area where they were doing core samples? Ninuk?”

“Different century, same area, same blowing off of indigenous knowledge. If y’all just listened to us once in a while, maybe you’d live longer and happier lives.” He gave them a cheeky smile.

“We’re listening now,” Ani assured him. “This is so interesting. You’re saying the northern Ahtna knew there was an ancient virus frozen in the permafrost?”

“They didn’t know about viruses, obviously. But they knew their ancestors got sick when they went that way. But here’s the thing. My people got sick, but they didn’t die.”

“They’d developed immunity to the virus?”

“Victor thought it might be due to some local plant that was part of their diet. He couldn’t get funding for that research, so he was tacking it onto his permafrost field trips. That’s why he went to Ninuk. Please don’t tell anyone. He’d kill me.”

Gil gave an impatient shrug. “Who would we tell? I don’t have a problem with any of that. It does explain why he didn’t talk about his research much. He didn’t want people to know he was misusing the grant funds.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Gil looked at Nyx sharply. He got the sense there was another reason Victor hadn’t talked about it, something Nyx still wasn’t sharing. “So what was he doing at Smoky Lake?”

“Testing plant samples, trying to identify which one might provide the protection from the virus. He needed a place to work alone with no one watching over his shoulder like here.” He gestured to the surrounding department, with the occasional researcher wandering past.

“Did he have any success? Did he keep you updated on his research?”

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