Page 53 of The Gathering Storm

“I am.”

Her happiness shouldn’t have surprised her, but did. Before Will had stolen those kisses from her, she’d been at loose ends, bored, restless. He’d provided a small portion of the adventure she’d needed to jolt her out of a rut. More, he filled her life, easing the loneliness she hadn’t even been aware of carrying.

“You’re really going to fight another Daughter over him?” George asked.

“You heard about that?”

“Everybody has.” He pushed through the short pile of folders resting between them and selected one. “I hope you kick her ass.”

His words startled a laugh out of her. “I plan on doing so.”

“See that you do. I’ve just gotten used to this side of you.”

They settled back down to work. Sigrid set the results she’d been working on aside. The ethnicity was wrong, even accounting for statistical variations and the perils inherent to the methodologies used to estimate it. Too much Southeast African, not enough Near Eastern. She’d expect at least a three-quarter estimate of the latter ethnicity regardless of any other factor.

The next folder she snagged was for Jaran, a Daughter she knew by reputation only. Jaran had been decidedly African in origin, sub-Saharan, if Sigrid recalled correctly, a Daughter of a line that had been in Africa for at least three generations prior to her birth. For the sake of thoroughness, every set of results had to be checked. She flipped open the folder, sifted through the pages, went straight to the ethnicity, and stared.

Nearly one hundred percent Near Eastern. That had to be a mistake.

“We need to rerun these tests,” she told George.

He glanced over, used one finger to push paper off the folder label, and shrugged. “Can’t. We only had a partial skeleton to work with there and it was brittle. Really old, I thought. We got just enough DNA out of a femur to run the tests we needed.”

Sigrid’s heart began to pound as the implications presented by ancient bones began to form in her mind. Age wasn’t the only factor in a bone’s deterioration. Acidity, moisture, heat, all could contribute to a bone’s breakdown, but age was so important.

“Jaran was only about fifteen hundred years old when she died, and that was just before my birth,” Sigrid said.

George’s eyes widened. “So you didn’t know her?”

“I knew of her. My mother used to tell stories of Jaran, of the battles she fought, of the number of enemies she killed before they took her down.” Even back then, when the People were scattered and their enemies were fierce, news had a way of making it into the right ear. “She was a fierce warrior, one of our finest, but she was several generations removed from her Sister ancestress. Look.”

Sigrid showed him the ethnicity results and explained Jaran’s heritage, or what she knew of it. “We can probably confirm some of her ancestry with Robert, or by interviewing her descendants.”

“Yeah, we should look into that.” George crossed one arm over his chest, propped the other elbow on it, and rubbed a hand over his mouth. “There must’ve been a mix-up somewhere. Either the samples or the results were mislabeled.”

“Or the remains themselves were mixed up.” Sigrid glanced at the files in front of them. “Do you remember running across results that would’ve approximated Jaran’s ethnicity or otherwise matched her?”

“No, but we haven’t tested all the museum’s remains yet.”

“And we still have results to sort through.” Sigrid huffed out a sigh and eyed the folders scattered across the workbench. “Ok, let’s start with what’s in front of us.”

They divided the remaining fifteen files between them and flipped through each one for the ethnicity report, the best way they had of determining which results belonged to Jaran. None matched, so they went to the workroom housing all of the remains from the museum and checked labels, sorted onto metal shelves running the length of the room.

George located the box labeled “Jaran: Ganenda: ca. 732 BCE - 766 CE” and placed it on the small table near the room’s entrance, the only empty workspace in the room.

Sigrid opened the box and examined the few bones comprising the remains mislabeled as Jaran’s. Age had painted a patina on the bones’ surfaces, staining them brown like an old sepia toned photograph. A chill ran down Sigrid’s spine. Could these be the remains of a Sister, or of a first generation Daughter? Was that even possible?

She retrieved archival gloves from the pocket of her lab coat, tugged them on, and lifted the femur from the Styrofoam cushioning it from further damage.

“What is it?” George asked.

She glanced at him, startled. She’d almost forgotten he was there. “What is what?”

“You got this funny look on your face.”

“I don’t know why.”

She shook the lie away. Yes, she did, and he deserved to hear what she was beginning to suspect. How to tell him, though?

---