Amy Bechtel: In Fortune's Hand

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

There was a lizard in the wreckage.

Ria Kerey moved aside a chunk of metallic debris and looked down at the lizard’s crushed body. For an instant she thought it was a child’s toy, like the plastic dinosaur she’d found earlier, but it was real, and not long ago it had been alive. Carefully she picked up the lizard and lifted it in her hands. Its front half was undamaged; it had been a brilliant, iridescent creature, with stripes of blue and yellow and green, and highlights of orange and red behind the eyes. Ria cradled it in her hands. She pictured the lizard drowsing and dreaming on a Sun-baked rock on the warm hillside, content with its world, and wondered if it had even seen the small plane that had fallen out of the sky and killed it.

Darcy Angelo knelt beside her and Ria held out the lizard. “Innocent bystander,” Ria said, trying to make light of it, but her voice was unsteady and her hands, still cradling the lizard, shook ever so slightly. She felt foolish, getting emotional over a lizard after calmly and professionally helping piece together the bodies of the plane’s passengers—she especially felt foolish in front of gray-haired Darcy, the team’s leader, a woman who’d been working in the field for over four decades. Ria started to put the lizard back where she’d found it, but Darcy gently took it from her, moved it away from the wreckage, and laid it under a frond of flowering purple weed. Another lizard suddenly darted past in a flash of yellow and green, disappearing as fast as it had come, and Darcy smiled. “There,” she said. “A survivor.”

Ria nodded thoughtfully, then looked up at the waiting copter. Dusk was deepening, mercifully casting the hillside in shadow, hiding the neatly stacked rows of belongings and bodies, the long swath of debris that had once been a small plane. On the plane, there had been no survivors. The rescue team’s last four calls had been much the same: different sorts of accidents, but with the same sort of death toll. Ria found herself wishing for Paul, her husband, who was usually with her on the team. Paul had the luck, being so far away during the worst string of calls they’d had for months, but Ria would have liked to have him by her, just the same.

Lizards always made her think of Paul, these days. The week before he’d left, he’d traded shifts with Jack Mercer on urban duty, and had been called to a pet store fire. The rest of the team had rushed about rescuing puppies and kittens and birds; Paul had stuffed his pockets with chameleons and geckos, and had carried out an armload of iguanas. Apparently he’d been quite a sight, running out of a burning building draped in lizards. The urban team was still laughing about it.

As they walked to the copter, Darcy stopped for a moment to point at the darkening sky. “Which star is Ruby?” she asked.

Involuntarily Ria glanced up, even though she knew Paul’s star was too faint to be seen at dusk. “You can’t see it yet,” she said. “Too much light.”

“It’s hard to believe a ship can really go so far,” Darcy said. “Don’t think I did believe it till that first team went out on the string and came back. Sad to say, I’ve never been farther than the Moon myself.”

“I’ve never even been that far,” Ria said. “Never left Earth.”

“Really, you haven’t? Somehow I thought you had. Being married to Paul, after all. You know, I thought about applying for crew on Aurora myself, but I didn’t suppose they’d be wanting such old folks. Didn’t you think about going?”

“I couldn’t,” Ria said quietly. “Not this time.”

I can’t go with you, she’d told Paul. Even though she’d climbed to the top of Everest with him, even though she’d explored the bottom of the sea by his side, something in her had frozen at the thought of leaving Earth. And how could she even consider following a cosmic string to a star no one had heard of before? The star had no name, only a set of numbers, but Paul, gazing at the pictures the probe had sent back, had called it Ruby. He had shown Ria the pictures of Ruby’s planets, and she’d known, in that instant, that he was going to them, and that nothing could hold him back.

Ria rode in the back of the copter with Darcy and Jack Mercer; Lupe Valdez piloted. Jack was filling in for Paul, and the last few days had not been kind to him. He stared out the window at the deepening gloom, then turned to the others. “Another for the books,” he said with feeling. “You guys work like this all the time?”

Darcy glanced up from her novel and said, “The worst things happen in bunches. It’ll pass.”

“It won’t pass soon enough,” Jack muttered. “Remind me never to sub for Paul again. I’ve never had a worse run of calls in my life.”

“Neither have I,” Lupe said.

Ria was about to agree, but the memory of Simone stirred in her mind and she stayed silent. Beside her, Darcy too said nothing.

“You’ve seen worse?” Jack asked. He looked fascinated.

“Not worse, exactly,” Ria said. “It was just something that got to me.”

“What was it?”

Ria sighed. She didn’t like to talk about that day, but Jack seemed to think that if he heard about something still worse, the horrors of today would recede. And perhaps he was right.

“It was years ago, on my first team. One of my first mountain calls. A woman who’d gone over the side of a cliff.”

The alarm had sounded just before dawn, and when they’d arrived at the scene, the cliff was cloaked in morning fog. The sight of the mist-draped cliff brought a piece of music to Ria’s mind. She had a new album by her favorite singer, Simone Marionneaux, and one of the songs was a strange and sad traditional ballad in French. Ria translated in her mind, remembering; in the song a woman stood at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, lamenting her lost love. It was a dark song but a rich one, laden with emotion. She had listened to it only the night before.

The copter touched down on the cliff top near a stand of tall pines and a cluster of summer cabins. A knot of people stood uneasily nearby, shivering. When Ria peered over the edge she could barely see the fallen woman, far below on an outcropping of rock. Such a long fall. Ria felt downcast. A fall of that distance meant they’d surely be recovering a body rather than saving a life.

So Ria went first, since she was new and could use the practice on a recovery where speed was not essential. She found the woman lying face up, with scarcely a mark on her, curled into an almost comfortable-looking position on the rocks. Ria stared at her in disbelief for a long time, watching numbly as the wind shifted, as the woman’s dark wavy hair blew across her cold face. There was not a mark on that face, and even dead the woman looked uncannily like the pictures on her albums. There was really no doubt that she was Simone.

At the top of the cliff, with Simone’s body bundled and ready for transport, Ria answered questions. The woman’s name was Simone Marionneaux. She was a singer and songwriter. No, she wasn’t well known. No, Ria had never actually ever met her, she had identified Simone from her album photographs. She did not know what Simone’s state of mind might have been, if there was any possibility of suicide.

That question made Ria think again of Simone’s last album, of the sorrowful traditional ballad that the foggy cliff had brought to mind. The entire album had a touch of darkness to it, a darkness that had not been present in Simone’s music before. The music had been richer and deeper for its presence, but had the darkness meant more than that? Had it reflected something in Simone’s life?