Alex Steven's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The call came in from Siberia two days after Alex finished the quarantine perimeter. The permanent excavation team had hit something new in the permafrost. Alex took the satellite feed in her office and watched the grainy footage scroll across her screen. A second specimen lay half-exposed in the ice. It was larger than the first by a wide margin, and the team lead said the layer above it dated older than anything they'd pulled before. The shape was wrong for any catalogued species. Heavy limbs. A long skull. Still locked in clear blue ice, intact enough that the tissue underneath looked fresh. Alex flew out within twenty hours. The field station sat low against the white slope, metal and glass braced against the wind. Inside, the team had already cut a rough block around the specimen and moved it into the cold storage bay. Alex circled the block slowly. Through the ice she could see a curled trunk, tusks, and a thick coat of dark fur. It looked like a mastodon at first glance. It wasn't. The proportions were off, the claws on the forelimbs too long, the jaw too deep. She gave the order to extract. The team drilled core samples from three points and sealed them in nitrogen tubes. The DNA pulled clean on the first try. Alex watched the sequencer run and felt her chest tighten. The markers matched the unclassified creature back home. Same source. Same line. This was its parent species, or close to it. They loaded the full ice block into a refrigerated transport unit, a heavy blue hauler rigged for long-haul cold chain. Alex signed the manifest herself and rode with it to the airstrip. She told the team to keep digging. If there were two, there were more. By the time the truck rolled onto the cargo ramp, Alex already knew what she'd bought herself. Answers about the creature in the amphitheater. And a second one coming, larger and older, with DNA already in her lab. The arc had widened. She didn't slow down.