Page 12 of Spread Me
Saskia shades her eyes with the flat of one hand. The sun is tyrannical today, lashing the entire team with whipcrack heat. The air around them is still as a hiding hare, not offering even a sour breath of relief.
“I think we should go inside,”
she says evenly.
“For at least a few hours.”
Kinsey looks up from the grid she’s laying out across the sand.
“We haven’t even started taking samples yet. Domino, are you done with the scissors?”
Domino slowly cuts a length of twine, then hands the scissors over. Their arms move strangely, like they’re reaching through water.
Saskia points at them.
“Domino is lightheaded. And Kinsey, you’re not sweating at all. Nkrumah hasn’t stood upright in half an hour. And Jacques…”
She glances over at Jacques.
“I don’t actually know. He doesn’t look different from normal, but—”
“We get it,”
Jacques grumbles.
“I’m fine, okay? I’m just tired.”
“We should go inside,”
Saskia says again. She thumbs the necklace that hangs at her throat.
“Water. Shade. Little recovery. What do you say?”
Kinsey looks around at her team and sees the way they all sag under the punishing weight of the heat. She grudgingly rises, feels the blood in her legs unpool, watches as the horizon swims and shimmers in the distance.
“One hour,”
she says.
“Unless Mads says we need longer. Which they won’t. Deal?”
Saskia’s already gone, striding back the way they’d come at dawn.
As soon as Kinsey starts walking, she knows that Saskia was right—she can feel the full breadth of the kilometer between them and the station, the way it stretches relentlessly between her team and the respite they all clearly need.
She stumbles over her own feet, kicking up dust and nearly sprawling across a trail of carpenter ants.
She stands there, trying to recover, waiting for her head to stop spinning. She startles at the feel of a cool, dry hand on her elbow.
“Come on, then,”
Saskia says in a low voice, her lips curling up at the corners.
“I’m sure Mads will say I was being silly and inefficient, making us go back. Let’s go talk to them, so you can say you told me so.”
They walk together, Saskia clearly slowing her pace to stay beside Kinsey.
She points at things as they pass—things that are mundane to the desert, but still at least a little incredible to everyone on the team.
A massive lizard resting in the shade of a stone, and his smaller counterpart basking in the sun up above, both of them watching the passersby with suspicious, darting eyes.
A thorny bush so covered in caterpillar webbing that it looks like a fresh-spun cone of cotton candy.
A black seam in a rockface that sets off a debate about whether it would make sense for there to be coal out here.
Saskia gets them talking, checks in on each of them subtly enough that they don’t snap at her.
When they get back to the station, she stands by graciously as Mads berates the entire team for staying in the field during the hottest part of the day.
Kinsey finds her twenty minutes later, after a steady stream of water and cool damp compresses have brought her most of the way back to herself.
“You have every right to say that you told me so. That was stupid,”
Kinsey says evenly.
“I could have gotten us killed.”
Saskia shakes her head and offers Kinsey a small, conspiratorial smile.
“No way. I remember when you interviewed me, Kinsey. You told me that you need every person on your team to be ready to put you in a headlock and drag you out of the field.”
Kinsey doesn’t feel the warmth rising in her cheeks, but she knows it’s there, joining the flush of her lingering heat exhaustion.
“I didn’t think I’d need—”
“Sure you did.”
Saskia gives a liquid shrug.
“So you see? You have nothing to apologize for. You couldn’t have gotten us killed. We’d never let you do such a thing. You made sure of it when you brought us on.”
“Still, though, I’m—”
“You’re perspiring again. Good sign.”
She grins, eyeing Kinsey’s hairline.
“Come on. Let’s go show Mads. They’ll be thrilled to see it. Mads! Kinsey’s sweaty!”
She leads the way to the exam room, and Kinsey follows.