Page 8 of Spread Me

The video on Kinsey’s laptop judders as the hotel Wi-Fi throttles her signal. She sits in her room, drumming her fingers on the smearless glass of the desk, waiting for the candidate’s image to clear.

“Can you see me?”

“I—see—can—?”

Their voice comes through in robotic bursts.

Kinsey sighs and hangs up the call.

She’s unwilling to wait.

TQI is bringing her to their Albuquerque headquarters for some kind of paperwork bonanza, and she only has half an hour before the car they’re sending will ping her phone to tell her it’s pulling up.

If she’s going to arrive with her first hire under her belt, she needs to be able to talk to the candidate now.

Her cell phone hotspot does the job better than the hotel internet was ever going to.

She calls them back, and this time, they’re at least recognizable as a human being.

The conversation picks up quickly.

The candidate jokes easily, apologizes after swearing and then immediately swears again, drops hints about hating TQI but loving the sound of the work.

Kinsey is charmed.

She asks questions about their research into dune ecology and wind patterns, and then gets into some specifics about their experience with Weatherman.

Everyone at the station will be doing a bit of everything, but this person will take point on storm tracking; it will be their job to decipher the steady stream of weather data that will come into the base via satellite.

They tell her about their love for the red glow of the screen when the incoming data indicates severe conditions.

When Kinsey asks the candidate if they have questions for her, they ask what she’s most excited to research out there in the desert.

“Me?”

Domino nods.

“You’re the team lead. I want to know what you’re there to look for. Or are you just excited to make some sand angels and get a tan?”

She feels clumsy, trying to explain. She’s tired from the flight. But she tries anyway.

“The thing about the desert is, it’s alive.”

On the screen, Domino nods politely.

“Right, the ecological landscape is rich with—”

Kinsey waves a hand to cut them off.

“Not like that. It’s—it’s alive. The desert itself. The whole thing. There’s the sand, right?”

She holds a hand out flat, palm down. Then she points to the space beneath her hand.

“But just down here, like five inches below the sand that you can see with your eyes—it’s alive. The entire desert. There’s this layer called the cryptobiotic crust. It’s all one huge living interconnected thing, made of algae and moss and bacteria and lichens—”

“Lichens?”

There’s a spark in Domino’s eye already, just as Kinsey knew there’d be. Everyone loves lichens.

“Oh, yeah. Like you wouldn’t believe,”

she says, the warm thrill of her work building in her. She loves this. She never spends enough time around people to get to talk about it.

“And it’s active. It soaks up water and it forms these filament networks that keep all the sand from blowing away, and it breathes, and it’s—”

Domino leans in close to their webcam, their eyes gleaming. “I’m in.”

“What?”

“I’m in. I’ll take the job.”

Kinsey half laughs, startled, and doubly startled to find herself delighted.

“I didn’t offer you the job y—”

“When do I start?”