Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) by Richard Farr Page A

when Jimmy and Lorna were out of earshot: “But the I’iwa aren’t my ancestors. So perhaps the taboo doesn’t apply to me? Don’t worry, I’ll be back by the afternoon!”
     
    She wasn’t. It was only long after dark, when we’d put in two hours of worrying and were trying to organize a search party among deeply unwilling Tainu, that she walked back into the encampment.
    “Sorry.”
    “Is that so?” Lorna said, meaning No, you aren’t . Iona looked pale, though: either exhausted or scared. But privacy’s nonexistent among the Tainu, and we had to wait until later, when the four of us were briefly alone, to get the full story. She sounded like a kid admitting she’s had a scary adventure in the wrong part of town.
    “I went beyond the waterfall.”
    “Iona, lass,” Lorna said. “We told you it wasn’t wise, and we kinda dropped a few wee hints it might be dangerous too, so you goin’ ahead an’ doin’ it anyway was totally a given. Please, tell us somethin’ we couldn’t have guessed.”
    “All right,” she said. “I will. I was hot, so I waded into the pool beneath the falls to wash my face. I stood there for a while and sensed I was being watched. I kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye.”
    “It could have been an animal,” I said. “A wild pig.”
    “It could have been an animal, but it wasn’t. Someone was trying to get me to notice them and follow them.”
    “And you did?” Jimmy asked.
    “There’s no way up except a steep path right next to the falls. I climbed about a hundred feet. At the top, right where the river pours out of a hole in the mountainside, there’s a rock platform.”
    She used the end of a stick to scratch a diagram of what she was describing in the mud.
    “In the center of the platform there’s a round, flat rock, like a tabletop. I don’t just mean roundish: it’s unmistakably a worked object, not something natural. This was sitting in the middle of it.”
    She handed Jimmy an object the size of a fist. It was a flattish stone, shaped like a teardrop, with a round edge on one side; the other side had been knapped to a razor sharpness. He looked at it carefully, turning it over, and handed it to Lorna. She held it up, rotating it in her fingers, the way you might examine a monster diamond, and blew out a long breath before passing it to me. It was smooth and heavy. It seemed to fit into my hand as if it belonged there.
    “That’s a hand ax,” Jimmy said. “It reminds me of things they’ve found in France, dating to forty, fifty thousand years ago. It isn’t remotely like anything else from New Guinea. When Europeans arrived here in the 1930s they said, ‘Stone Age people, Stone Age tools.’ That was right, in so far as the locals didn’t have metal. But local tools are ‘like’ that thing the way a bird’s like a bat.”
    I must have yawned, because Lorna announced that it was time for me to go to bed. We were right in front of the hut the Tainu had allowed us to take over. Reluctantly I said good night. Before I went in, I turned back to look at the group of three adults.
    “Doesn’t make sense,” Lorna was saying.
    Iona stirred the fire. She was looking pale, drawn, and intensely serious. “Makes even less sense if it was made by ghosts,” she said.
    I went into the hut and lay down under the mosquito net. I don’t know how long I stayed awake, but I must have drifted off while they were still talking.

    You clutched the camera to your chest all the way back to the Eislers’, where Rosko quickly confirmed that its battery was long dead. But there was a memory card inside. You plucked it from his hand and looked at it as if it was a holy relic.
    “An old one,” Rosko said. “Wrong size for my machine.” But after rooting around in a boxful of cables, he came up with a charger for the camera battery and an adapter for the card. “Let’s see what she left for us.”
    What she’d left was not much: the card was almost empty,