Inhabited by Ike Hamill Page A

piece they saw a brown vein through the white rock. Miguel increased his hammering. Little chips of quartz flew from the wall. Justin backed up and shielded his eyes from the debris.
    “Here it is. Here it is!” Miguel said. He swung hard and flinched back when quartz flew. “I need a screwdriver or something. Anyone have something?”
    “Here,” Carlos said. He handed forward a knife.  
    Miguel wormed it into a crack.
    “Hey, careful with my knife,” Carlos said.
    “I’ll buy you a new one,” Miguel said. He turned around with a triumphant grin. He held up a chunk of quartz lined with shiny gold highlights.
    “Is it gold?” Carlos asked.
    “What else would it be?” Miguel asked.
    “I don’t know. I’m not a geologist. How do we know for sure?”
    “Just take it. We’ll get it tested or something,” Miguel said. He handed the rock to Carlos and turned back to his excavation.  
    As Miguel worked, Justin was scanning his light along the wall. Travis joined him.
    “I don’t see any other exposed quartz, do you?” Justin asked.  
    Travis’s light waggled back and forth as he shook his head.
    “It almost looks like the real source of that might be in another room or something.”
    “Or just underground,” Travis said.
    “Like maybe there’s another passage behind that deposit of powder,” he said. He pointed to a spot that was several paces to Miguel’s left. Travis tried to imagine what Justin was envisioning. Did he expect that the line of quartz had to be exposed?
    “Help me out, would you?” Justin asked. He was scanning the floor of the cave.
    “What are you looking for?”
    “Something to dig with.”

    -o-o-o-o-o-

    Justin couldn’t find a suitable rock. In this part of the cave, all the rocks were worn and rounded. Miguel was monopolizing Carlos’s knife, so Justin had to settle for using the back of a flashlight. With his shirt pulled up over his mouth, he scraped at the wall of powder with the rounded edge of the flashlight’s cylinder.
    When his arms got tired, he handed-off the chore to Travis. They took turns, making very little progress before growing tired.
    In Travis’s hands, the flashlight bumped over something hard embedded in the powder.
    “Is it a rock? We’ll have to move more to the right maybe,” Justin said.
    Travis coughed and then pulled his shirt up over his mouth, imitating Justin. He bashed at the hard spot and more powder flaked away.  
    “Let me see some of that water,” Travis said.
    “Just a sec,” Justin said. He had to go to Kristin to find someone with water. Travis kept working, exposing more of the hard place, until Justin returned. “Careful with it. It makes that stuff burn, right.”
    Travis got the mouth of the bottle very close to the hard spot. He poured a small amount of water over it to clean it off. He nodded and poured a little more. The water made the powder erode quickly. In the depression left in the powder wall, they could see the end of the impediment they had uncovered. It was spherical on the end of a shaft.  
    “What is it?” Justin asked.
    Travis reached out and touched it with his fingernail, just to be sure.
    “It’s a leg bone. You know up near the top, where it goes into the hip?”
    “Get out of here,” Justin said.
    Travis carefully looped his finger around the end of the bone and pulled. The powdery wall crumbled away as he liberated the bone. Flakes of compressed powder fell away. One section that fell revealed the gentle curve of several ribs. In another place, they saw the entombed tips of finger bones.
    Justin backed up a step and nearly stumbled back down the sloping wall.  
    “What the fuck,” Justin whispered.
    “Didn’t someone just say that we’d be okay unless we found a bunch of skeletons? I think we might not be okay,” Travis said.
    From back down the slope, Joy witnessed the discovery.
    “Time to go,” she announced.

Chapter Eleven — Clarity

    R OGER BACKED UP UNTIL he was leaning