Bone to Pick

The rental car died three miles from base camp.

It didn’t die dramatically—no smoke, no bang, no cinematic grinding of gears. It simply stopped. One moment Elena was navigating a dirt road that hadn’t been maintained since the Pleistocene, and the next the engine coughed, shuddered, and went silent with the quiet resignation of a machine that had decided it was done participating.

She sat in the driver’s seat with both hands on the wheel and stared through the dust-caked windshield at the Montana landscape—an expanse of sage and scrub and ancient, eroded earth that stretched to the horizon in every direction without a single sign of human habitation. No buildings. No power lines. No cell tower. Just the wind and the grass and the deep blue sky and the absolute, humbling indifference of a landscape that had been here for sixty-six million years and did not care about Dr. Elena Vance’s tenure timeline.

She tried the ignition. Click. Nothing.

She tried again. Click.

She rested her forehead on the steering wheel and said a word she never said.

The heat was immediate and oppressive. Without the air conditioning—which had been functioning at roughly thirty percent capacity to begin with—the car’s interior became an oven in under a minute. Elena opened the door and stepped into sunshine so intense it felt like a physical substance. She could feel her skin beginning to burn through her sunscreen. She could feel sweat forming in places she preferred not to think about.

Three miles. In this heat, over this terrain, in hiking boots that were broken in but not designed for road walking, three miles was an hour. Maybe ninety minutes with the two duffel bags of equipment she’d packed.

She could leave the bags and come back for them. That was the sensible option. The logical option.

Elena Vance was not always a reasonable person.

She shouldered both duffels—one with her personal gear, one with her field instruments, together weighing approximately sixty pounds—and started walking.

Forty-five minutes later, she was reconsidering every decision she’d ever made.

She crested a low rise and saw the camp. A cluster of canvas tents and temporary shelters arranged in a rough semicircle around a central area with folding tables and a cook station. Three vehicles parked on the perimeter. A shade canopy over what appeared to be a field lab. The dig site itself was invisible from this angle, hidden in the canyon below.

And standing at the edge of the camp, leaning against one of the university trucks with his arms crossed and his eyes on the road, was a man.

She noticed three things in rapid succession.

First: he was big. Not tall in the way academics were sometimes tall—stooped and apologetic. He was tall in the way the canyon walls were tall—unapologetically, structurally, as a fundamental condition of his existence. Broad shoulders. Arms that strained the sleeves of a faded T-shirt. The kind of build that came from years of physical labor.

Second: he was watching her. Had been watching her, she suspected, for some time.

Third: he was, in a completely objective and scientifically irrelevant way, extraordinarily attractive.

Elena filed this observation in the same mental category as the sunset is pretty and immediately dismissed it as having no bearing on the work at hand.

She reached the camp. Set down the duffels. Adjusted her glasses.

“Dr. Vance?” The man’s voice was low, with a roughness that suggested either natural timbre or chronic dehydration. “You’re early.”

“My car broke down three miles east. I walked.”

He looked at the duffels. Looked at the road behind her. Looked at her—flushed, sweating, dust-coated, carrying sixty pounds of equipment in hundred-degree heat.

“You walked,” he repeated.

“I wasn’t going to leave my instruments.”

Something moved behind his eyes—not quite amusement, not quite respect, more like a man recalibrating an initial assessment. He extended his hand.

“Silas Thorne. Field tech and site manager.”

She took it. His grip was firm, dry, warm. The handshake lasted exactly the appropriate duration, but the sensation lingered longer.

“Elena Vance. Vertebrate paleontology.”

“I know why you’re here.” He picked up both her duffels—sixty pounds, as if they contained nothing heavier than pillows. “Your tent’s the third on the left. Dinner’s at seven. Don’t be late.”

He walked away. She stared at his retreating back and felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

Irritation.

And somewhere beneath it, something else entirely.