wants to discover something new and different—something incredible. When her anthropologist father is invited by an eccentric billionaire to lead a team of international experts to the Arctic to investigate the remains of a woolly mammoth, Maya begs to come along. This could be her big chance!
But once they reach the lonely, isolated base camp, it becomes clear that things are not what they seem. Why have they been summoned to a place so remote and so forbidding? What exactly is hidden in the ice? Maya is determined to solve the mystery—no matter how strange and unbelievable it gets.
The computer screen glowed in my dark bedroom like a moon. Mom was late logging on to video-conference with me. My mom was totally into ancient civilizations: Mayans, Incans, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans. She even liked Vikings. Her latest expedition had taken her to the jungles of South America. She had told me that in the jungle nothing dries, that everything stays wet. She said even the moonlight felt damp on her skin, as if she had been bathing in milk.
I counted out six gel pens and formed a rainbow of color on my desk. My notebook was opened to a crisp white page marked with pale blue lines. I uncapped the purple pen and held it loosely in my hand. The inky tip bled onto the paper, leaving tiny purple stains. Purple was a serious color. It was the color of royalty, the anchor of the rainbow that held the other colors up in the sky. Steadfast and reliable, purple didn't fool around.
Dad once told me that NASA had spent years trying to make a pen with ink that flowed in zero gravity. The Russians took two seconds to figure out the problem. They called it the pencil. I'm not sure if that story was really true, but I thought it was funny. I also realized that if I were on an expedition in a steamy jungle where the ink never dried, all my notes on every wing beat or tiger prowl or bird squawk would end up as a smeared mess. So I had loaded up on colored pencils.
In defense of NASA, pencil sharpeners are nonexistent when you are knee-deep in the starry sky. What if one day I dropped the sharpener in the undergrowth of the Amazon floor, or it floated away in the black pit of outer space? It would be pretty much impossible to find a pencil sharpener in the deserts of Luxor. So I practiced sharpening my colored pencils with a Swiss Army knife that I found buried in the junk drawer next to the phone in the kitchen. But I'd never used the knife before, so I cut my thumb and left an incriminating trail of blood drops all over the pile of Chinese take-out menus crammed inside of the drawer. Dad confiscated the knife.
I had Dad to thank for the jumbo pack of colored pens that were now laid out before me on my desk.
I liked to record my observations in vibrant color. All scientists need a thing—a specialty—they can talk about like an expert. Mom's thing was dead people, and, no, not creepy zombie dead people but ancient dead civilizations and their dried-up bones. She was an anthropologist. Since I couldn't excavate my bedroom floor, my specialty was colors, at least for now. I liked linking colors to emotions and situations. Purple, I realized, was also the color of patience. Sitting at my desk, I imagined breathing out a calm plume of purple air.
Since I was still developing my color theories, I was in the observation stage—collecting and sifting through the facts that would form my hypothesis. The beginning of anything was always bright and shiny, like a brand-new copper penny. Copper, the color of hope.
The computer screen flickered. Butterflies flapped in my stomach, brushing their fiery wings inside my body. I practically felt them crawling up my throat. Suddenly, Mom's face popped up on the screen. Her nose was peeling from the relentless South American sun. Her hair was a long tangle of chestnut waves that caressed her bare shoulders. She was wearing a filthy, sweat-stained tank top.
"Mom!"
"Maya! It's so good to see you."
My heart raced. I inched closer to the screen and rested my hand on the monitor. This was our window. Mom once read me a bedtime story all the way from Brazil. She called it our midnight read. Past explorers never experienced the instant thrill of an Internet connection. Their families back home had to wait months to receive letters scribbled in pencil. Graphite was the color of loneliness.
"You look great. How's the dig going?"
I could hear strange insects screeching from the darkness over Mom's shoulders.
"Soooo much better than I expected. But how are you? How's school?" Her smile widened, the whites of her eyes shining in the darkness.
"Good… I guess." I tapped my pen on the page.
"Studying hard?" She arched an eyebrow. "Especially science? My assistants must love all the sciences."
"Yes, Mom. We're studying the ecosystem of the bay, and I did my report on mollusks. Dad and I dug for clams." I sighed. "Can I hear about the expedition now?"
"I suppose digging is a family trait," she said with a giggle.
As a respected anthropologist, Mom saved giddiness for special occasions—usually when a shard of bone or bit of broken clay pot had been extracted from the dirt. Exhumation was the scientific term, a splinter pulled out of the past. "Tell me," I begged. "You found something, didn't you?" I quickly wrote Mom found something in the rain forest across my notebook page.
"I can never fool you."
"Are you going to tell me or what? I've heard that keeping a kid in suspense stunts her growth."
She stood, and now only her tanned arms and muddy cargo pants were visible. "One second," she said. And then she stepped out of the camera's view.
All I could see from the glow of the solar-powered light was a wooden platform and ropes tied to the tree trunks. But a bit of the jungle peeked through, and my heart leaped when I realized that she was in a tree house. The dark night pressed into the lens. I imagined at any second a jaguar would leap from the treetops. Dozens of animal eyes were watching my mother from their perches in the canopy.
I scribbled jungle, tree house, vines, and nighttime.
This was her bedroom. The ropy hammock was her bed. My face was pressed so close to the computer screen, my eyes hurt, and I was getting fingerprints all over the monitor. It felt like our window was closing up. Or that it was too small for me to climb through. I wanted Mom to hurry back to show me her special find. It could be our secret.
She was there to research the indigenous people of the rain forest. Really, I knew she was looking for links: evidence that proved a certain behavior. A rock was just a rock until some scientist found a rock that had an edge chipped away and formed what looked like a knife—the evidence of a cutting tool… like a prehistoric Swiss Army knife dug out of a junk drawer. Links are big in the sciences of the past. They prove stuff. See, I'm right, they say. Or Whoa, I'm wrong.
Mom's face peered back through our window. At first, all I saw was the red earthy color of dirt and some kind of bundle. It wasn't a piece of broken pottery or a stony knife. In her arms, she cradled a tattered cloth that might have been a dress once, a thousand years ago. She loosened the swaddled fabric and held her hands out, palms up, cupping the thing toward the camera. It looked like she was holding a dehydrated mango that had a puckered nose and sunken cheeks. But from the way she cradled that ugly, shriveled thing I realized it was precious. The butterflies took flight again, flying up into the sky of my stomach. I swallowed and breathed hard through my nose.
"What is it?" But I had a bad feeling that I already knew.
"You tell me. What do you see?" Her eyes glowed.
Mom was taking necessary scientific precautions, holding the thing gingerly and looking at it with warm, adoring eyes. My face flushed hot, but I shrugged the feeling away. Don't be immature.
"Think it out. You've got to have at least one good guess." The light flickered in the background. Mom curled her legs up in her chair like a cat, waiting for me to move. She tilted the shriveled mango thing toward the camera so I could get a better look.
"Is it a baby?" I asked, my mouth dry as dust. The mango looked like a person, a tiny clay-caked body. Maybe Mom had found an ancient tomb with the remains of a dead baby buried in the ground, and now she was holding it up like a present for me to gawk at.
She smiled triumphantly. "No, it's not a real baby. It's a doll."
"Oh." The more I looked at the thing, the more foolish I felt. It didn't look like a real baby but rather one made of cloth that was all dried up and puckered, the way a washcloth shrinks up on the side of the tub. "Um… that's great."
"Isn't she beautiful?" Mom rocked her gently back and forth in the cradle of her palms.
"I guess."
"It belonged to a little girl hundreds of years ago, just like you."
Stupid, ugly, shriveled doll. I smiled, showing every tooth in my mouth. "Cool."
She laughed, reading my glued-on expression. "OK. I know you're too big for dolls. I'm sorry." She smiled right through the window at me.
Mom had the best laugh and smile in the world. She looked even more beautiful in the jungle with her tangled hair and dirty shirt. She was like a goddess, a mythical woman both good and not so good—because goddesses weren't perfect. That was one of their trademarks. They were fearless and tough and always stood up for themselves. But they also had one major flaw, like jealousy or arrogance or selfishness. That was their nature. It wasn't her fault she was in demand and traveled a lot. That's how goddesses were. I smiled for real now.
"The eye is made of a bead," Mom said.
Her finger hovered over a tiny black dot on the scrunched-up face. The ugly thing only had one eye, yet Mom loved it. That one stupid eye made it all the more valuable. A tiny detail of seeing sewed onto the doll's face. It was a link. The bead was kind of cool, but I was so far away that I could barely see it through the glass window of the computer between us. I touched the screen. I traced my finger over the ugly face and wrinkled nose. I tapped the beady eye. Dumb doll.
"I miss you," I said suddenly.
But I didn't want her to come home. Instead, I wanted to crawl through our window and join her in the tree house. Sleep in a hammock. Dig in the dirt. Find a precious doll to cradle in our palms.
"I miss you too, baby. How's school? Are you studying hard?" she asked again.
"Yes. Everything's fine." If I studied any harder, my head would explode.
"Good girl. I can always count on you when I'm away. I was just telling Sam how mature you are. I'm a lucky mom to have you."
A layer of guilt settled over me. This was her moment. "I'm glad you found the doll."
She jerked her head, and the sound of cheering filtered into my room, probably from the rest of the campsite. She looked back at me, a guilty shrug forming in her shoulders. "I should go. Always something."
"I have to go, too. Dad's making dinner," I said.
"Oh, good. That's nice. Your dad's a great cook. I always know you'll be well fed," she said. "Work hard. I'm proud of you."
Proud of what? I wondered. I hadn't done anything important, like find a precious artifact.
"You too. Congratulations."
She beamed, and the screen went dark.
I was happy for Mom and her discovery. That was what anthropologists lived for—the puzzle pieces of old broken things—and she had one in her own hands. Some day that would be me, on an expedition, discovering a link—but to where or what I could only dream.