The thing about being the youngest person in a Land Cruiser full of people who hadn't asked for you was that you noticed everything.
Amara noticed the way Yosef Mizrahi had not looked at her once since the airport. She noticed the way Dawud Barakat kept his eyes on the window with the particular patience of someone who had learned, over a long career, that the desert would tell you what it wanted to tell you in its own time and not a moment sooner.
She noticed that Shai Oren, who was twenty-six and therefore technically her peer, was currently pretending to sleep in the front seat in a way that was not convincing anyone.
She also noticed that her tablet had exactly forty-seven percent battery left, that the track they were on had stopped being a road approximately thirty-eight minutes ago, and that the formation data she had memorised three days ago was still sitting in the front of her mind like a word on the tip of her tongue.
She had been over it four hundred times. Possibly more. The hollow at forty-three metres. The substrate compression that didn't fit any natural process.
The depth signatures that the survey software had simply given up on and filed under instrument error, because instrument error was tidier than the alternative.
She was right about this. She knew she was right about this.
The problem with knowing you were right before you'd proven it was that nobody else was obligated to agree with you yet.
Beside her, Rania had been asleep since somewhere outside of Be'er Sheva, head tipped against the window at an angle that was going to require medical attention later.
Amara had considered waking her for company and decided against it on the grounds that Rania had been awake until two in the morning cross-referencing ancient Near Eastern linguistic databases and had therefore earned the neck pain.
"Another hour," Yosef said, from the front passenger seat. Not to her specifically. To the vehicle in general.
Amara looked at the desert going past the window and thought: right. Then she looked at her tablet. Then she put the tablet away, because looking at it again was not going to change what it said, and took out her notebook instead, and wrote nothing in it for forty-five minutes because she had already written everything she knew.
· · ·
Yosef Mizrahi was fifty-three years old and had run eleven desert excavations and had the specific kind of unimpressedness that could only be earned, not performed. He had read her preliminary report on the flight.
He had said, upon landing, with the economy of a man allergic to wasted words: "You understand this is probably a geological anomaly."
"Yes," Amara had said.
"I don't drill into bedrock on the basis of probably."
"I have the permits, the budget, and the formation data." She had paused, and then, because she had learned that sometimes you had to say the quiet part:
"And I'm right."
He had looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that was doing several calculations at once.
Then he had said: "We bring the full kit."
And walked away, and that was the closest thing to a vote of confidence she was going to get from Yosef Mizrahi until she had proven something.
She could work with that.
· · ·
The full kit was, as it turned out, five other people with more combined field experience than she had years of life.
Dawud Barakat ran ground-penetrating radar with the unhurried calm of a man who trusted the machine implicitly and people only provisionally.
He was fifty-one. He had not introduced himself; he had simply arrived with his equipment and begun setting it up, which Amara had decided to interpret as a personality rather than a slight.
Shai Oren was the structural surveyor, twenty-six, good at his job in the specific way of someone who knew he was good at it and was still deciding whether to be humble about it.
He had shaken her hand at the airport with the careful courtesy of someone who had been told to be professional and was trying.
Khalil Nassar handled controlled demolition.He was quiet in the way of someone who spent his working life around things that required precision, and when Amara had explained what they were trying to reach, he had listened to the whole thing without interrupting and then said, simply:
"We go carefully."
Not a question. Not reassurance. Just a statement of how it would be.
She had believed him immediately, which surprised her. She didn't usually believe people immediately.
And then there was Rania, who was both her research assistant and, more relevantly, the only person in the group who had known Amara long enough to understand that when she went quiet, something was happening in her head that was worth waiting for.
The rest of the team was still in the waiting-to-see-if-she-was-worth-it stage.
Amara had been in that stage before. She knew how to be patient.
(Author's Notes: The formatting was messing with me due to me being unfamiliar with Webnovel as a Writer.
To all the ones who read the Prologue. I thank you from the depths of my heart and hope that I may hold your attention with my words
With that said, See you after 7 hours Ladies and Gentlemen!)