Fuck.
There was only one year left on her three-year fossil lease at Yellowtail Ranch. Her sponsor was restless, her funds were low, and her dad needed surgery and chemo. Barring a miracle, she was shit out of luck.
She walked on, her unfocused gaze drifting along the canyon wall. And there, rightthere,an orange-brown bone subtly popped against the yellowish-gray matrix. The birdlike shoulder blade practically winked at Ripley from the place where it had slumbered for a million human lifetimes.
A miracle.
She’d screamed for Cara, and after they finished laughing and crying, Ripley spat in her palm and held it out.We tell no one.Rumors drew fossil-hunting competitors in the twenty-first century as surely as they had in the 1880s, when American paleontologists dynamited their own richest fossil beds rather than risk their discovery by rivals.
The younger woman spat in her own hand and shook, eventhough Ripley was the one who tended to blurt out things she didn’t mean to say and whose face always gave away a lie.
It killed Ripley to leave the bones in the earth, but the snow would be flying in a week or two. She covered the scapula with a ridiculously over-the-top amount of plaster and spent the winter dreaming of a sinuous, graceful, golden-feathered beast.
This April, the cap was still there. So was the name she’d written on it in black Sharpie:Beauty,after a classic fantasy series about time-traveling dragons.
An intact wing is a spectacular find anywhere on this continent, especially if it’s a holotype—the first of its kind. It could fetch six figures, maybe even seven, from a museum or a minor billionaire looking for an eye-catching piece to spice up the foyer of their fourth home. It would definitely earn Ripley recognition as an up-and-coming private fossil hunter.
But if the rest of the skeleton is hiding somewhere along the course of this shallow canyon near Montana’s Big Snowy Mountains, and if she can find it…
That’s life-changing money. A deinonychus—whatJurassic Parkfans would call a velociraptor—went for twelve million a few summers ago, and Stan theT. rexsold for over thirty at Christie’s.
Half the cash will go to Geraldine Yellowtail, Cara’s grandmother and the owner of Yellowtail Ranch, but Ripley’s share will help launch her own fossil company when her lease at Clever Girl expires. She’ll secure a few buyers on commission—people who have the money to buy priceless things and the naïveté to think that owning a piece of eternity will make them feel less empty.
She’ll finally be safe. And since the thesis of her now-trashed PhD dissertation on proto-avian habitats in North America willbe proven correct, she’ll also have the satisfaction of flipping a heartyFuck you very muchto the men who pushed her out the highest window of the ivory tower.
And she’ll have time. This creature who waited uncountable years for Ripley to run her fingers over the indentations where its feathers were once attached—it will buy some time for her dad. Maybe not more time, butgoodtime. She can pay off his medical bills; work less and be with him more; get him out of the trailer park and into a house with decent air quality. He’ll stop telling her she has to make the most of the precious years at the beginning of her career and let her take care of him the way he took care of her when he was a young single dad.
That’sifshe can find a complete skeleton and get it out of the ground this year.Ifthe weather cooperates,ifthe bones aren’t damaged by rain and wind,ifher crew holds together,if, if, if.
Ripley sets down her hammer. Her focus isn’t where it needs to be. Instead of seeing the curves and angles of a forelimb that’s well on its way to evolving into a wing, she’s feeling that old, sharp longing in her chest.
Once upon a time, these bones would have put her at the center of an explosion of joy in the scientific world. Papers inScienceandNature,gushing articles inNational GeographicandOutside.Five-minute spots on daytime talk shows. Job offers from Berkeley and Oxford.
Ripley Adams, the first in her family to finish college, might have had the dinosaur she discovered name-checked in a Jurassic Park movie, likeDreadnoughtuswas. Hell, in that imaginary timeline, having acharacterbased on her in a Jurassic Park movie wouldn’t have been out of the question.
But private fossil collectors aren’t the good guys in adventuremovies, no matter what their backstories are. In this timeline, she’s not the one who gets to growl, “It belongs in a museum.”
Ripley won’t be giving her finds to a museum, not after the way she left academia. But a museum could buy them from her—if the billionaire who’s funding her dig doesn’t buy them first.
Maury definitely wants this one. He’ll hang the mounted skeleton from the ceiling of his great hall. The species will be calledNeopteryx maurior some damn thing. Maury will pretend to be surprised by the honor, as if he hadn’t planned all along to get his name carved into this specific slice of immortality.
Maybe she lost the career she and her dad dreamed she’d have, but by this time next year, Ripley might have more money than she’s ever seen in her life.
And the first thing she’s going to buy for herself, and him, is some time.
She pulls her long, sun-streaked blond braid off her damp spine, tucks it under her hat, and reties the one shoelace that always wants to come undone. Then she picks through her tools for just the right brush.
She needs to make the most of every minute between now and summer’s end.
“Yo! Ripley!”
Their cook, Renzo, stands at the edge of the canyon in a tomato-smeared apron, his floppy black hair falling over his eyes exactly the way his brother Matteo’s does. She isn’t sure how he manages knives with so little vision, but the hair gives him asmoldering air of mystery in his actor’s headshots, so she supposes he thinks it’s worth the risk.
Every summer since she and Cara launched Clever Girl, the younger members of Renzo’s Italian restaurateur family have taken turns cooking vats of aromatic sauce, racks of spicy and tender meat, and cauldrons of perfectly al dente pasta on a huge grill. Maury complained about the cost, but Ripley’s first rule of fossil hunting is that a crew excavates on its stomach. You can’t spend all day shoveling, crouching, and painstakingly brushing priceless fossils on a diet of lukewarm weenies and beans.
Ripley sits back on her heels and pulls down the bandanna she wears across her face to keep out the dust and chaff from the neighboring rancher’s combine. “Can it wait until dinner?” she calls.
Renzo glances over his shoulder. “No.”
