And then, to make things even more complicated, she discovered the excavation was polluting the river. Containing all the liquid sediment they pumped from the Plaza became a major headache. It meant more earthworks, isolating their branch of the river, and then forming a silt storage pond large enough to land a seaplane. They could only release the silt back into the natural watercourse gradually, and the resulting silt pond constantly threatened to top the silt wall and flood the dig when it rained.
Her first day on site, when it still looked like the archaeologists were trying to patch the gaps between the ruins with all their khaki tents, she had looked down from the plane and asked about the different colored tarpaulins.
Ethan had pointed awkwardly across her seat through the small window. ‘Blue is for the medical tent. Orange for the kitchen area. Green for the communications tower. Red for security. It's for navigating on site. Until you know the Plaza, it can be easy to get lost. It changes every season after all. Nothing stays in the same place. Every time we dig, the place changes.'
Oddly enough, learning about that little system had made up Claire's mind to accept the job. It was a clever system, and suggestive of the types of practical minds she might like to work with. Sometimes, often actually, it was one little thing that made up Claire's mind. One little sign.
'Flying in at night,' Ethan had gone on to say, pointing down at something, 'is even more incredible.'
He was pointing at the lights. Ten tall floodlight towers were spread around the top tier. For working at night, Claire had assumed. Later, she learned they were security lights.
She smiled at her own naiveté. The two issues giving her the most problems were the two things she’d least expected. Security and the river. She'd never even considered the river encircling the entire site, even though one of her marketable skills was commercial diving safety, which, like right now, was taking up more and more of her time.
She checked everyone's log books were up to speed, signed and dated. The bends could strike a diver a long time after they finished their last dive. Claire had witnessed it during a backpacking trip around Australia. A girl in the bunk across from hers had woken screaming in the night, her muscles all twisting up. Apparently she'd spent the first day of her holiday on the Great Barrier Reef. She spent her first night in a hyperbaric chamber.
OK. You can't put it off any longer. She'd left moving the scuba tanks to last. Those buggers weighed a ton when they weren't underwater. She attached a regulator to every tank and checked the pressure. Too little pressure and air could leak back into the tank and let mildew grow on the inside. Not good for the lungs. Better than giant cockroaches, but only marginally. Her tanks all checked out. She knew they would. Where's that tank trolley when you need it?
She hauled the tanks to the orange plastic enclosure and clipped them into place, sweating under her army-green cargo shorts and yellow polo shirt by the time she'd finished. Now they were ready for the next season's diving.
She hunted around the chamber for anything she'd missed. All the tripods and lights were staying, as well as the cables that kept them juiced up. The tables pushed against the wall were collapsible, but Ethan generally left everything intact to save time later. She didn't bother with Ethan's tape measures and tools in the corner. He knew what he wanted left out for next season.
And apparently he wants me to come back.
She thought about Ethan's offer of another season’s employment.
She had interviewed with Ethan over the phone before he'd initially offered her the job. The seasonal work proved ideal. She'd managed to travel between seasons, and it turned out her coworkers were some of the best folks she'd ever met. The volunteers, the divers, the grad students — the visiting experts in any field she could imagine — at first she suspected pure luck was responsible for such a great pack of people all winding up working at the same place, but then she realized that it wasn't the people, but their shared goal. Someone who might be a seething malcontent stuck in an office was a happy camper out here. The entire experience taught Claire how important it was for people to have jobs that interested them in some way.
Her motivations weren't so simple.
Sure, she appreciated the significance of the Plaza — a mysterious new culture, incredible discoveries, fabulous stonemasonry and all that. It might have interested her more if she was sitting back watching it all on the National Geographic Channel, but she didn't have time to kick back and enjoy it. She didn't share their wonder. To her, the world was full of mysteries. It was cool to be a part of uncovering one, but in the back of her mind she couldn't help think that they would never truly figure out this place. It would end up like Stonehenge or Machu Picchu and all the others — a bunch of theories with no foreseeable way to be proven either way. Truth be told, when she first entered this very chamber, she thought it looked more like a Roman bathhouse with strange artwork scrawled on the walls than anything she'd seen on the television associated with the Aztecs or the Mayans.
She was here because it was where she needed to be.
At nineteen she'd married young and, as it turned out, to a jackass. Thankfully she'd realized this before they started pumping out kids. A broken marriage sounded tragic, but it was nothing like that. No kids, no pets, and they were only renting where they lived. She used the settlement money first to go back to school and then to travel.
When the money ran out, she wasn't ready to stop, so she found a way to travel and work at the same time. So far she'd done safety work in the Philippines, Malaysia, New Caledonia and now here. If it hadn't been for her 'insignificant other' she would never have started this chapter of her life. It had been the best time of her life, but did she still want this kind of life? Sleeping in tents, washing by hand, toilets in the jungle, never really feeling clean….
And her job was getting harder and harder. Every day the Plaza offered new problems. When they started the dig, they never anticipated underwater work, but here she was right now packing away scuba gear that provided people's life-giving oxygen. She loved scuba. In fact, she’d purchased a scuba diving watch meant for a man because the female versions just weren’t large enough for her. But scuba diving and managing scuba safety were two very different things. She was responsible for every stage of their risky penetrative dives. No way she would have signed up for this gig had she known she'd end up doing this. Somehow all the responsibility had crept up while she was just doing whatever it took to keep the site functioning. Responsibility was intimidating.
She lifted her cap and wiped her forehead on her sleeve. That was everything stowed except her own dive gear. She squatted and gathered all her gear. She lifted the awkward load, hugged it to her chest, and copped a nasty whiff of blood.
Oh, yuck.
She sniffed her buoyancy vest. Yep, it was on the gear again. It pervaded everything. That hot copper smell. She didn't know if the silt they were sucking from the bunker was high in copper, but it certainly smelled like warm blood. Others had commented, so it wasn't just her. She'd learned the hard way to shower after every dive. The smell proved impossible to remove from bedding. She had to throw away her nearly new sleeping bag. Every season the smell got stronger, or perhaps her intervals away from the site cleansed her olfactory palate and left her vulnerable again. Whatever it was, she hated it.