"Nothing?" Static crackled around my dad's voice, and I pressed my phone harder into my ear. Reception wasn't the best up here. I was hoping that I was close enough to base camp for my WiFi box to pick up.
"Nothing," I sighed into the phone.
"It was a fool's errand, you know." My dad's voice was matter of fact.
Annoyance prickled through me. "Not a fool's errand, dad. Artifacts have been found here before. There was an entire culture that lived here. We know this."
"Found by who? The locals? Son, that poor town is a dead zone in the middle of nowhere. They've got to do something to keep stupid college kids hiking out there every summer, buying their food, sleeping in their motel...right? They do have a motel in that dump, don't they?"
"Yes, Dad, there's a Motel 6." I rolled my eyes. "With really comfy beds." That part wasn't true. There was a spring protruding through the fabric in my mattress.
"Well, anyway...I think it's a local hoax. And if your professor said this was a good idea, then he's probably in on it. They pay him a small fee to have him send his most gullible students out there."
"Dad!" I protested.
He was silent for a moment, probably trying to decide whether or not to reprimand me for protesting. He let it slide, moving on as if I hadn't spoken any outburst. "But you haven't found anything? How many more days do you have there?"
"Five days. And no, we haven't found anything." My shoulders slumped, and I stopped on the path to spin slowly, absentmindedly dragging my eyes across the tall trees and big rocks on the mountainside with me and, in the distance, the valley and neighboring peaks covered in a bluish haze. It was pretty here. Empty but pretty.
"I say you call it quits and come home early. Then you can spend a few extra days with your mom and me."
"Dad, my grade is dependent on this project. This is really important to me."
"I still think you should have chosen Sandridge University. Hartrock College seems a little second-rate to me. I told you that when you applied there."
I tilted my head back, staring at the sky. It was blue with occasional puffs of clouds along the horizon. "Yeah, I remember. Thanks."
My phone beeped. I was in range of the WiFi. Great. Now I could upload my gridwork from the day. "Okay, Dad, I gotta go. It was good to talk to you." Sort of.
"Alright. Stay safe, son."
We both hung up. For a second, my upload didn't seem so important and I dropped my phone into my pocket. A few steps further and I was able to see the pitiful little town of Grin. Half the men traveled nearly 40 miles every morning to work in a bigger city. The other half earned their living with mountain artisan work, making rustic goods and selling them to tourists through a mountain guild of towns that stretched for 180 miles. They were all eager to tell me about their lost city -- a sort of Atlantis of the mountains.
Some artifacts had been found by them -- stoneware, pottery, a knife with strange engravings on the handle. They recently found a piece of oiled cloth -- with a unique woven pattern -- which had been sent to the big city to undergo testing to find out how old it was and what it was made of.
Because the artifacts were found by the locals instead of professional archiologists, the historical community was reluctant to accept this "lost city" as a fact. But with the increase of artifacts being found this year, it was, as my dad said, attracting the attention of the gullible...myself included. The artifacts pointed to the idea that these people lived in structures and not just tents -- but no ancient ruins had been found yet. People like me hoped to be the first to discover the ruined city from which these artifacts were scattered.
I pulled my baseball cap low over my forehead and hiked down to the Motel 6 at the edge of town. The Jeep was still gone. That meant that Hammer and Jenny -- my two teammates on this mission -- weren't back yet.
My phone let out a series of happy dings, rejoicing to be reconnected with the world and downloading useless information. Then it chirruped -- I had an incoming video chat.
It was Karl, our lab buddy. I accepted the chat.
Karl's face appeared in the screen -- the usual test tubes and sterile equipment in the background. "Hey, Fence, got some bad news."
I cringed. What a day. "Bring it on, man."
"Yeah, so that oiled cloth is not very old. It's strange and unique and they haven't quite pinpointed the fiber blend yet, but they are very sure that it's not more than 30 years old. So...I think this might spark some dating tests on the other artifacts. I mean, some of them are clearly old, but if they're not more than 200 years old, that pretty much kills the lost city idea. You know? Like, we've got history for that area for the last 200 years. If there had been a lost city that recently, we would have known about it. Soooo....yeah...that's my bad news." Karl squinted at the camera. "You guys found anything cool or anything?"
"Nah, man. I guess my dad was right and this was a stupid trip for gullible people after all."
Karl shrugged and then tried to hide a grin. "Buuuuuttttt….If you ask Jenny out finally, it won't be a total loss. I mean...that's why you agreed to this trip anyway, right? To hang out with her?"
"No. It's not." I raked my fingers through my hair in frustration. "I genuinely thought..." It was hard to admit my own stupidity. "I genuinely thought we'd find something up here. Like I was supposed to come. Like this was my destiny." Wow, that sounded so corny. I really was gullible, like my dad said. Too many movies, maybe?
"Hey, man, it's okay. I understand that. I do that all the time in my lab. I get really excited and try something." He shrugged again. "Sometimes it's a total flop, and you have to accept that. And know that it's still okay to get excited about the next idea. Like a wise old oil-driller once said, sometimes it's just as valuable to know where oil ain't."
"Right." I rubbed my forehead, trying to rub away an ache that was more emotional than physical. "Cool. Thanks."
"Okay, so you look like you could use a break now. So I'll go back to my work, and I'll talk to you later."
"Okay, talk to you later."
His face disappeared, and I found myself staring into my phone's background photo. It was a picture of Hammer, Jenny, and I standing in front of the Motel 6 when we first arrived in Grin. Our faces were so eager and excited.
Nine days later, and we had found nothing. They would be disappointed when I told them Karl's news. I wondered if the locals were just innocently finding semi-old things or if they were actually fabricating them in a hoax like my dad said.
My phone chirruped again. Another video chat.
Jenny.
I accepted the call and Jenny's excited, flushed face appeared on the screen with the backdrop of forest behind her.
"Okay, so you're probably wondering why I have mud on my face, but I have a good excuse, I promise." Her words tumbled over each other in her excitement.
I could see where this was going. She thought she found something and that would make her all the more disappointed when I told her that there was no lost city here. "Jenny..."
"Look what I found!!!!" she squealed. She lifted something into view. It was a large square, one inch thick and approximately the length of her forearm. It looked like it was made of metal. It had a scene stamped into it -- mountains with the sun rising through them.
"Okay so it's just a piece of metal artwork, Jenny. Probably not related to any lost city anywhere." I was trying to let her down gently before I told her that the lost city didn't even exist.
"But look!" Jenny enthused. She turned the metal piece so I could see the edge. "It's the same zigzag sort of pattern that was on the cloth and on the pottery!"
That was too intentional. That means that these "artifacts" must be a local hoax. A cruel one, in my opinion.
I swallowed hard. "Where did you find it?"
"On the North face of the mountain. I think all the rain this year uncovered it. I looked up and I just saw the edge sticking out of the ground, with the sunlight glinting off of it." She giggled and then touched her face embarrassedly. "It was kinda a mess to get to...I had to crawl through mud...hence my face...sorry about that."
"Your face is...fine." I felt the back of my neck flush. Her face was more than fine. Her eyes were lit up with so much joy and hope over her find. "But I may have some bad news."
She laughed. "Okay, well, hang on. We're on our way down now. Hammer and I will meet you at the motel. Then we can all study this piece for more clues and you can tell us your news."
She was too happy to register any other emotion. I wasn't sure how to respond to that.
She leaned close to the camera. "We FOUND something, Fence. We found something! And we're going to find more. I just know it."
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