[ WP ] You were born with the ability to know what is buried beneath your feet . You have worked for years alongside archaeologists finding lost cities and ancient treasures ; however , today is the first time you have ever said `` We should not dig here . ''

What always surprised me was the pottery and the tools. Economic downturns, invading armies, and natural disasters; those are the things that empty cities. Countless cities, through time and across geography. I'd been south of the border to Ek' Balam, where there were vases and ceremonial containers for Mayan corn-cocoa beer. Walking over Jamestown, I could feel the hammers and nails beneath my feet, as well as fishing hooks fashioned from deer bones. Little stories like whispers, quietly and confidently told to me as I walk, often in the sun a hundred-thousand days after army boots, or a volcano, or despair buried these things in dust. It's always pottery and tools. 
 
 The pottery was a surprise... that it survives. The brittle clay remains while the resilient people are gone. Pottery comes from the earth but does not return to the earth. It remains distinct and people like me and the team that follows me can dig it out again. But the humans who made the pots, people who come from *people*, return to the earth. We are less permanent than clay. There was a time when I grappled with that realization and wanted to kill myself. I'd lain in bed for weeks unable to move. What point doing otherwise? I was to become dust eventually. I changed nothing by living. 
 
 But the tools were the opposite. They surprised not because they endure; tools are of course made to be durable. No, they puzzled me and frustrated me because they were left behind. If for some reason I found myself fleeing from my only home, my farm fields, and my life from before the disaster, would I not *take* my tools? Assuming I wanted to keep living, those tools were mandatory. Shelters call for axes and millstones for wheat require chisels. Why did I find so many axes and chisels left in the ragged wake of cataclysm? Why? 
 
 Surely in the face of disaster, these gone people must have foreseen what I saw; the futility of life, the despair. No need for tools; they are n't needed when you rest in the roots of the Ceiba tree, or when the Pearly Gates open before you and you no longer have earthly needs. No, no... just make a token effort to flee and let the coming dust do its work. 
 
 So I walked around the sites that my university wanted me to. I used the senses of my bare feet and found them artifacts to study, to sell. I made the token effort. But night after night, and sometimes during the days, too, I waited for the dust I'd become, and had some thoughts of speeding it up. 
 
 That ended, though. I'm glad it did. 
 
 My handler asked me what I thought about going to the Middle East. Sure. Bahrain? Whatever. 
 
 I slept almost the whole plane ride there. 22 or maybe 23 hours. 
 
 They drove me to the site of a temple that I later learned was the Barbar complex. I took off my shoes and walked among the low walls and dirt. Whispers of worship... gossip... holidays... and rage. Deadly, powerful, murderous, and feminine. Rage unto rage unto sadness unto rage. 
 
 For the first time again there was something new under the sun. Not a tableaux of family sharing a meal, not a worker nor slave nor royal clerk, but instead something fraught and terrified and enraging. 
 
 I hovered my dusty foot backwards over the spot where I'd felt the whisper of the story. 
 
 “ There's something here, ” I'd said. 
 
 “ Anything specific? Another reliquary? ” 
 
 “ No. It's heavy. A tablet of some kind. ” And I set my foot down to take it in. 
 
 Gagging dust and a sliver of orange light. Flickering light. Fire. A boy, a girl, digging upward at the wall. The spade in his hands is made of bronze or maybe copper, and he chips furiously to widen the gap through which the firelight comes. They crouch in a space barely large enough for the both of them. They are hemmed in on all sides by white and earthen rubble that has collapsed around them. There are screams, but not theirs. 
 
 The boy keeps his smock over his mouth to fight the thickening smoke that comes in through the hole he is widening. The girl, working with a wooden stick, is younger than he, and too short to breathe the smoke. Old enough to know that sticks do not chip stones, but young enough to believe, perhaps, in divine intervention. 
 
 He chips and chips, coughing, eyes watering, starting to wheeze. Hammering the shaft of the spade with his balled-up fist and then a rock to cut the stone and escape this destroyed basement. It's starting to grow hot, but the smoke already has him. He's starting to die. Lips turning blue and he sinks to kneel gasping beside the girl. She resembles him. 
 
 She says something and he shoves her off her feet toward the gap high in the wall. She is crying. He is not gentle when he lifts her and slams her into the space he has chiseled. She squirms through and sends her hand back to help pull him out. Her body blocks much of the searing light from entering the rubble, but the slimmest beam still falls on him to show that he is on his side. He twitches and gurgles. Gods keep him. 
 
 Beside his bones was the spade and, though it was n't there in the whisper of the attack and fire, a stone ornament. It's a writing tablet like a stylized scroll, bearing his sister's words. It belonged to her as she... ascended and became more. She wore the tunic of ruler among her people who did not take women as rulers. She wrote, and wrote, and wrote until her rage had filled pages and people. She raised fervor to the brim and brought her gods down on them in a river of violence flowing only to one place: here again where her brother died. She defied everything to lay cuneiform benedictions beside his body. The spade held the fire that tried to claim them. The tablet held the fire that she claimed as her own. 
 
 The bones of an old woman lay in state not far from the dirt-laden tomb of the young boy. 
 
 She had meant everything to him, and that had meant everything to her. 
 
 I was crying. Kneeling. 
 
 “ Are you okay? What's wrong? What's wrong? ” 
 
 They led me off and gave me water until I could stop. They asked me to go see someone, please go talk to a shrink, and I said I would because all the inevitability and pointlessness had just vacated. I told them though, I needed one thing or I would never use my sense for them again: 
 
 “ No matter what, I do n't give a fuck what other artifacts are here. We should not dig here. We should *not dig*. ”
