From below.
Laurent screamed once.
The sound cut off so abruptly that Marchand felt it in his teeth.
They found the lantern at dawn.
It lay on the slab, glass broken, wick cold.
Laurent was gone.
There were no footprints leading away beyond his own approach. The sand around the slab remained undisturbed except for the chaotic marks of Marchand and the others searching by lantern until Amastan forced them back. The seam around the stone looked unchanged. No blood. No torn cloth. No sign of struggle.
But in one of the shallow spiral depressions on the slab, Vasseur found a fingernail.
Human.
Split down the center.
Rinard vomited behind a mound.
Marchand ordered the slab covered again. No one questioned him.
By then, the expedition had crossed a threshold none of them could name. The survey no longer felt like an act of discovery. It felt like trespass.
Still, Marchand did not leave.
Later, he would ask himself why. Pride was the easiest answer and therefore the least complete. Ambition, perhaps. The terror of returning with claims no institution would believe unless supported by overwhelming evidence. Or something darker: the need to force the impossible into record before it could retreat into legend again.
He thought often of Laurent’s words.
They measured us first.
On April 28, they found the cut face.
It belonged to a trunk half buried beneath a dune field south of the lakebed. Only a segment of the base protruded from the sand, but that exposed face was nearly vertical and unnaturally smooth. Rinard saw it first and called Marchand over with a voice stripped of all color.
The face was not broken.
It was sawed.
