'Of course you are,' she said, her voice brittle as fossilized bone. She held her spine like a steel rod, her walking stick like a bludgeon. She couldn't be referring to the children. 'Do you know what those are?' she said, gesturing again to the park below. Evolution occurred Constance Roya could eviscerate me with a glance. Now? Evidence acquired, knowledge attained, theory proven. I'd found it impossible to believe that such a small, unassuming woman had done all they said she did. Killing a hexapedal carnivore with a hand-made spear, hiding for two days from a giant amphibious jellyfish desperate for food, surviving alone in the Well for five years before the computers on this side even registered the malfunction-those rumors had floated around the agency for decades. Smith.' I saw her clearly, then: beautiful and terrible, ancient and radical, a goddess as much as any human can be. Roya, I think it's time you showed me the lab,' I said, hoping, like a child, to hurt her with my authority. Could I blame her? She saw the agency acronym on my lapel she knew what I'd come for. But she insisted on denying me what little individuality I had left. I stared-was she playing me? She laughed and shrugged.

'They're children,' she said, her voice incongruously deep and carrying for such a small body. I had a sudden impression of those dark, full lips breaking me open, holding their silence. Her answering smile was brief and indulgent. Children from the nearby ambassador's school scrambled over banyan tree roots, hanging and swinging so adroitly that it suddenly seemed the separation between humans and apes was not so great as we liked to imagine. Constance Roya was a scientist in the ancient sense, when that term implied at least as much of a reckless love for adventure as an appreciation of form and method and the furtherance of human knowledge. A particularly knowledgeable observer might have noted that the cherry-red wood was at once lighter and stronger than any known on Earth. Her eight remaining fingers were casually laced over a knobby walking stick that she carried for show. She appeared to be in well-preserved middle-age only I and a few other agents knew the truth.

Her shiny olive skin was firm, but even the best youth-treatments couldn't hide the purple veins that snaked around her arms like cables. 'It comforts me to remember that I too was a child once, and one day they too will be old.'

Audible by Dawn Kimberly Johnson