No matter how Laureen tried to brush her hair, the strands continued to escape. Just like the toddler she barricaded with desks and a spare yard of netting. Being alone with a child who clearly didn't know how to act like a human while the others went off to their usual programming was not how she imagined her Saturday would go.

But someone has to be left with the child, and they've settled into a rotation before the job got passed around once more. Quid took the first day, Laureen, the second, and Jas, the third. Stell, who had more experience with goats than children, whined about accidentally setting the cabin on fire when left alone with Amy, so he was pardoned off chaperoning duty. Now, he has to go with everyone everyday.

Laureen should have the one who whined. She didn't want to stop doing her job just to play nanny to an infant, no matter how much she belonged to the civilization they kept chasing.

Her brush scratched against her scalp one last time, tucking the fly-away strands back to where they belong. She still had to study the material Amy's clothes were made of. The main theory circulating in the cabin was that Amy was a child from the community in the east part of the island. Somehow, she died, and the locals buried her in the caverns. For some reason, she wasn't dead, and woke up when Laureen found her.

Which raised a whole lot of questions Laureen had no immediate answers to. The problem with studying the past was they had to find all the answers themselves, from what traces time had left, and often, time cleans up after itself. Instead of mapping the cave systems, the purpose of the dig has now shifted to finding the explanation of Amy's existence.

Not that Laureen had problems with it. They were bound to explore deeper in the systems anyway. What better way to do it than scramble around before time ran out and they would have to disband? Sometimes, having knives hovering by thread overhead pushed people harder than anything would.

A loud clatter made her look away from the mirror and into Amy's "crib". The color cube Jas would sometimes play with had rolled out of the netted barrier. It must have slipped out of Amy's hand when she flung it too far. It's the only thing that calmed the child down and made her leave them alone while they prepare for the next exploration. Now, with it sitting inches from her and no way for her to reach it, her chest started heaving.

Oh, no.

Laureen chucked the brush on the table, rushing towards the desk. She cooed under her breath as she picked the child up, rocking her back and forth. She bent down and plucked the cube from the ground before shaking it in Amy's face. "Lookie here!" she said in the silliest voice she could manage. "The cube is here!"

Amy slapped Laureen's wrist, causing her to drop the cube again. Jas would kill Laureen if she realized what Ay did to her prized toy. If memory served, Jas went to a cube convention and underwent many trials just to get one of these. It's a miracle the post-grad considered lending it to Amy before she went out this morning.

Or maybe it was to shut the kid up that Jas conceded. The power kids had over adults in motion.

Laureen was about to bend down again when Amy's arms clamped around her neck. She froze, feeling the warmth seep through her skin and into somewhere inside her.

When she talked to Quid on the porch, she claimed she was fine. In reality, she wasn't. Ever since she found Amy and brought the child back to the cabin, she had this itch to call Jed and cry about it. She didn't, for obvious reasons—one, he was busy with his job; and two, there's no signal consistent enough to send out more than two words. Cangabayi was wonderful that way.

But being alone with Amy, being close to her like this...Laureen went back to her glory days. The days she felt the proudest. The ones that seemed so far away when Riley's health deteriorated, when it got so bad Laureen prayed for the heavens to take her away just to help her not feel pain anymore.

Suddenly, she was back at the start again, and she hated it. From the tears that streamed down her face and the sobs building up in her throat—she wished it to be over.

"Amy?" the child's shrill voice called.

Laureen sniffed and wiped her tears as fast as one free hand could. "Yes, that's your name," she answered, giving Amy another rock. "What other words do you know, hmm? Things you remember?"

The child answered by pressing her cheek against Laureen's shoulder. "Amy," she said again. "Amy."

Laureen sighed. She only knew her name, and that's more troublesome for them. She didn't look a day past two years old, and by then, she would have learned to recognize sounds or say simple words. Then again, she probably couldn't recognize a single syllable Laureen and her team uttered, since she was accustomed to a completely different language.

Either way, "Amy" was the only mode of communication they had, and whatever that meant, it would stay that way until the child could learn English.

Her phone lit up with a chance encounter with a single bar of signal. She swiped at it and read the details. On the bright, unnatural thing in the middle of nature, the words leaped out at her.

From: Milton Prick

Message: Confirmed date with HQ. Pick-up of package on the twentieth. Meet up in the east for drop-off. Come unarmed.

The battery died ages ago, forcing them to light up the spare torch they always brought for this occasion. It was Laureen and Quid's turn in exploring the caverns, and this time, they continued where Jas and Stell left off yesterday. From C2, one of the paths there diverged into three more, and today's aim was to explore it. That way, they could move to C2-3, which meant the third divergence from C2's single thread.

The beams on the hard hats died somewhere in the middle of C2-2-2, and the path went on. After her stint with Amy's corridor, she made sure to stick to the walls and feel for further illusions the caverns might play on them. Quid would glance at her every now and then, but she would always flash him a reassuring smile or a quick thumbs up. He would look away immediately, the remnants of their talk still heavy in the air between them.

Laureen saw where Quid came from. He wanted to keep Amy from the authorities because she's alive and a child too. He failed to see Laureen's stance. If they honored Amy's right to live, then they would lose the right to manage Cangabayi and leave it to other researchers and the military, and who knew what would happen then? Would they still be able to go back to this wonderful island and recognize it?

It's scary, and Laureen wasn't the one who would be ushering such a future. As long as her team and the dig was here, no harm would come to the island and its indigenous people.

The road sloped downward, plunging them deeper into the mountain's heart. Laureen's heart quivered with both fear and anticipation. What awaited them down there? Would it be the secret to the civilization they've been looking for? Were more cave systems waiting for them? It's exciting but also exhausting, as she already started mapping out the amount of work waiting for her and her team.

Their shadows danced with every flicker of the flames eating away at the torch. They needed to get back before it ran out, or they would be forced to use the other stick. Laureen hated running out of things, so they'd have to either take the boat to the next island to get more supplies, or rely on their survival skills and instincts to make their necessities.

"How do you think Amy survived in that crypt?" Laureen ventured aloud, craning her neck to the ceiling devoured by darkness. The flames could only do so much. "Have you gathered something from the locals?"

Quid hummed, deep in thought. Despite the vast knowledge stored in his head, retrieving one data file for a specific topic could take some time. "The elders talked about something of the sort in their myths," he said. "I can only remember bits and pieces from my last immersion."

"Let's hear it," Laureen replied. "Something to pass the time."

The road curved, and they followed it. Still no diverging paths. Quid swung the torch against the walls, giving her a quick glimpse of the continuity. Nothing unordinary.

"There's something called the pabangtiin. It's ancient magic done by...I guess you can call them priests, and they believe these priests can store souls in objects," Quid said. "Some still practice the rituals, but I doubt they still believe the physical manifestation of said souls. The elders told me they only do it because it's tradition, and they want to honor their ancestors."

Laureen stuck a lip out. "Does this have something to do with the..." she readied her tongue for another difficult word she's about to pronounce. "Tiserang?"

Quid's shoulders went up and down. "The Dread? Could be," he said. "The gods and the spirits have long abandoned Cangabayi because of the chaos they keep sowing into the soil, and they're only reaping consequences now."

It was ingrained into the locals' belief that The Dread could arrive the moment disarray and sin entered their abode. The gods and spirits would leave, plunging their world into silence. The people wouldn't feel their presence anymore, until such time the chaos was chased away and the land was purified. Tiserang has been happening for a while now, and Laureen might have been responsible for that. Having foreigners on one's island was the same as having rude guests lay waste in one's house.

But what could she do? It's not like she could stop excavating just because her conscience told her she shouldn't. She had to earn her keep, and the only way she knew how was to dust the soil and find stuff from the past.

"Anyway, pabangtiin can be applied to anything, even people," Quid continued. "I'm not really a spiritual person, but after seeing what happened with Amy, and how...impossible her situation was, I'd bail. Supernatural things are real."

Laureen couldn't have agreed more. Growing up in a Catholic household, she believed in God and other religious stuff. Having grown out of it, she found relief and certainty in science more than a bunch of vague teachings from dodgy men. But Amy rising from that coffin in the middle of the darkness even though she was supposed to be dead for thousands of years brought back the memories of the countless Sundays she spent learning about things like this.

There's still a lot of things science couldn't explain, and this was one of them.

The road curved to the right. Laureen noticed something with the quick flit of the flames from Quid's torch. "Hold on. Shine the torch in that," she ordered. Quid swung the torch here and there, with her guiding him with iterated syllables of varying speed and tone, until it settled on the spot she wanted.

An arch made of jagged stone gave way to another opening. She and Quid exchanged looks. "C2-2-2-1?" she cracked a grin.

"That's a lotta numbers, Laurie," he scratched the back of his neck with his free hand. "But I'll take it. Shall we?"

One glance at the torch and the cloth tied around its head being devoured by the flames told her they didn't have much time left. She couldn't stop here, though. Not now. Her gut told her there's something beyond that arch, and it might be the clue to what Amy was.

"We shall," Laureen answered.

Together, they ducked into the belly of the inky beast.

And they came in front of a large dead end spanning meters across. The flames from the torch caught faint markings etched in stone—something not present from anything they passed over the last few years. Damn it. They should have brought the mega-torch. Or a camera. The only thing with Laureen was her phone, which was useless down here.

Quid muttered under his breath as she ran a gloved hand across the space in the wall he could reach. He held the torch over his head, studying where the lines started and where they ended. From ceiling to floor—that's their answer. Everywhere the flames' vibrance chased the darkness away, more lines bled from the ones they already saw.

"It's a freaking mural," Laureen breathed.

Quid's smile rivaled the beams of unnatural, LED light when he turned to her. "Better," he said. "I think this is a record of their history. I recognize some lines from the locals' surviving script. We're in for a treat."

She braced her hips to at least disperse the giddy recoil of her gut. "What do you think it's about?"

"Let's hope it's about Amy and what happened to this civilization," Quid said.

It's not a question of whether or not a civilization existed here anymore. There was a civilization underneath the rubble that was Cangabayi, and they would soon learn about it and what led to its demise.

They're so getting that budget.