Serpent's Kiss. Alex Archer

exhausting.

      “Hey!” Annja turned around quickly and brought both of the younger men up short. They splashed to awkward stops in the water. “Gamer geeks—enough with the chatter.”

      Jason and the other young man just looked at her owlishly. They even blinked at about the same time.

      “The naga statue we found isn’t a playing piece from some long-lost D&D game,” Annja said. “We’re supposed to be out here looking for more artifacts.”

      She and Lochata had agreed to keep the students busy until the rescue helicopter arrived. They’d salvaged enough water and energy drinks to get them through the next few hours.

      “You think that naga was like part of a chess set?” the other young man asked.

      Irritated, Annja pinned him with her gaze. “What’s your name?”

      “Me?” The young man pointed at himself and looked surprised.

      “Yes. You.”

      He shrugged. “My name is Sansar.”

      “Fine. Listen up. No, I do not think that naga statue was part of a chess set. Or any kind of game.”

      “It would be kind of big, I suppose.”

      “Sansar,” Annja said, struggling to maintain her composure.

      The young man looked at her.

      “What I think is that the naga statue came from somewhere out there.” Annja waved at the shallows that lapped at the foot of the cliff. The flooding had almost totally receded.

      “Like, it was just laying out here somewhere?”

      “Or was buried under the sand.” Sand, shells and other debris from the sea lay strewed across the dig site and into the jungle. “The tsunami moved a lot of sea floor. Maybe it shifted some things around,” Annja said.

      “You think there’s more out here?”

      “I think there could be more out here,” Annja corrected. She couldn’t believe how lackadaisical the two were about potentially finding more artifacts.

      “So we could be out here tromping around in the water for no reason,” Jason said.

      “Personally, I think it beats sitting around the dig site in muddy clothes waiting for help to arrive,” Annja said.

      Jason frowned. “If my PSP hadn’t gotten washed away, I’d rather be sitting in the shade playing a game.”

      Okay, Annja thought with a sigh, forensic anthropology in a nice, quiet lab is soooo going to be your thing.

      “When’s the rescue helicopter going to be here?” Sansar asked.

      “I don’t know,” Annja answered. She felt a headache coming on, but she didn’t know if it was caused by hunger, the hot sun, spending the night in a tree or listening to the never-ending argument.

      “Man, I hope somebody finds more food,” Sansar said. “Do you think a Pringles can could survive getting submerged? I mean, if it hasn’t been opened. Those things are watertight before you peel them open.”

      Annja turned to face the two. “I’ve got an idea.”

      They waited.

      “Why don’t you two walk in that direction?” Annja pointed in the opposite direction.

      Jason looked that way, then he looked back at Annja. “Why do we have to walk that way? Why can’t we walk with you?”

      “Because we can cover more ground if we separate.” Annja hoped she sounded reasonable instead of frustrated and resentful of the company she was keeping.

      “Yeah,” Jason said, “I can see that. But why do you have to have this end? Why can’t we have it?”

      Annja stared at Jason. “We’ve been through a tsunami. We’re trapped out here without supplies. And you want to argue over which end of the Indian Ocean we’re going to search for artifacts that could be harder to find than a needle in a haystack?”

      Jason’s self-preservation suddenly kicked in. He held his hands up before him. “Hey, you know what? This end is just fine with me.” He looked over his shoulder and faked smiling happily.

      “What if she’s telling us to go that way because she believes she’s going to find something this way?” Sansar said suspiciously. “How do you know she doesn’t just want all the glory for herself?”

      “Dude,” Jason whispered, “you should really keep your mouth shut about now. She could kick your butt.”

      “Okay,” Annja said as evenly as she could, which she knew wasn’t very even at all, “you guys take this end. I’ll take that one.” She pulled the straps on her backpack and headed the other way.

      “You just really made her mad,” Jason told his companion.

      “Me? You’re the one that started the argument over the D&D rules.”

      Annja tried to block them from her hearing, but she was doomed to failure because sound carried more clearly and farther over water than it did over land. There were times when she preferred working alone on a dig. This was one of them.

      Doing a field study with Professor Rai was a treat. The woman had traveled extensively around the Indian subcontinent and been part of every major dig the Archaeological Survey of India had done in the past twenty years. Annja knew she could learn a lot. She also knew that the professor had played up Annja’s involvement to the local papers to get more press due to the Chasing History’s Monsters connection.

      The Shakti-sacrificial-victims dig hadn’t been set up to ferret out any new information. It was fieldwork designed to season the professor’s class and to provide more substantiation to the book Lochata was writing on Shakti.

      The gold naga statue was a totally unexpected find. Annja just hoped there would be more. She didn’t see how there couldn’t be.

      Jason and Sansar kept up their argument, though at a lower volume. They obviously weren’t paying attention to what might be in the shallows.

      Annja sighed unhappily. She was wet, hungry, tired and pushed to the breaking point of her patience. She wondered how the two students could be so completely useless. She wanted to find another artifact to show them what could happen if they actually applied themselves to the task at hand.

      “Hey!” Jason yelled with sudden enthusiasm. “Look what I found!”

      “S O HOW OLD IS IT ?” Jason wanted to know.

      Standing in the shallows where the artifact had been found, Annja upended the fired clay pot and studied the bottom. “49 B.C. ,” she said

      “Wow,” Sansar said. “That thing’s over 2050 years old.”

      Jason slapped him on the back of the head. “She’s goofing you. How would a potter know that he made a pot forty-nine years before Christ was born?”

      “Oh.” Sansar rubbed his head. “I knew that. I was just so excited over finding it that I wasn’t thinking.”

      “You didn’t find it. I did,” Jason said.

      “We were walking together. That means we both found it.”

      “I seem to recall bending down to pick it up from the water,” Jason replied.

      “Both of you can shut up,” Annja suggested.

      They looked at her, clearly offended but silent nonetheless.

      “I think you have found something,” Annja said a short time later. “It even ties in with the dig Professor Rai has initiated.” She pointed to the figure of a six-armed woman riding a tiger.

      “Shakti, right?” Jason asked.

      “Right.”