In Fortune's Hand

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There was a lizard in the wreckage.

Ria Kerey moved aside a chunk of metallic debris and looked down at the lizard’s crushed body. For an instant she thought it was a child’s toy, like the plastic dinosaur she’d found earlier, but it was real, and not long ago it had been alive. Carefully she picked up the lizard and lifted it in her hands. Its front half was undamaged; it had been a brilliant, iridescent creature, with stripes of blue and yellow and green, and highlights of orange and red behind the eyes. Ria cradled it in her hands. She pictured the lizard drowsing and dreaming on a Sun-baked rock on the warm hillside, content with its world, and wondered if it had even seen the small plane that had fallen out of the sky and killed it.

Darcy Angelo knelt beside her and Ria held out the lizard. “Innocent bystander,” Ria said, trying to make light of it, but her voice was unsteady and her hands, still cradling the lizard, shook ever so slightly. She felt foolish, getting emotional over a lizard after calmly and professionally helping piece together the bodies of the plane’s passengers—she especially felt foolish in front of gray-haired Darcy, the team’s leader, a woman who’d been working in the field for over four decades. Ria started to put the lizard back where she’d found it, but Darcy gently took it from her, moved it away from the wreckage, and laid it under a frond of flowering purple weed. Another lizard suddenly darted past in a flash of yellow and green, disappearing as fast as it had come, and Darcy smiled. “There,” she said. “A survivor.”

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