Aaron couldn’t believe his eyes. What he first thought was a living woman laying down on a bench on an island in the middle of the ocean that had been unknown since the Great War, he now recognized as a stone statue of a girl.1
He took a step closer to the statue. The details in the statue were amazing, and the girl looked beautiful…not perfection, but something full of…dammit, he didn’t have a word for it.2
He heard the crunch of dirt behind him, and turned to see Sid, arrogant grin and all. Aaron tried to scowl at the miserable creature, but it didn’t faze him one bit. The old man’s eyes were studying the statue as well.3
“Looks quite….real, don’t you think?” Sid half said, half smirked.4
Aaron nodded and bent down next to the bench. He motioned Sid over, and the older man bent down next to him, both peering at the section of stone bench the stone woman’s hair was not covering.5
In the stone was engraved words in of the Old Texts. Aaron studied the strange symbols for a bit, trying to identify which of the old languages it was.6
Sid shrugged and got up, sitting on the bench next to the woman. He patted the statue’s stone bottom playfully, but pulled back his calloused hands after a glare from Aaron. “Look, if you’re going to drag me out here to work, then be serious about it, okay?”7
But inside, he had another reason. The stone statue seemed too real, too lifelike to degrade. She looked like a fallen angel from the gods, hands curled together in front of her eyes as if….as if she were hiding from something.8
He turned to Sid, who was still sitting on the bench. “I’m pretty sure the language is a older form of Gaelic”—he pronounced the word carefully, since it was an old word that did not fit in with the languages of the last millennium—“that was considered ancient even during the time of the Great Wars.” He sifted his hand through his sun bleached hair, thinking. “I can’t read much of it myself, the only word I can make out is ‘day’, but I can’t make sense of anything else. Do you have your portable guide with you?”9
Sid nodded absently, his gaze lost in the ocean waves beyond the edge of the garden and island it rested on. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small computer and handed it to Aaron.10
Aaron held the small portable computer up to the engraved symbols and hit the button to take a picture. After a short while, the computer finally gave him a rough translation of the text.11
Waken in the dawn of a new day and—12
The stone woman’s hair blocked the rest, Aaron realized. Damn.13
He felt an odd stirring in the pit of his stomach, and reached his hands out to the symbols in the stone, drawn to them like he had always been drawn to fire. His fingers lightly touched the words, brushing away dust and pulling away cobwebs.14
Aaron pulled away his hands as if the words really had been fire. His hands burnt, and now the space inside the engraved words were glowing slightly, flaring to life. He backed away, eyes wide. What the hell—?15
He heard Sid gasp and stand up, and Aaron’s eyes flickered briefly to the stone girl—and then back again. Her stone hair, as if frozen in ice all this time and now thawing, became a waterfall of raven black silk. Her hands that covered her eyes were now milk white, as if she had never seen the sun. Her cloak, he could now see, was crimson as blood.16
And then she pulled away her hands and revealed two huge, violet eyes that blinked up at him, confused.17
“Holy Fucking God!” Sid shouted at the top of his lungs, tripped, and fell backwards on the dirt path beneath him.18
Aaron didn’t turn to see him fall, instead his eyes were locked with the woman who only seconds ago had been encased in stone.19
She pulled away her ghostly fingers and sat up, rigid on the stone bench. Raven hair fell about her fiery violet eyes as they bore into his soul. Her pink lips quivered silently, and she looked about to cry.20
She pulled her arms around her body and hugged herself, rocking back and forth and concentrating on the ground. “Well?” she whispered almost inaudibly after a time, looking down at her palms.21
Aaron tried to speak, but it felt as if someone had lodged a…a cat in his throat. An overweight cat.22
He heard Sid get up behind him and dust himself off.23
The girl looked up again, her eyes wide and dark. He found himself lost within their depths….24
They turned to rage, fire flaring up inside them. He stepped back, surprised. She jumped up off the stone bench and threw her hands up, fury blazing within. “Well! Are you going to say something!”25
Aaron eyed her, confused, and turned to Sid for guidance, but the old man was just as confused as him. Well, so the old man isn’t really all knowing. Big surprise.26
He turned back, feeling his voice return. “What is your name?” he croaked, and flinched inwardly at the stupidity of it. A stone statue just came to life, and you ask what her name is? God, Aaron, you’re stupid, he thought to himself. A complete moron.27
The anger left her eyes and she fell back on the bench, her eyes once again wide, imploring him, confused. She didn’t answer, just looked down at her palms again.28
He nodded, trying to restore some sense of reality to the situation. He remembered the computer he held in his hands, the latest model of the mini computers that were all the rage in the market today, and held it up before his eyes, taking a picture of the girl’s face before she knew what hit her.29
Her eyes grew wide, but she sat still, shivering slightly. She must not like having her picture taken, thought Aaron.30
He caught himself. He was referring to her as a person, but she was stone—or locked in stone, or what? Perhaps she had been in some sort of advanced freezing process similar to the type used in space flight, but that would be very expensive and to use it on Earth and in the middle of an island that showed no trace of human life for over a millennium—now that was strange. He shook his head and returned his attention to the portable.31
Aaron ran a search on the government database for any matches to her picture, but none came. Usually the database would be able to match perfectly a picture to a computer model of the person, which was recorded every time a citizen stepped through a checking gate.32
So why were there no matches to her?33
“Are you a U.S. citizen, miss?” he asked, trying to sound rough but formal, like the government soldiers that worked the gates.34
She gave him a strange look. “Yoo…ess?” she asked, pronouncing the word carefully. Her accent was strange and foreign, but he couldn’t quite identify it. It had a musical lilt to it, and was soft. It sounded a bit….French? British?35
“Yes, U.S., miss….?” Sid asked behind him, finally coming to his wits. Of course, it would be shocking finding a human frozen in what looked like stone on an island you thought uninhabited for a very, very long time.36
She shook her head, looking more confused than ever. “I don’t know of this…nation? You speak of.”37
Aaron sighed. “Your name then, and your number, please?”38
She gave him an odd look. “I don’t know my name.” She whispered, more to herself, and pulled her legs up close to her, hugging them with her arms against her body on the stone bench and rocking back and forth again.39
Of course, Aaron thought. Just my luck.
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