Dena changed the lamp before she admitted there was nothing wrong with it.
The moths were in the grass. She could see them when she bent with her torch: little gray wings held roofwise above bodies no longer than a fingernail. There were hundreds. The white collecting sheet shone behind her, empty.
“Try insulting them,” Jory said.
She pointed the torch at his boots. “You do that.”
He had worked the night shift with her for eleven months and still brought a sandwich that made its presence known before he unwrapped it. Tonight it was egg. She had spent twenty-three years at the field station and could remember moths settling on the sheet in such numbers that they covered yesterday’s stains.
Jory crouched. A moth climbed a grass stem past his knee, opened its wings, and flew straight through the bright beam. It did not circle.
“Maybe they’re learning,” he said.
Dena took an empty collecting pot from her pocket.
He stopped smiling. “You don’t think that.”
“I think the lamp works.”
Before taking it down, she photographed the empty sheet for the record.
She caught six. They were the common gray moth she and Jory bred indoors for their flight trials, ordinary enough to live unnoticed on nearly every fence in the valley. She knew where to find their eggs and which broken places in the fence they sheltered in. She could collect the same species without leaving the station grounds. Tonight, with six in her pocket, she kept looking down at the grass.
The six went into a separate enclosure. Their wings had the expected marks. Their antennae moved when Dena touched the outside of the glass. Beside them, a moth from the station’s long-established indoor line looped around the test lamp until she switched it off.
The wild six crossed the lit space without turning. Then they settled, all at once, on the dark side of the enclosure.
“They’ve got something else to steer by,” Jory said.
“Or we’ve damaged them.”
“All six?”
“We caught all six the same way.”
He wrote that down. It was one of the reasons she liked him. He could be irritating without insisting on remaining right.
They sent specimens to the central laboratory. Dena expected mites, an infection, some chemical change in the verge where the road crew had sprayed. What came back was a photograph of fine branching structures, with a request that they send more.
Under magnification, the branches resolved into ladders. The rungs were not all alike. Dena enlarged the image until its edges vanished off the screen, then shrank it back. In the form beside it, the space headed IDENTIFICATION was still blank.
Three weeks later the laboratory sent a second picture.
This one was dated nine years earlier. It showed a grain from an orbital dust collector, sealed above the atmosphere and opened inside a controlled laboratory. The ladder ran through its fractured shell.
Dena read the accompanying pages twice. Two other laboratories had found the same structure in independently stored grains from that collection. The new material in the moths copied itself, but not with the machinery they used to copy their own genes. Researchers had checked the collectors’ blank compartments and old handling records. They were still arguing about the route from falling dust to living tissue. They were no longer treating the match as a laboratory accident.
Jory had read the report on his phone while waiting for the kettle.
“Does it know?” he asked.
“What?”
“That it’s here.”
There was a brown ring in the bottom of his mug. Dena had been meaning to wash it for him, although he was thirty and entirely capable of washing a mug.
“Keep that question out of the trial notes,” she said.
He put the phone away. “I hadn’t put it in.”
The visitor did not make the moths larger or give them unfamiliar wings. The laboratory reported that it lived among familiar tissues and bacteria, using compounds the moths’ bodies discarded. In the laboratory photographs, its branching threads thickened near a native microbe already living in their gut. The microbe flourished. The moths carrying both partners survived cold nights better than their siblings without the visitor.
The central laboratory called it an association. Jory called it a lodger. Dena used the sample number.
Beyond the station, the same branching pattern turned up in grass roots, beetles, and the thin films on river stones. Sometimes the association failed. Sometimes the host died. But successful pairings persisted and spread, and their descendants carried the pattern onward.
On television, a presenter held a plastic model of the visitor while the weather map waited behind her. Dena watched until the presenter put the model down. Nobody on the programme said how to keep it out of a moth room.
Dena kept working nights. She still checked the outside of the lit kitchen window before going to bed. Its frame had been crowded every summer. Now she could rest her hand anywhere on the sill.
By late summer, the outdoor moths passed lamps without losing their way around them. They still visited flowers, but different ones, at different hours. On one field survey, a patch of pale night flowers went unvisited while moths worked the closed blossoms farther down the bank. Dena watched them probe the petals until dawn. The pale flowers set fewer seeds that season. Across the path, a sickly stand of grass grew so thick that it bent the wire fence.
“I don’t like that,” she told Jory.
“Which bit?”
“Don’t make me choose.”
He had started recording the insects away from the lamps, on their own routes. Once, at four in the morning, he showed her a film of two beetles waiting at a dry crack in the ground. A thread of moisture rose into it. The beetles moved forward together.
“Roots below,” he said. “Same patch we sampled yesterday.”
“You can’t know the roots did that for them.”
“I know. Look anyway.”
She did. She watched it three times.
The moth room had acquired a second door and a supply of tested feed. Dena kept the indoor line separate from everything brought in from outside. Test after test found no visitor in its samples. That was a statement she could still make without crossing anything out.
When Jory told her he was leaving, she was counting eggs through a magnifier.
“For where?”
“The coastal survey. They need night staff.”
“So do I.”
“I want to see the marshes. They’ve found it in the mud, but not in the crabs. Why?”
She lowered the magnifier.
For weeks he had been filling his breaks with films of water draining from mud banks. He watched things she had mistaken for empty holes. She had asked him once to turn the sound down, although there had been none.
“The pay?” she asked.
“A bit better.”
“And the accommodation?”
“A room with a window.”
“You have a window.”
“Mine faces your generator.”
She went back to the eggs. He waited beside the bench. After a while she said, “You should take my waterproof case. The latch on yours is going.”
“I’ll bring it back.”
“Make them buy you one.”
His last night at the station was the night the ridge burned.
Dena smelled the smoke in the entry room before the warning came. Through the high window she could see a flat orange glow beyond the trees. The road was still open. The driver who brought their food called to say that it would not stay that way.
Jory had his car packed. He came back through the second door in his travelling clothes, carrying two portable breeding cases from the store.
“Which line?”
“There are six.”
“Dena.”
She looked along the shelves. Different families, different trial histories, eggs, larvae, adults. She knew their labels without reading them. The visitor-free line had become a whole room of work, and the room could not be picked up.
She tried a tall rack in one case. It protruded above the rim; the filtered lid would not close.
“We can take the racks if we leave the lids off.”
“No,” he said. “Then what are we taking them for?”
She kept her hand on the rack for several seconds before lifting it out again.
They chose the two oldest, best-recorded families. Dena transferred the small covered containers into the cases while Jory took the data drives and paper books. He carried out the samples already preserved for the laboratory. At the door, she went back for a tray of pupae, each already closed in its little transport pot. Their outer box was too wide for either case. She had no free hand left for it.
“Put it here,” Jory said.
“That’s your bag.”
“I can wear one shirt.”
He tipped his clothes into the sink. A sock caught on the tap. It hung there like something trying to climb out.
Dena helped him lower the box into his emptied bag. By then, smoke had begun to show beneath the outer door.
They left the lamps on.
From the car she could see moths moving over the verge, their wings appearing and disappearing as they crossed the headlights. None turned toward the station windows.
The first motel refused the insects. The second manager asked whether they ate wool, listened to Dena’s answer, and charged her a deposit anyway.
Jory brought the cases into her room. Their little air units, plugged into the wall now, hummed on the table where guests were expected to put tea. He had called the coastal station to say he would arrive a day late. Dena had phoned three laboratories about taking the colonies. Two had their own evacuations. The third could collect them on Monday.
It was Friday.
She laid the books on the bedspread. Ash had worked into the creases of one cover. She brushed it with the edge of a card and stopped when Jory set a plate beside her.
“Eat.”
“What is it?”
“Toast. I’ve spared you the egg.”
They ate sitting on opposite ends of the bed, looking at the cases. Dena could see an adult resting on a twig inside the nearer one. It held its wings in the same plain roof she had seen in the grass the first night.
“Do you think they’re still up there?” she asked.
“The station?”
“The ones we couldn’t take.”
He rubbed a crumb between his fingers. “I don’t know.”
She had asked because he might have said yes. He did not look up. They finished the toast.
Later, while Jory slept in the chair, Dena reviewed the last batch of test results. No visitor detected. She knew the limits of that statement. There were so few moths now that a sickness, a failed brood, even an ordinary mistake could finish what she had brought away. She wrote to the collecting laboratory about the numbers. She did not call them the last unaltered moths. Other stations had colonies; some were much farther from the fire.
She almost deleted the photograph of the empty collecting sheet. Then she sent it with the report.
Jory woke when the case fan changed pitch.
“Is it all right?”
“Yes. The other fan’s running now.”
He sat forward and watched the resting moth lift off. The bedside light was shining across the case. The moth turned, tilted, and turned again, tracing a tight uneven circle in front of the glass.
“There,” Dena said.
Jory looked at her.
The moth banked and struck the side of the case. It recovered and went round again.
Outside the motel window, a few gray wings passed through the light above the parking spaces and continued into the dark.
Dena reached across the bed and switched off the lamp.
In the case, the small collisions stopped. After a moment she heard Jory stand and feel his way toward the bathroom, careful not to catch his foot on the power lead. He left that light on, with the door pulled almost shut. A narrow bar of it reached the carpet between their shoes.
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