The Shape in Amber

The mountain had been keeping its dead for a very long time.

The Dolomites rose above the excavation site in enormous, pale formations, their limestone faces catching the afternoon light in shades of rose and gold. The surrounding forest was dark with pine, the ground uneven beneath a thick covering of needles and damp soil. By the time the afternoon clouds began gathering over the peaks, the excavation team had been working for nearly six hours, and everyone was becoming increasingly unpleasant about it.

"You're standing in my light."

Jiaa Tran did not look up from the trench. She had been kneeling in the same position for the better part of twenty minutes. 

"I'm standing in the sun. Can’t really escape that." Kenai Dosela replied.

"Which is where my light is."

"That's an interesting way of looking at it."

"Would you like to try looking at it from somewhere else?"

Kenai huffed through his nose and moved a few inches to his left.

A short distance away, Jaclyn Atlas was crouched beside a collection of recovered material, carefully separating several fragments of what appeared to be ancient resin from the surrounding soil. Her red hair had been pulled into a loose bun that was beginning to come undone, and the sleeves of her faded brown sweater were pushed up past her elbows. She had a small notebook balanced against one knee, its pages already crowded with measurements and observations. Every so often, she reached into the pocket of her coat and retrieved a small cloth to clean her fingertips.

They were graduate students. Most of their work consisted of waiting, measuring, documenting, and trying not to damage things that had survived hundreds or thousands of years without their interference.

Jaclyn liked that part. 

She liked the patience it required, the careful removal of one layer at a time. There was something deeply satisfying about working with objects that had outlasted people. 

Anyone could uncover something. Keeping it intact was considerably harder.

“Atlas.”

Jaclyn looked up. Dr. Ellison was standing at the edge of the excavation trench, one hand shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun. Her dark hair was beginning to show silver at the temples, and she had the perpetually tired expression of someone who had spent most of her professional life trying to keep intelligent young people from doing stupid things.

"Can you come have a look at something?"

"Of course."

"Bring your notes."

Jaclyn closed her notebook and stood, brushing the dirt from her knees. "What have you found?"

"That's what I'm hoping you'll tell me. I could use a second opinion."

The deposit lay several feet below the original excavation surface. It had first appeared as a dark, irregular discoloration along the northern edge of the trench. It seemed to be a type of organic resin, although its depth and apparent size had already raised a few questions. 

The material seemed almost entirely isolated, as though something had been deliberately buried and the surrounding earth had gradually reclaimed the space.

Jaclyn crouched beside the exposed section. The resin was darker than the fragments she had been examining earlier, almost brown at its outermost edges, though a thin section near the center caught the light with a distinctly golden translucence. She leaned closer without touching it.

"How deep?"

"Approximately two meters below the original surface." 

Jiaa appeared beside them, removing one glove with her teeth. "It's not behaving like any resin deposit I've seen."

“Exactly, look at it here,” Ellison shifted so that the light was able to reflect cleanly into the chasm, leaning back so the students could gather closer. “The outer layer is almost completely opaque, but the interior is translucent. There's very little sediment intrusion. It's almost like the surface hardened before the surrounding soil settled."

"Could it have been enclosed?"

"Possibly. But by what?"

Jaclyn glanced between them. "Have you taken a sample?"

"Not yet. I wanted you to look at it first."

There was a particular trust in the way Ellison said things like that. 

She reached into her pocket for a pair of gloves.

The exposed surface was smooth in some places and deeply irregular in others, with several long impressions running beneath the translucent material. Jaclyn tilted her head, trying to make sense of the shapes. There was something about the arrangement that bothered her. 

Kenai passed her the portable lamp. She angled it toward the exposed section, watching the beam travel through the amber-colored material. For a moment, the interior appeared entirely featureless. Then something caught the light.

A pale, curved shape.

Jaclyn went still.

"What do you see?" Ellison asked.

She didn't answer immediately. She adjusted the angle, bringing the lamp closer. The shape disappeared beneath a darker section of resin, then emerged again a few centimeters farther along.

There was another shape beneath it. And another.

She felt the small, unpleasant tightening that came when something familiar refused to fit where it belonged. 

The light caught the interior again, revealing what appeared to be the curved outline of a human shoulder.

Ellison instructed Jiaa to retrieve the camera and asked the remaining team members to stop excavation until they could determine the safest way to proceed. There was a brief exchange about contacting the relevant authorities, followed by several minutes of increasingly frantic discussion about what the deposit might contain.

Jaclyn barely heard any of it.

She was looking at the shape beneath the resin.

It was larger than anyone had anticipated, a roughly rectangular mass of amber-colored resin with an irregular outer surface. The interior, however, was remarkably clear.

A child lay curled on her side, her knees drawn toward her chest, one arm folded beneath her head. Her hair was dark and spread in thin, tangled strands against the resin. Her face was turned slightly away from them, leaving one cheek pressed against the interior surface. Her skin was an unnatural patchwork of pale and darker tones, interrupted by lines that initially looked like cracks in the resin.

Then Jaclyn saw the stitches.

They crossed the child's throat in a thick, uneven line, disappearing beneath her jaw. More followed along the shoulder and down the side of her torso. Some were small and precise, almost surgical. Others were crude, the thread dark and thick, pulled so tightly that the surrounding skin had puckered around it. There were places where one section of flesh met another at an angle that made Jaclyn's stomach turn. 

The others were asking questions. How long had she been there? How old was she? Why did she look like that? Who had done this to her?

The left side of the child’s chest seemed slightly raised beneath the resin, while the right remained completely still. She leaned closer, trying to distinguish the natural contours of the body from distortions caused by the surrounding material. Then—it rose.

Jaclyn reached toward the amber before she realized what she was doing. Her gloved fingertips stopped just short of its surface.

She was breathing.

Not properly. Not comfortably. But something inside that impossible, stitched-together body was still struggling to do what it had been made to do.

"She's alive," Jaclyn whispered.

~~~~

Chiron University did not know what to call her.

For the first several days, she was referred to in reports as the unidentified juvenile, then the preserved individual, then simply the subject. 

The authorities took control of the site, and the laboratory was converted into a restricted examination space. A medical team was brought in to oversee the girl's condition while the university's specialists worked to determine how to remove the resin without causing further damage.

It was not an ordinary archaeological project anymore. There were cameras in the laboratory, restrictions on access, and a rotating list of people who were allowed to examine her.

Jaclyn was on that list.

At first, she was careful to follow every instruction. She recorded the changes in the resin, photographed the exposed tissue, and documented each movement with the same precision she had brought to the excavation.

She was particularly interested in the stitching. Under magnification, the seams were worse than they had appeared in the ground. Some thread had been absorbed into the surrounding tissue; other strands had left narrow, dark channels beneath the skin. There were sutures beneath the sutures, older lines crossing newer ones, some so deeply embedded that they could only be seen when the light struck them at an angle. The wounds had been opened and closed repeatedly.

It was Jiaa who first noticed.

"These aren't all from the same procedure."

Jaclyn leaned over the microscope. "No."

"Look at the thread. That one's different. And this one." Jiaa adjusted the focus. "Someone went back in."

"Several times, probably."

"Why?"

Jaclyn didn't answer. Beneath the newest seam, a thinner line disappeared into the child's shoulder, its edges darkened. There were places where the tissue had been joined so many times that it no longer seemed to remember its original shape.

The amber had preserved all of it. It had settled into the smallest spaces between the stitches, hardened over the knots, and filled the hollows left by whatever had been removed. In some places, it had formed a thin golden shell around the child's skin. Under the laboratory lights, the child appeared to be sleeping beneath a layer of honey.

"How many times do you think someone did this?" Jiaa asked.

Jaclyn looked at the photograph on the screen. "I don't know."

The first section of amber was removed under supervision two weeks later. It was slow, painstaking work, and the room smelled faintly of heated resin and antiseptic. When a section finally separated from the child's side, the tissue beneath it appeared wet and strangely soft. A thin line of blood gathered along an old seam.

The following morning, the child's breathing was worse. The exposed skin had begun to separate around the sutures, and the medical team decided that further removal would have to wait. 

Jaclyn read the preliminary notes twice, then a third time. She understood the reasoning. The tissue was unstable; they could not know what the amber was doing to the body, or whether removing it was interrupting something that had kept her alive. 

She understood all of it.

She also remembered the way the amber sparkled as the subject’s finger moved.

For the next few days, Jaclyn found herself counting the spaces between breaths. She had once counted them for someone else, years ago, sitting on the floor outside her mother's bedroom with her back against the wall. There had been a particular rhythm to those nights: the small mechanical click of the medication dispenser, the rustle of bedsheets, the pause that always seemed a little too long. Her mother would wake in the morning and tell her she was a good girl, that she didn't know what she would do without her.

Jaclyn had never known what to say to that. The pride filling her chest was enough.

"You're not going home?"

Kenai stood in the laboratory doorway, holding two paper cups. He had brought her coffee often enough that he no longer asked what she wanted.

"In a minute.”

"You said that hours ago."

"I have to finish the report."

"Dr. Ellison can finish it."

"She isn't the one documenting the tissue response."

He placed the coffee beside her notebook. It was already cold.

For a while, he stayed. He asked about the examination, and Jaclyn showed him the photographs. He listened, his attention moving between the screen and her face. When she finished, he was quiet.

"Maybe we should stop."

Jaclyn turned toward him. "Stop what?"

"Taking the amber away."

"It’s breaking her apart. We can't leave her like that."

"We don't know that."

"We know what happens when the tissue is exposed."

"We know what happens when we expose it," he corrected gently. "That isn't the same thing."

Jaclyn looked back at the monitor. 

Eurydice's chest rose unevenly beneath the remaining resin.

She had started calling her that in her notes several days earlier. The word had appeared in the margin beside a photograph, written without much thought, and then remained there. She couldn't stand the clinical language anymore. There had been a child inside that amber long before any of them found her. Someone had given her a body, or pieces of one. Someone had stitched her together and sealed her away. Jaclyn couldn't make herself believe that the child had never had a name.

"Eurydice?" Kenai read from the page.

"She needed something other than a number."

He looked at her for a moment. "You know what happens to Eurydice."

Jaclyn shut the notebook.

“She waited long enough for someone to find her. To bring her back.”

Kenai didn't argue. He only looked at the child, then at the thin gold line where the resin met her throat. He turned around slowly to face her, eyes meeting hers. The amber reflected onto his face in shimmering golden waves. "Come with me, Jac."

"I can't."

"You can. You're choosing not to."

She kept her eyes on the monitor. "You don't understand."

It was the last time he brought her coffee.

Jiaa stopped coming to the laboratory soon after. She still answered Jaclyn's messages for a while, but the conversations became shorter, then stopped altogether. 

Ellison found an unauthorized repair in the morning. 

Jaclyn had attempted to close a separation along Eurydice's shoulder, but the surrounding tissue had split further, leaving a dark, wet line beneath the remaining resin. 

"Atlas, tell me you didn't do this."

Jaclyn didn't look up from the table. "The seam was coming apart."

"You were instructed to observe."

"She was deteriorating."

"She's been deteriorating because we keep intervening."

"Then we need to do something differently."

Ellison stared at her for a long moment. "Jaclyn, look at her."

She did. The child's chest rose unevenly beneath the amber.

"She's suffering," Ellison said. "We cannot keep putting her through this because we're unwilling to accept that we might not be able to save her."

"You're going to let her die?"

"I'm trying to stop us from hurting her any further."

Jaclyn stared at her. Ellison had once trusted her hands more than anyone else's in the department. Now she wouldn't even let her stand beside the table. 

Ellison requested that Jaclyn be removed from the project, and her identification card was taken before she left the laboratory.

For three nights, she went home. She lay awake for hours, watching orange and yellow honeycombed lights shift behind her eyelids. All she could hear was the soft breathing of the girl beneath the amber, and her mother's voice saying, ‘I'd have faded away without you, Jackie.’ It didn't matter that Jaclyn had been eight years old, that she'd known how to make her mother throw up, where to place the needle, how to sign her mother's name just right. She had known how to help. She had been good at it.

So on the fourth, she returned.

She knew which corridor cameras had blind spots and which security guard took his break near the loading entrance. She told herself she was only going to check the monitors. 

The first night, she adjusted a loose dressing. 

The second, she cleaned a wound that had begun to seep beneath the amber. 

By the third, she had brought her own instruments.

Jaclyn sat beside Eurydice for a long time, looking at the child's face. The amber cast a warm light across the table, catching in the dark strands of hair and making the child's closed eyelids look almost translucent. 

She remembered her mother telling her not to go to sleep yet. Just a little longer, sweetheart. Stay with me until the medicine works. She remembered being small enough that her feet didn't touch the floor, and how important it had felt to be the person who knew what to do.

It was then Jaclyn realized the child's eyes opened.

They were unfocused at first, drifting beneath half-lowered lids, coated in that orange hue. Then they moved toward Jaclyn's face. Her mouth trembled. A sound caught somewhere in her throat, and her hand lifted from the table, fingers shaking as though each joint had to be remembered separately.

Jaclyn took it.

For one extraordinary moment, she thought the child was holding her back.

Then Eurydice tried to pull away.

Her arm jerked, the movement too weak and uncoordinated to carry her anywhere. Her fingers scraped against the table, searching blindly. Jaclyn caught her wrist before she could reach the instruments.

"No, Eurydice. Don’t do that." Her voice was quiet and calm.

Eurydice made another sound. Her other hand moved, dragging against the table until her fingers closed around a small, sharp fragment of broken resin. Jaclyn saw it too late. The child's grip was clumsy, her wrist trembling violently as she brought the jagged edge toward herself.

Jaclyn caught her.

The fragment fell and struck the floor.

For a moment, there was only the sound of Eurydice struggling to breathe. Her body twisted beneath Jaclyn's arms, each movement interrupted by the stiff resistance of damaged limbs and old seams. Jaclyn held her against her chest, one hand closing around both wrists. 

Her hands were steady.

Somewhere beneath the table, the broken fragment of resin lay in a small pool of gold. Jaclyn picked up a fresh length of thread. 

Jaclyn began to put her together once more.

There were so many seams. So many places where the skin had been joined and separated, where someone had tried to make a whole thing out of what remained. She found an older stitch beneath the newest wound and carefully worked around it.

Eurydice had been here before.