A scene [3: with Grace and Harold]

The building was two stories high, entrance on the top floor--you walk right in and there's a rotating wire display holding vertical rows of postcards. Each one showed a different bleak desert photograph, with Dinosaurs Lived! printed in the lower right. There was a bin with some plastic figurines, and on top there were pamphlets describing the displays. The ground was covered in thin red carpeting, and the ceiling went high up overhead where lights hung suspended from little wires. The whole floor was small, and clung to the south wall. A brown, three-section railing went around the edge of the floor, and the rest of the building was open so you could see the rock wall with the fossils jutting out.

Except for Harold and his father, there didn't seem to be anyone else around. No scientists or other tourists, just displays set in a little maze around the floor, with color-coded graphs and pieces of Allosaur fossils. On the left, the wall was one big window, streaked with fingerprints and glass-cleaner residue. The desert outside was peppered with little grey shrubs. It must have been at least 100 out, stifling and choking because of the heat and the sand that swirled all over.

This place used to be a river--that's what the first graph showed, at least. The earth shifted over millions of years, and ended up a hot, barren wasteland, thrust upward at a sixty-degree angle.

"What a waste of time," Harold said.

"History is never a waste of time." His father had a receding hairline and wore wire-rimmed glasses that sat on the tip of his nose. He was studying one of the pamphlets. "Read everything. I know you'll love it." He gestured out the window. "Can you believe it used to be a river around here?"

"No." Harold strode down past the displays, hands outstretched, lightly tapping each Plexiglas enclosure. He looked at the bones, the reconstructed skulls. "I'm going downstairs to see the wall."

His father nodded. The stairs were at the back end of the floor, corrugated metal covered in black rubber. They led to more displays, underneath the top level, and another windowed wall where you could supposedly watch paleontologists work. But no one was there. And everything in this place looked rickety, like it was just clapped together.

There was a girl downstairs. Harold stopped and leaned up against an open-air Brachiosaur femur, the first object past the bottom of the stairway. It was taller than him and he had his arm way up on it, same level as his head.

The girl looked at him and smiled. She had on a white skirt, and a white cardigan over a pink shirt. She was a redhead, with maroon-lipsticked lips that made her freckles stand out on her nose. She was older than him, by a couple years at least.

She pointed at a sign above his head: Please do not touch. Harold pulled his arm away and stood straight.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" she said. "That they didn't discover this place until 1909. 1909! What was someone even doing out here anyway? Why did anyone ever discover it?" She was watching a video that showed mules pulling crates of whitewashed bones toward a train.

"Yeah--fascinating," Harold said. "I love this kind of thing."

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Harold."

"Nice to meet you, Harold."

"You too--"

"Grace. My name's Grace."