"Snow Moon" by Angela Perry

Kara caught her breath as a beam of winter moonlight coruscated over the white shell, picking out sparks and prisms just beneath the surface. Squinting her eyes, she leaned closer. Maybe this wasn’t a shell after all....

“Dr. Hodgins, come look!”

The excited grad student was practically bouncing on his stool in front of the microscope. Samantha Hodgins smiled crookedly at his behavior. Pushing herself away from the table where she was working on the arctic bacteria samples, she wandered over to stand behind the student.

“What did you find, Steve?”

“These shells that the expedition brought back…look at their structure. If they were from simple mollusks, I would expect to see calcium carbonate, protein, even silica. None of that is present here.”

“I didn’t expect them to be normal mollusk shells,” Dr. Hodgins sighed, folding her arms across her chest. “The expedition would hardly have brought them to us if they expected them to be normal either. Carbon-dating shows that they are least five thousand years old. We may have identified a new species.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Steve protested, standing and urging the professor onto his stool. “The shell doesn’t appear to have any known organic compounds. I think there may be some there, I just can’t identify them. But it also looks like metal. Or some kind of stone. Not fossil, though. Just…just look.”

It almost looked like the sparks were dancing around the shell now, skipping off the surface like water on a hot griddle. Kara hesitantly touched the shell. A tingle ran up her arm. The sparks brightened, white and blue and silver dancing in her darkened bedroom, reflecting off the frozen windowpane and the icicles hanging outside.

“Your grad student is right, Samantha. I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr. Bernham peered intently through the microscope, adjusting the resolution and sliding the shell around. Dr. Hodgins hovered near her colleague’s shoulder. In the background, Steve balanced on the soles of his feet, his eyes gleaming under his shaggy hair.

“How many specimens do we have?” Dr. Bernham asked, sitting up and looking at Dr. Hodgins.

Steve flipped through some sheaves of paper and blurted, “Twenty-seven distinct shells. Well, items.”

“Actually, twenty-six,” Dr. Hodgins corrected, looking away and rubbing the back of her neck. “Kara, my eight-year-old daughter, collects shells. I had no idea these were unusual. I brought one home for her.”

Dr. Bernham glowered from behind his thick glasses. “Then I suggest you bring it back. This could be the greatest discovery made by the university in decades. A unique compound that combines organic and metallic properties. We need to find out what it is, where it came from.”

A little frightened, Kara opened her window and pushed the shell outside. It chimed as it landed in the snow. In the open air, surrounded by twinkling snow and moonlight, the shell’s flickering increased. It seemed to grow and change and shift before Kara’s eyes.

“Hey! What’s happening?”

Steve lifted his fingers from the specimen box. They were coated with fine grey powder.

Dr. Hodgins and Dr. Bernham looked into the box as well. Together, the three of them watched as the strange shells lost their luster and began to crumble. Soon, nothing remained but piles of the grey powder.

“It’s almost like something drained them,” Steve whispered.

“Nonsense,” Dr Bernham muttered, his voice heavy with disappointment. “They probably just reacted to the air. We should have been more careful to preserve them.”

Dr. Hodgins sighed. “Now we’ll never know where they came from.”

High above the park, looking down on the frozen pond and snow-covered trees, Kara squealed with delight. She had always known moonlight and the sparkling of snow and ice were magic.

The dragon carrying her looped and twirled in the air, trumpeting its freedom, its opalescent scales dazzling in the light of the Snow Moon.