"Thank you," I said, and I meant it, and it hurt, both at the same time.
"I said I'd think for an hour. I thought for three. I've got something, but it's small, and I don't want to oversell it."
"Can I say something first?"
She paused. "Of course."
I had been thinking about it since the pond, since Yusra rode off up the hill. I had been thinking about the two scientists on Daphne Major with their calipers, the married couple, and the fact that neither of them had been finches. They hadn't needed to be. They needed to be there, and they needed to pay attention, and they needed the numbers.
"Somebody has to do the data," I said. "Every night. Oskar's beak measurements, and the banding counts, and all the field notes. In the program description it says the cohort uploads everything to the shared server every night and the grad students clean it up when they get back to Boston in August. That's what it says. They clean it up in August." I took a breath. "I could do it every night. From here. I could clean it and check it and flag the weird numbers, the ones where somebody wrote the beak depth in centimeters instead of millimeters, and have it ready for them in the morning, so they'd know right away if they needed to re-measure a bird before it flew away. I'm good at that. I'm really good at that. Mr. Thackeray will tell you."
There was a long silence on the line. The dog's nails again, clicking.
"Maya," Dr. Brindle said finally, "that is, almost word for word, what I was going to offer you. Except I was going to make it sound much more like a consolation prize, and you made it sound like a job."
"It's not a consolation prize," I said. "It's not the islands. I know that. But it's not nothing."
"No," she said. "It's not nothing. It's the part most people don't want to do, and it's the part that makes the science true." I heard her breath catch a little. "You'd be listed on the data report. Your name, with everyone else's. And I'll want you on the evening calls every evening at six, so you can tell them what you found. I'll set it up today."
"Footage," I said, before I could stop myself.
"I'm sorry?"
"Could they send footage? Of the birds? Not for me. For the data. Of the boobies when they band them. I want to see the feet."
She laughed, the real kind. "I'll make sure Oskar films the feet."