Ultimately, they got a dozen of them.

Adelaide felt underwhelmed, at first. For all of the discussions they had had, for all of the anguish, it seemed like they hadn’t gotten all that much from it. But, then again, she was actually sort of relieved to have had only a small impact: it made the consequences seem less real.

Emma told her it was actually a great result, much better than Earth hunters would have expected. This was what came of Triangle hunting — there were no other humans who had ever set foot here, and predators like the unicorns were completely unready for anything above them on the food chain.

That changed when she saw them preparing the bodies for transport back to the Strider. Their window was closing and it was time to leave, but they had planned for this and were executing an orderly and unrushed reembarkation. And the first step was taking their relatively-fresh kills back on board, where they could be better preserved. Emma, Ray, and Jim had worked to dress the kills and had applied some sort of cold blanket designed for this purpose, but it was imperfect. So the bodies were the first transport priority, and they’d been laid out carefully.

Encountering a dozen dead things, laid out right next to each other, triggered something primal in Adelaide, some instinct that something has gone very wrong. It felt like a sign that something dangerous had come by, that she needed to hide from whatever massive predator or calamity had done this. And she knew that the only calamity was her own crew, acting at her own direction. But knowing it didn’t help her calm down.

So she walked away. She would be the last one to leave anyway. And, since no one would ever come back here, she was happy to take one last look around.

She tried to take it all in, to really notice everything she could. Not to remember it, exactly — Allessio had gotten hours and hours of video, no doubt. But those videos would fade from everyone’s awareness after they had gotten enough likes, just as the countless videos of previous expeditions lingered unwatched on some servers somewhere. There was already more than enough footage of Triangle ecosystems to fill as much viewing time as anyone had, but other than some very specific researchers, no one cared. They were like photographs of sunsets — they nominally depicted something special and unique, but it was hard to care about any of them individually.

So all you could do was to take it in, to experience it. Adelaide let herself wander the coast, where she hadn’t really spent much time. And there were little wonders to discover here as well. There were little pink fish that sometimes bounced up onto the shore for a minute and ate some sand before scooching themselves back into the water. And there were crabs — they looked like regular crabs, but Adelaide decided to believe they were special and unique in their own crabby little way.

She didn’t consciously intend to find Trish, but she wasn’t surprised either. Trish had placed herself on the beach as soon as the hunting began and had spent her time there for the duration of the hunts. And Adelaide saw her now, standing by a little tide pool. As Adelaide approached, she saw Trish was holding a shell.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“What’s that?” Adelaide asked.

Trish smiled. “Just a shell. Nothing more than it looks like. Although I do think these are particularly beautiful.” And she passed it to Adelaide.

It was striking. It had more twists than the shells Adelaide remembered from the beach trips her parents had taken her on when she was little. Those had had little spirals one one end, but hte other part normally opened up — or at least, that’s what Adelaide remembered. She’d later read somewhere that there was a relationship to the Fibonacci sequence, in the spiral. This shell had a few different spirals, including one that folded back on itself. Adelaide wondered if there was that same Fibonacci thing here. “It is really lovely,” she said, handing it back to Trish.

“Thanks. I’ve been collecting them. I’ll keep one or two as a souvenir, and figure someone will probably buy the rest off me. I mean, it’s not the most commercial thing in the world, but, you know…”

“Yeah. How are you — I mean, how are we —”

“Ade, it’s ok. We’re good. I mean, I’m not like thrilled, but I get it. Or, well, I’m not going to like abandon our friendship over it!”

“Well, that’s good. More than good. Because I wouldn't want -”

“But, honestly, I don’t love it. Like, you were probably right about the markings. And I get that people need to make money. It’s a privilege to come all this way and just come home with shells.”

Adelaide didn’t say anything to that. Trish had always had an odd relationship to her own wealth. She would bring it up casually, because it was a fact of life for her. But when other people tried to reference it or speculate about how it made her feel, Trish would get quiet. So Adelaide tried to avoid the subject in what she hoped seemed like a comfortable way.

“The thing is,” Trish continued, “I’ve realized it wasn’t really about whether they were intelligent. I mean, we’d never know that. We will never know that! We don’t even know that about normal animals, right? Like we have a guess, but who really knows! But let’s say the unicorns weren’t intelligent or social, that they were just animals, they were dumber than cows. I eat meat. And this is about as far as you can get from factory farming. So I shouldn’t really be upset. But I am.

“Because, like, if they weren’t intelligent, if nothing here is intelligent, then that means its just us! We were the only things here that ever got to make a choice. The history of this little world was just our time here. And all we did was kill things! Not because we were hungry, not because we needed to. Just because we thought it would be to our advantage. That’s the whole history of intelligent life in this world.”

Adelaide let that sit. She could see the dinghy in the distance, weighted down with the spoils of their venture. It was bobbing up and down on the same waves that, minutes later, would be crashing against the shore here.

Eventually, Adelaide spoke. “Thank you for telling me that. But I do think you’ve missed something. We didn’t just kill. We studied, we learned, and we made the best decision we could. And there’s only one reason that happened — because you made it happen. I don’t think that’s such a bad history of intelligence, as far as it goes.”

Trish looked up at her. “That’s sweet of you to say. But even then — we made a choice. Not just you. I made the choice to stop the fight. We thought about it, and this was our choice.”

“Well, maybe some day it won’t be, even if its not here. That’s what intelligence is, maybe. The ability to make a different choice tomorrow.”

And then they walked together, picking up shells as they went,