It culminated with a mass of dead and dying fish on the banks of the river. Corynth and the other ichthyologists at the Canary #2 research station had never seen anything like it. Despite its distance from the station, the die-off carried over a cloud of death and hopelessness to the research station, ruining the generally pleasant atmosphere and acting as a catalyst for already rising tensions. Corynth sat at the bank of the river watching the dying fish heave, their scales glistening in the heat, while back at the station their colleagues and supervisors continued to argue and point fingers. 

“We’ve had issues with the Finch District Before, I’m sure if we just give them a nudge they’ll be fine and the issue will resolve itself.”

“The Finch District? The hell are you talking about? I hear the cities are doing nasty things further inland…”

“Those farming districts have always struggled to learn from the past—just a bunch of uneducated hicks. To tell you the truth, I think one of us should be in charge over there—we’d make things right.”

Corynth grew tired of their bickering; they had their sights set much further upstream, to fragments of a ruined complex that no one seemed to pay any mind to.

“Just wait until the test results come back Corynth, then you’ll see…”

Yeah…We’ll see…

Over the next few days, Corynth plans their trip to the ruined complex; they would head northeast back to Canaria, then head to Serinus to catch the train that heads to the city of Locustella in the Warbler District. From there, they would head on foot past the Warbler #1 research station and into the ruined complex, where they would hopefully find answers. Corynth considers notifying their supervisor before they leave, but pauses as they’re unsure of her position on the matter. 

What if she also thinks it’s the farming districts? Would she be upset I think otherwise? Would she fire me if I went?

Corynth paces outside of her office, and then finds themselves going past it and taking to the sky.

After resting in the edge city of Canaria, they reach Serinus, the capital of the Canary District by the early afternoon. This was one of the first large cities to be built, which showed in its buildings built like or within trees and twisting, turning, hardened dirt paths. With the renovations to the university and addition of the train station, Serinus was starting to catch up with the technological advances of the other city (much to the dismay of some of the older residents). Corynth heads to the train station, taking in the scenery as they go. The tops of buildings and tops of trees seemed to blend together, giving some bits of the road they traveled on little pockets of shade. 

Reaching the train station, they buy their ticket to Locustella and wait by the tracks for the train to arrive. In their bag, Corynth feels their phone buzz; they open it to find their phone, but the train pulls into the station. They quickly close their bag and hop on—

I’ll call whoever it was back later.

Dr. Scott-Stone sits nervously in her office—

I’ve never had issues reaching Corynth before…is something wrong?

She decides to try again later; perhaps they’re out doing fieldwork?

That must be it, just out doing fieldwork—they’ll be fine.

She reclines in her chair, and goes back to editing her paper. 

After finding a seat, Corynth pulls out their laptop to check for any further updates on the die-offs. They open their email to find images of lab techs taking samples of an orange sludge that permeated the water. Corynth then goes to check the digital archives to see if they could find any clues as to what the sludge is and what’s causing it.

Keyword after keyword turns up very little; mostly stories from centuries ago about large entities known as “corporations” that flooded the waters with poison and gave people cancer. Probably just fables of some kind—there’s a lesson in there somewhere. As the landscape slows down and un-blurries itself, the train honks and whistles while welcoming travelers to the city of Locustella. 

Locustella is the capital of the Warbler district; a district best known for its small towns and swaths of highly productive farmland. Unlike the farmland of centuries past, these fields are not monocultures; the diversity of crops they fit in to just a single acre of land is astonishing—corn, squash, soybeans, strawberries, various fruit trees; despite being inhabited, the land was beautiful. The small city was packed to the brim with small mom and pop shops and tiny apartments.

After walking for a few blocks, they find a hostel advertising open rooms. They check in at the front desk and are handed a grimy, worn key by a kind older woman. Corynth found her smile slightly off-putting, but brushed it off and headed to their room. The room was small, but for a bird like Corynth it had all the necessary amenities, and that was all that really mattered. It smelled worn, almost like an old textbook. 

They open their bag to unpack their toiletries when they remember that they had missed a call, and hurriedly dig for their cellphone. They find it at the bottom of their bag and open it up to a missed call from their supervisor. 

Digits flying, they send a quick text to Dr. Scott-Stone—“Hey! I’m on a bit of a mission, I’ll talk to you when I get back!”—and set their phone on the nightstand. The bed is a little bit big for Corynth (since it’s made for humans), but they manage to settle in after almost suffocating themselves with a pillow. They take one last look at their email for the night for any further updates, and head to bed.

Corynth woke up unsettled after strange dreams of orange sludge and mutated talking fish. They shake their head and start to get ready for the day ahead. They groom themselves, tidying their shiny black plumage, and start packing their things back into their bag. 

Just after leaving the key on the table, they get a call from Serina, one of the head lab technicians at the research station. She talked like she was thinking about what she needed to say right as she was saying it, the reason for this being that she had to tell Corynth exactly what they wanted to hear; they found no evidence of organic pollution or eutrophication, meaning, it wasn’t the farming districts like everyone had originally thought.

Well, that settles it.

They exit the hostel and continue their journey west with renewed vigor and curiosity.

A couple of miles out from Locustella, Corynth trades well maintained roads with shiny signage for fields of tall grass and an old crumbling map—most likely older than they are. They reach the research station Warbler #1 by late afternoon; the sun is low in the sky, and most people should be coming back from the field. However, the field station looks empty—extremely strange for a station during prime time field season. 

They briefly circle overhead looking for any clues as to where the station staff went and find nothing. Unnerved, they return to the ground and continue forward. It’s not until an acrid smell burns their nostrils that they think to take a look at the river.

In their time at Canary #2, Corynth had seen many strange, interesting, and even downright scary things; fish that walked, plants that grew so quickly you could watch them grow, rouge lightning—but nothing could’ve prepared them for the giant swaths of orange sludge that had taken over the river. They fly up to a tree for a better vantage point; the, now orange, river stretches for miles, the orange color getting stronger as it goes further inland. The are feels dead—no birds scream, no insects beg; only silence.

An emaciated fawn drinks from the river and promptly vomits.

In disbelief, Corynth pulls out their camera and starts taking photos. Supervisors at the station talk about “Canary moments”—the moment where someone signals that something isn’t right, where they’ve found something disturbing, something that needs immediate attention.

This, would be Corinth’s.

For a moment, they feel as if they’re in way over their head, but very quickly that feeling of uncertainty is replaced with a sense of duty. They glide back down to the ground and continue towards the crumbling structures, ducking under a rusted fence plastered with faded warning signs. Here, the smell is overwhelming; the mixing of stenches is so abhorrent that Corynth retches and dark spots overtake their vision. As their head fills with fumes, they remember one of the most important rules of fieldwork, turning around and flying off. The cool winds help clear their head— “New data means nothing if you’re not alive to present it.” 

Corynth had never flown this fast before. Flying is an extremely costly mechanism of travel, and they really only used it in short bursts; to reach something on a shelf or to get a better view in the field. However, Corynth felt like this intense burst of energy they’re using to get back as soon as possible was necessary—time was of the essence. 

They once again stop in Serinus, this time to briefly rest before flying the rest of the way back to Canary #2. Sitting on a bench in the heart of the city, they open their camera and take a look at the photos they took. Just looking at the images of the orange ribbons crisscrossing the river made their heart sink. When was the last time something like this even happened? 

They put their camera back in their bag and pull out a snack bar. The bustle of the city seemed muted as their heart raced in their chest and they kicked their feet back and forth. Finishing, they once again take to the skies and rush back to Canary #2. 

The meeting was called just half an hour after Corynth returned from their exhausting journey. Slightly out of breath, they quickly explain to the group about the crumbling structure near Warbler #1, the missing station staff, and the thickening sludge—they needed to do something about it and they needed to do it now. For a while, there was stunned silence. A problem on this large of a scale was something of legend—did they even have the technology to fix this? 

Serina spoke first, “Well, let’s start with the basics. Based on the test results we have, it’s some kind of acidic substance, and with what Corynth is saying, it’s coming from that old structure out east—can’t we just neutralize the acid and contain the leak from the structure?”

Another PI chimes in—“That might work, but the substance isn’t just composed of an acid, it’s most likely composed of other materials and elements as well. Who’s to know what will precipitate out of it if we do just neutralize it?”

“Then that’s where we start; we take some sludge, put a base on it, and work from there. Let’s get some experiments running, yeah?” said Serina. 

The room nodded and murmured in agreement, and the work began.

The days at Canary #1, #2, and at the University of Serinus were filled with trial and error, triumphs and frustrations, progress and regression. Weeks passed, and the orange sludge slowly progressed further down the river. The plant life at the edge of the river had started to die, and other animals besides fish had started to contribute to the death toll. 

While teams at the research stations and the university continued to work on a way to disperse the sludge, another team worked on containment. 

This team, led by Corynth, made their way out to the structure that Corynth suspected to be the issue. Once they reached the fence, they donned hazmat suits and masks, with peppermint oil to help with the smell. Together, they trudged further into the ruins than anyone had gone. Despite the warm sun shining through the cracks and holes in the remaining metal and concrete walls, the ruins had a cold and eerie feeling to them. Dilapidated machinery groaned at the slightest breeze; feathers and hair alike stood up on end as the party creeped further in. 

After opening a door that led to the back end of the area, they spotted them—several large, ruptured barrels that leaked pungent orange sludge. Even with the masks and oil, the smell was nauseating. The team scoped out the barrels and determined that the sludge had slowly corroded them over time, and they had finally broken open. The party decided that the intact barrels would be transported back to the city to be used in their methodological experiments and then be properly disposed of. 

While the humans started to gather barrels for transport, most of the birds in the group started to head back to their various cities and research stations. Corynth, however, walked out of the crumbling structure and towards the riverbank. The smell of rotting flesh and orange sludge wasn’t enough to quiet the undulating streams of thought in their mind; Corynth feared the consequences of this were far more reaching than anyone seemed to be thinking about. This wouldn’t be a one and done thing; it would affect the districts for years, maybe even decades, to come. But how? They didn’t quite know yet. Even in just their study system—fish—this would for sure be a selection pressure that changes the genetics of the different fish populations that inhabited the area; who knows how it would affect the rest of the ecosystem?

This would make a kick-ass project… Corynth thinks to themselves as they continue to walk along the decaying riverbank. They watch through some of the windows in the sludge as some fish slowly cruise by, while others gasp near the surface. What made those two groups react so differently?

Corynth makes a mental note to go fishing later.