<hr/><div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/8/89/Onnecamug1.jpg)</div><br/><strong>Name:</strong>Onneca de Goni<br/><strong>Faction:</strong>Unknown<br/><strong>Date:</strong>August 11, 1875<br/><strong>Time of Day:</strong>Heat of the afternoon<br/><strong>Location:</strong>Bodega de Goni<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Agatha<br/><hr/><br/>Onneca was crouched down by the dollhouse near the front of the bodega, a little alcove just back from the shelves of fresh produce, where the customers' daughters sat and waited for their mothers and tomatoes often went missing. A scuttling on the thin wood of the miniature house had betrayed an invader, its segmented six legs climbing the narrow avenues of the internal staircases, its bulbous and clumsy body a nightmare to the scale of the thing.<em>Phyllophaga sp., </em>what she suspected to be an emergent species of the family colloquially known as June beetles.<br/><br/>Her fingers grasped around the sandy-colored wing casing and pulled. The beetle's legs instinctively dug into the wood, and she could see the barbs at the leg-joints extend. An adaptation, one of several, that made this species much more than just a pest to crops. The legs held fast, and one broke off as she lifted it. The leg would grow back in the next molt. And they did molt, as adults, no longer dying in the daylight as their sister species did. They molted and they grew bigger, because the checks that kept the June beetle population under control no longer applied to them. Its ghastly mandibles scissored to bite at nothing, instinctively seeking the salt of human flesh. She carried it carefully.<br/><br/>The thimble-sized golden beetle plinked into an empty jar, and Onneca swiveled on a perforated tin lid. This was not something she could release back into the wild. It was a crop-destroying, flesh-eating foe with legs that would root onto skin and a hard carapace resistant to all but the most judicious application of force. It might be brimming with 600 or 10,000 eggs just waiting for a cereal crop or a dead body to propagate. She expected that it might live a month longer, or perhaps a season, as she tipped the jar on its side and watched the beetle slip against the glass walls of its prison. The experts would say that such a creature would not flourish in the Maze, but the same could be said for Onneca. Both were tenacious. Still, the tailor couldn't quite muster admiration for an organism that was lying in wait to bite a child.<br/><br/>A lifelong love of discovery motivated the great naturalists, the Mendels, the Darwins, the Lewises and Clarks. It was a love that for the señorita de Goni had been ignited on the trail of the railroad's progress, as a young girl, with Agatha her inseparable companion. It had been a friendship that could endure anything. It had endured a decade apart, and a divergence into such different disciplines that it was hard to imagine both passions for science blossomed over the same shared experience. There was almost no common ground now, and yet, Agatha was still her friend. Onneca observed the beetle under glass, wondering at where its own friends were and what damage they were causing, until it slipped backward off the glass and flipped over on its back. She was prepared to help it right itself with a little bit of string, but then it pulled in its head and legs like a turtle and simply rolled over. That was new. She began taking notes:<em>¿Phyllophaga o Polyphaga? El escarabajo retrae sus piernas. </em>In the margin, she doodled a tigerlily.<br/><br/>It was one of those days, those too hot days when hardly anyone could be bothered to come to the bodega.