Eli found it on the last morning of the school camp, wedged in the crumbling clay of the riverbank. At first he thought it was an ordinary stone. Then he tilted it, and the light caught a perfect spiral pressed into its surface, coil after coil, like a tiny stone galaxy. A fossil. His own hands had freed something that had waited in the rock for millions of years.

He knew the rule. The camp leaders had said it twice: anything unusual found in the reserve had to be reported, because the area was protected. But the fossil fit so neatly in his palm, and no one had seen him pick it up. He imagined it on the shelf above his bed, the one thing he owned that nobody else at school could match.

All through the bus ride home, the fossil sat heavy in his pocket, heavier than a stone that size had any right to be. He thought about the millions of years, and about the hundreds of students who came to the reserve each year, and about how a shelf is not really the same as a museum.

The next week, Eli posted the fossil to the reserve office with a note explaining exactly where he had found it. A month later, a letter came back. The fossil was an ancient sea creature called an ammonite, older than the dinosaurs, and it would go on display with his name on the card. A shelf could never have given him that.