POV: Seren Adaeze
I had called him back within an hour of the woman's call.
Not to cancel. To tell him I knew about 1943, which I did not, but saying it like I did felt like the only move that had any power in it. There was a longer pause than usual and then he said: come to the office tomorrow morning, we will talk before Saturday. I said fine. I spent the rest of the evening sitting with the painted door on my wall and the question of whether fine was the right word for any of what was happening.
The car arrived at eight. Black, quiet, the kind of car that does not announce itself. The driver did not speak, which suited me. I sat in the back and watched Lisbon pass the window and tried to organise what I wanted to say into something that was not just a list of the ways I felt wrongly handled.
The building was taller than it needed to be.
I knew Veyne Industries existed the way you know large things exist, vaguely and without detail, the name appearing in financial news I never read carefully. Standing at the base of the building was different. It rose until the upper floors disappeared into low cloud and there was something about that which felt intentional, like a statement about what was possible if you had enough resources and enough certainty about where to point them.
The lobby was very quiet for a building with this many people in it.
I checked in at the desk and a young man appeared immediately to take me up. We rode the lift to the fourteenth floor in silence. The doors opened into a wide corridor and he gestured left.
Lucian was already in the corridor, walking toward us from the far end, not rushing, he never rushed. He walked at the pace of someone who knows the schedule will wait for them.
He looked at me for a moment. "You called back."
"I said I would if I decided yes."
"You also said you'd found my family crest on your wall."
"I had." I matched his pace as he turned to walk back toward the office. "And then I got another phone call."
Nothing changed in his expression, and that in itself was information. "Who."
"She didn't say. Woman's voice. She told me to ask you about 1943." I watched his jaw, a very small movement. "And she told me the last person who could read the island the way I can didn't come back from it."
He pushed open the door to his office and I followed him in.
The room was large and ordered, not decorated the way offices are decorated when someone wants you to notice how successful they are, but ordered the way a working space gets ordered when the person in it has very little tolerance for anything that isn't useful. One long desk. A wall of windows with the cloud-covered city below. Shelves with documents and a few old books with broken spines.
He stood near the window rather than behind the desk. I noticed this, it was a deliberate choice, standing on the same side of the furniture as me, removing the obvious barrier.
"I was going to tell you about 1943 this morning," he said.
"Before or after I got on the boat."
He looked at me steadily. "Before."
"Was that always the plan or did it become the plan when I called last night."
He did not answer immediately and I respected that more than if he had rushed to defend himself. He was thinking about whether the honest answer was the one that would serve him. I watched him decide to give it anyway.
"It became more urgent when you called," he said. "Yes."
I nodded. Something settled in me that had been tight since the previous night, not trust, not yet, but something like the beginning of knowing where the edges of this person were.
He told me about 1943 then, slowly and without softening it. A woman who came to the island with his great-great-uncle, she had the same gift, the same painting method, the same inability to explain her own process. She went into the island to complete the work. His great-great-uncle did not survive the process. She came out. She documented everything she could and then she disappeared from the family record completely, and he had spent years trying to trace what happened to her.
"She came back," he said. "She survived. The version you were told was incomplete."
"The version I was told said the last person didn't come back."
"The last Veyne man didn't."
I stood with that for a moment. The woman's voice on the phone had been specific, she had said the last person who saw the island the way I see things. She had not said anything about coming back. I had filled that part in myself.
"Who called me," I said.
"I don't know yet." He said it in a way that meant he had already started finding out. "But the information she gave you was selective, accurate but incomplete in a way designed to stop you from coming."
"Someone doesn't want me to go."
"Several people, probably." He said it matter-of-factly. "The island has been sought by other parties for a long time. If they know I've found someone who can actually read it, the most efficient move is to remove that person from the situation."
The word remove landed in the room and sat there.
I looked past him at the wall to the right of the window. I had been half-looking at it since I came in, drawn to it without fully attending to it the way you are drawn to something your eye catches and your brain has not yet named.
Glass case. Wall-mounted. The kind used for documents or maps of value.
I walked toward it.
Inside, under the glass, was a map, hand-drawn, a single large sheet, detailed, dense with notations in the borders, the kind of notations I worked into the texture of my paintings without knowing I was doing it.
I knew the handwriting before I finished the thought. I had been looking at it my whole life, on the backs of submission forms, on labels, on the notes I left myself when a vision came too fast to hold all of it.
It was mine.
I turned around slowly. Lucian was watching me from across the room.
"When did I make this," I said.
His expression did not change. "You didn't," he said. "Not yet."