POV: Seren Adaeze
I came anyway.
I know how that sounds. I stood in my kitchen at four in the morning holding my phone, reading those six words over and over, and I still picked up my bag and walked out the door. I told myself it was because the message had no name attached, that anyone could send a text, that anonymous warnings are easy and mean nothing.
But the real reason is I needed to look at Lucian's face when I told him about it.
He's at the front of the boat now, facing the water, and I'm sitting near the back trying to figure out if I made the right call. The sun isn't up yet. The dock lights are already gone behind us. There's just the engine and the dark water and a man I don't know well enough standing too far away for me to read his expression.
I told him about the message before we left the dock. Showed him the screen. He looked at it for a long moment, longer than it takes to read six words, and then he handed the phone back to me and said: "Do you want to turn around?"
Not: don't worry about it. Not: that's nothing, ignore it.
Just: do you want to turn around.
I didn't. So here we are.
The captain is older, doesn't talk much, which I appreciate. He said one thing when we pulled away from shore, looked at the water and said it shouldn't be this flat this time of year, said he'd been running boats for thirty years and he'd never seen the sea sit this still in February. Then he went quiet and stopped looking at it, like it bothered him more than he wanted to let on.
It bothers me too. There's no wind, no sound except the engine. The water isn't reflecting the stars so much as just holding them, like a surface that's more solid than it should be.
I get up and walk to the middle of the boat, not to Lucian, just closer to the front.
"Who sent it?" I ask his back.
He turns around. His face in the low light is hard to read but he's been waiting for the question. "Someone who doesn't want you to reach the island."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have right now."
"Do you know who it could be? A list of people. Give me a list."
He looks at me for a second like he's weighing something. "Yes."
"And?"
"And I don't want to tell you while we're on the water."
That should make me angry, and it does, somewhere underneath the part of me that is also watching his face very carefully. He's not hiding something to protect himself. I don't know how I know that but I do. He's hiding something because he thinks knowing it will change the way I look at the island before I've seen it. He's managing my experience of this and he knows I'd object if I understood that's what he was doing.
"You're deciding what I can handle," I say.
He doesn't deny it. "I'm deciding what's useful to know right now versus what will only make you afraid of the wrong things."
"Those are not your decisions to make."
"No," he says simply. "They're not. Tell me to stop and I will."
I don't tell him to stop. I go back to my seat because I need a minute where he can't see my face.
The sky starts to change about an hour out, not sunrise, not yet, just a shift at the horizon where the dark gets slightly less dark. I'm watching it when I notice the shimmer.
It's not land, not light reflecting off cloud or water, it's something in between, soft and very faint, like heat haze but moving with a slow rhythm that makes me think of breathing. I watch it for a full minute telling myself it's nothing, a trick of the low light, my eyes being stupid from no sleep.
Then I notice the captain is not looking at it.
He's staring straight ahead but slightly away from it, deliberately, the way you look away from something that unsettles you, not because you can't see it but because you'd rather pretend you can't.
I stand up. "What is that?"
The captain says nothing.
"Lucian." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "What is that on the horizon."
He's already turned toward me, already watching me, and I understand suddenly that he's been watching me since the shimmer appeared, not the shimmer, me.
"How long have you been able to see it?" he asks.
"I just noticed it."
"No. How long has it been there."
I think back. I try to pin down the moment it started and I can't, which means it was there before I consciously registered it, which means some part of me was already tracking it without telling the rest of me.
"I don't know," I say. "Maybe twenty minutes."
Something moves across his expression that he doesn't let fully form. He turns and looks at the shimmer and then looks back at me, a question in his face that he's trying to decide whether to ask out loud.
"I've made this crossing fourteen times," he says. "The island shows itself differently each time, appears when we're closer, when the conditions are right, when I've been at sea for a certain number of hours." He pauses. "It has never appeared this early. Never from this distance."
"What does that mean?"
"It means something changed." He looks at me steadily. "It reacted to you. It never did that before."
The shimmer pulses once on the horizon, just once, the way a light does when someone on the other end flicks a switch.
The captain makes a sound low in his throat. He reaches under the panel beside the wheel and pulls out something I recognise before my brain fully processes what I'm seeing.
A flare gun. Loaded.
He's not pointing it at us. He's pointing it at the water behind us. His hands are shaking slightly.
"We're being followed," he says. "We have been since the dock."