POV: Seren Adaeze
The photograph is of a woman standing on this shore.
I know it's this shore because the pale sand is the same and the treeline behind her matches exactly what is behind me right now. She is standing with her back half-turned to the camera, looking at something in the distance that the frame doesn't show. Dark hair. Small build. The kind of stillness in her posture that isn't calm so much as concentrated, like she is listening to something nobody else can hear.
I look at Lucian. He is watching me look at it.
"Your mother," I say.
"Yes."
"This was taken here."
"Three weeks before she disappeared."
I look at the photograph again. The woman's feet are bare on the sand and around them, very faintly, the ground has that same low pulse I felt when I first stepped off the boat. You can't see a pulse in a photograph. But I can feel it looking at this image the same way I felt it through my shoes, a knowing that moves up through the body before the brain catches up.
"Why are you showing me this now?" I ask.
"Because you need to understand what you walked into." He takes the photograph back and slides it into his jacket. "And because the island is already responding to you faster than it ever responded to her, and I need you to know that is not a small thing."
I don't have an answer for that. I turn toward the treeline because I need somewhere to put my eyes that isn't his face.
"Show me the path," I say.
He does.
We walk the island's edge for an hour. The ground is wet from the fog that closed in behind us and the path is uneven in places, and I turn my ankle once on a loose rock, not badly, but enough that I catch myself on the nearest tree and stand there for a moment waiting for the sting to pass.
The tree leans toward me.
I feel it before I see it, a slow shift in the bark under my palm, the angle of the trunk changing by a degree or two, like a person turning their head. I take my hand away and step back and look at it and it is definitely not straight.
I look at Lucian. He is looking at the path ahead.
He saw it. I know he saw it because he stopped walking a half second before I pulled my hand back. He is pretending he didn't and the pretending is so deliberate it is its own kind of confirmation.
I don't say anything yet. I start walking again and I watch.
The next tree leans as I pass, subtle, the kind of angle you could argue with if you needed to. The one after that does the same. I look back and the trees we already passed have returned to something close to upright, not perfectly straight but close enough that I couldn't prove what I saw.
By the seventh tree I am done waiting.
"Has the island ever done this for anyone before?" I ask.
He stops walking. He doesn't turn around immediately. His shoulders go very still in the way they do when he is picking his words before he lets them out.
He turns.
"Once," he says. "For my mother. Right before she disappeared."
The air doesn't change. The light doesn't change. But something in the space between us shifts in a way I can feel in my chest.
"Disappeared," I say.
"Twelve years ago. She walked into the interior one morning. They searched for three days." He says all of this in a level voice, the voice of a person who has said these words so many times in their own head that they've worn smooth. "They found nothing, not her shoes, not a thread."
I look at him standing in the grey light with his hands at his sides and I think about being fourteen years old and searching an island for your mother and finding nothing at all, not even something small, not even a reason.
"You searched too," I say.
It's not a question. Something in his face shifts just barely, a small movement at his jaw, like he didn't mean for that to be visible and it was anyway.
"Yes," he says.
I should leave it there. I don't.
"And the trees did this for her, before she went in."
"Yes."
"And you brought me here anyway."
He holds my eyes. "I brought you here because not bringing you was worse. Whatever is happening to this island, whatever it needs, it has been waiting for something for twelve years and I think that something is you." He pauses. "I needed you to see it yourself before I said it out loud. I didn't want you to take my word for it."
I look away first. I don't like what that does to my chest, the fact that he thought about how I would need to receive it, that he arranged the information to protect my ability to trust it. I don't like it because it works, and things that work on me without my permission make me careful.
I start walking toward the curve in the path ahead.
He falls into step without being asked.
The path bends around a rocky section and then opens toward the denser interior where the trees grow close enough that their branches touch overhead. The ground here is darker, wetter from last night, and my feet sink slightly with each step.
I see them before Lucian does.
I stop.
Footprints. In the wet mud ahead of us, pressed clean and deep with sharp edges, the mud around them not yet dried or settled, fresh, very fresh.
They lead into the interior and they do not come back out.
I look at the size of them, small, light, going by how shallow the heel sits.
Lucian crouches beside me. He looks at them for a long time without speaking, and when he finally does his voice is very quiet.
"Those are the same size as hers."
I look at him. His face is doing nothing, completely nothing, and this time I understand that it isn't control. It's what a person looks like when they have spent twelve years building a wall against a specific hope and they are looking at something that just walked straight through it.
The trees on either side of the footprints lean toward the path where they lead.
Not toward me this time.
Toward whatever made them.