The festival crowd swirled around Aurélie like water around a stone.
She moved through them without touching, without speaking, without drawing a single glance—a silver-haired ghost in black tactical attire, her steel-gray eyes fixed on the target ahead. The smells of roasting meat and sweet corn filled the air. Children ran past with streamers. An old man played a pan-pipe badly near a cluster of dancers who were trying very hard to ignore him.
Aurélie noted all of it. Processed all of it. Filed it away in the back of her mind while her attention remained locked on the white-coated figure twenty meters ahead.
Dr. Zip H. Scatyl walked with the hunched, hurried gait of a man who had somewhere to be and very much wanted to get there unnoticed. His medical coat was a beacon in the crowd—too clean, too white, too wrong among the woven textiles and festival colors. His small horns caught the lantern light as he glanced over his shoulder.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second.
Zip's head snapped forward. His pace increased.
Aurélie matched it effortlessly, her hand resting lightly on Anathema's hilt. The cursed blade hummed against her palm—not loudly, just enough to remind her it was there. Waiting.
Another glance. Longer this time.
Aurélie narrowed her eyes.
Zip's thin shoulders drew up toward his ears. He stopped walking.
The crowd flowed around them both—laughing, talking, oblivious. Aurélie paused ten feet behind him, her expression unchanged, her hand still on her blade.
Zip turned.
It was a slow turn, the kind of turn a man makes when he's hoping the threat behind him will have vanished if he just takes long enough. His yellowish eyes—wide, unblinking, darting—found her immediately.
"We..." His voice came out higher than intended. He cleared his throat, tried again. "We believe we have experienced sufficient island festivities for one day. Yes. Quite sufficient. We will return to the... to the vessel. The submarine. Yes."
Aurélie tilted her head. Just slightly. Just enough.
"I too think I have experienced enough of the festivities," she said. "I will join you."
The words landed like stones in still water.
Zip's face went through a complex series of micro-expressions—alarm, confusion, alarm again, and something that might have been the beginning of a very creative excuse dying in his throat.
"Well," he managed. "That is... that is to say... we..." He trailed off, his fingers twitching at his sides.
Aurélie crossed her arms. Her expression did not change. It did not need to.
Zip's shoulders sagged in defeat. "Well. Okay then."
He spun on his heel and walked away, and if his pace was slightly faster than before, if his shoulders were slightly more hunched, if he muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like curses in a language Aurélie didn't recognize—well. That was his business.
Aurélie followed.
Ten meters behind. Always ten meters. Close enough to watch, far enough to give him space to panic.
The perfect distance.
---
On the stone path leading away from the shrine, Clarissa Belote walked with the determined stride of someone who had places to be and absolutely no patience for detours.
Jannali and Charlie hurried after her, Charlie's pith helmet bobbing with each step, Jannali's head still itching under her headscarf with that same relentless need that had driven her up the mountain in the first place.
"—and the architectural significance of the outer chambers cannot be overstated," Clarissa was saying, her raspy voice carrying the weight of someone who had given this lecture approximately eight hundred times. "The trapezoidal niches serve both structural and ceremonial functions. The orientation relative to the solstice sunrise creates a light alignment that—"
"Ahem!" Charlie interjected, his scholarly instincts overriding his self-preservation. "If I may, the trapezoidal form is actually characteristic of—"
"You may not."
"—The Inspired stonework, which suggests a cultural transmission that—"
"I said you may not."
"—would revolutionize our understanding of pre-Void Century migration patterns!"
Clarissa stopped walking.
Charlie stopped walking.
Jannali kept walking for two more steps before realizing she was alone, then stopped too, turning back with a confused expression.
Clarissa fixed Charlie with a look that could have curdled milk at twenty paces. "Son, I've been studying these stones since before your grandparents were a gleam in each other's eyes. You think I don't know about cultural transmission? You think I haven't read?"
Charlie's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"I was merely—"
"You were merely interrupting." Clarissa resumed walking. "Now keep up and keep quiet."
Charlie, for the first time in his academically privileged life, had nothing to say.
They walked in silence for perhaps thirty seconds.
Then Jannali stopped.
Not slowed. Not paused. Stopped. Like a statue. Like a woman carved from the same stone as the cliffs around them.
Her eyes fixed on something in the distance—on the sea, on the mist, on the massive shapes of the Rokaku rising from the water like ancient sentinels. Her hand rose toward her forehead, stopped, fell back to her side.
Clarissa turned. Frowned. "Come on, then. We haven't got all day."
Jannali didn't move.
Charlie stepped toward her, concern flickering across his face. "Jannali? Are you—"
"Something's coming."
Her voice was different. Lower. Thrumming with something that made Charlie's academic mind go blank and Clarissa's sharp eyes go wide.
Jannali blinked—slow, deliberate, like someone surfacing from deep water. Her gaze remained fixed on the Rokaku, on the mist that swirled around them, on something none of them could see.
"Something's coming," she repeated. Her accent thickened, the words rolling like thunder. "Can't you feel it? The air's gone still. The drums are distant, but they're gettin' closer."
Clarissa swallowed. It was a small sound, but in the silence, it echoed.
"How can you—" She stopped. Her eyes narrowed, not in judgment now, but in recognition. "You're one of the Three-Eye Tribe."
Charlie stepped forward, his protective instincts finally overcoming his fear of Clarissa's tongue. "Ahem! That is—she's simply—we should really be getting back to—"
Clarissa waved him into silence without looking away from Jannali.
"What is it?" she asked, her raspy voice softer than before. "What do you hear?"
Jannali's eyes began to gloss.
Not with tears—with something else. A film, a sheen, a distant look that suggested she was seeing things far beyond the physical world. Her lips parted.
"The drums are distant," she murmured. "But the Rokaku..."
She turned.
Slowly. Terribly. Her eyes found Clarissa's face, and for a moment, Clarissa saw something in them that made her breath catch—an ancient awareness, a weight of knowledge that had nothing to do with the woman standing before her.
"Prepare yourselves," Jannali said.
Her voice was not her own.
It echoed. Resonated. Carried harmonics that shouldn't have been possible from a single throat.
"They are close."
The words hung in the air like a bell toll.
Charlie's notebook slipped from nerveless fingers. Clarissa's hand went to the small Haki-infused cloth at her belt, her body tensing for a threat she couldn't see.
The mist swirled.
The drums from the festival below continued their distant pulse—thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump—but beneath them, beneath the laughter and the music and the sounds of a people celebrating, something else stirred.
Something waiting.
Something close.
Jannali blinked.
The film cleared from her eyes. She looked at Charlie, at Clarissa, at the path ahead, and for a moment, she was just herself again—confused, uncertain, a woman waking from a dream she couldn't remember.
"What..." She shook her head. "What just happened?"
Clarissa stared at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, she turned to look at the Rokaku in the distance—at the mist that hid them, at the sea that cradled them, at the ancient watching things that had guarded this island for eight hundred years.
"Nothing good," she said quietly. "Nothing good at all."
Far below, in the festival grounds, Vesta finally stopped playing long enough to notice the crowd's silence. Sanza picked ceramic Rokaku pieces out of his hair. Eliane checked on Jelly, who had partially melted from stress.
And in the hollow between rocks, Catarina Devon smiled into the mist, her transponder snail tucked safely away, her captain's laughter still echoing in her ears.
"They're close," she murmured to herself. "Very close."
The drums continued.
Thump-thump-thump.
Waiting.
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