Jude watched them. He sat with his arms around Lucy and Alia, letting their warmth settle into him. But his eyes flicked from face to face.
Natalie had been distant all day. Susan had dropped a basket of roots earlier, then stood staring at it for almost a full minute before shaking herself. Sophie had called Zoey by the wrong na twice. These weren’t things they usually did.
He waited until after dinner, until the plates were washed and everyone was wrapped in woven blankets, the circle drawn close around the fire. Then he leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said quietly, "Has anyone blacked out lately?"
The fire cracked. At first, no one responded. Then Zoey laughed softly. "Like... passed out? No. Why?"
Jude’s eyes didn’t leave the flas. "Not passed out. I an, have you lost ti? Like... you’re doing sothing, and then suddenly it’s later, and you don’t rember what happened in between?"
The laughter stopped. Even the jungle seed to hush a little. The wives looked at each other. So frowned. So blinked. Sophie’s hand tightened around her cup. Stella shifted uncomfortably. Nefertari glanced sideways at the shadows between the trees.
Emma broke the silence. "I thought I was just... tired. It happened near the beach. I blinked, and I was holding fish I didn’t rember grabbing."
"Sa here," Grace said quietly. "Up in the banyan tree. I thought I’d zoned out."
Susan swallowed, looking around. " too. When I was washing the leaves this morning. I was bent over the pot, and the next thing I knew, everything was clean."
One by one, they nodded. Lucy. Alia. Scarlett. Even Serena.
Jude’s stomach twisted.
"I think it’s happening to all of you," he said. "Not just one or two. All of you."
"Why didn’t you say sothing earlier?" Natalie asked. Her voice was calm, but her hands were clutched tightly around her knees.
"Because I wasn’t sure," Jude said. "I didn’t want to scare anyone. But now..."
"You think it’s the smoke again," Nefertari said. It wasn’t a question.
Jude nodded. "I saw it in the forest. It touched Grace. It left. Then she was confused. I saw it again with Emma. I’m starting to think it’s using all of you. One by one."
Scarlett stared into the fire. "What does it want?"
No one answered.
They sat like that for a long ti, listening to the jungle breathe, the fire crackle, and their own hearts beat too loud.
Sophie finally whispered, "Do you think it’s trying to take us? Or... change us?"
Jude looked at the won around him. The faces he loved. The souls he trusted. "I think," he said slowly, "it’s not after you. Not exactly. I think it’s trying to get to ."
The flas bent in the wind, casting shifting shadows across their faces.
"But why us, then?" Zoey asked. "Why not just co for you?"
"Because I don’t think it can. Not directly. Not yet." Jude exhaled. "But it knows you’re my heart. If it changes you... then it changes ."
They all went quiet again.
The forest sighed, and sowhere far off, an owl-like cry echoed through the trees.
Scarlett said, "We need a plan."
Stella nodded. "We need to write everything down. Track what we do. What we rember. What we don’t. Even the little things."
Alia bit her lip. "What if it finds out we know? What if it gets angry?"
"It already knows," Serena said quietly. "It’s watching. It’s always watching."
They slept with weapons that night. Blades under pillows. Nets at the door. Jude didn’t sleep at all. He sat at the window of his treehouse, watching the trees, the mist, the spaces between stars. He thought about the voice in the smoke. About what it had said. That it was the breath of the island. That it was becoming them. That it wanted to be him.
He rembered fire. The stake. The curse. His real body, hidden inside a lie. He rembered the pact he made to beco a god. To bring the end of the divine. And he thought, not for the first ti, that maybe sothing else had heard him back then. Sothing older than the gods. Sothing that had been waiting, in the corners of the world.
Sothing that had found him.
And now, it was using the people he loved to claw its way into him.
He looked at the sleeping faces of Lucy and Grace, curled around each other on the mat of woven grass and leaves. He wanted to believe he could protect them. That he was still strong enough to hold back the tide. But the smoke was clever. It had already slipped past them once.
He thought of Lyla, still trapped in the other realm. He thought of Nefertari’s family, lost in ti. He thought of the mountain, the volcano, the border they could never cross. He thought of the crab-island they lived on, its shell the size of a nation. Was it alive? Was it the source? Or was it just another piece of the trap?
Jude whispered into the night, "What are you?"
And sowhere, beyond the fog, a blue light flickered once. Then vanished.
The morning sun filtered through the leaves like thin sheets of gold, dappling the ground in a flickering mosaic of light and shadow. Jude stood at the edge of the stream with his boots sunk ankle-deep in the muddy soil, staring at the rippling surface where tiny fish darted like silver knives. The water was cool, moving with a lazy rhythm that usually brought peace to his mind. But today, his hands wouldn’t stop clenching. His eyes kept flicking toward the dense wall of trees as though expecting sothing to erge, sothing silent, sothing blue.
Behind him, Emma and Scarlett were carrying woven baskets filled with root vegetables, their laughter light and unbothered. It was the kind of normalcy that once would have settled his heart. Now, it unsettled him.
Reviews
All reviews (0)