We noticed them long before they noticed the absence.
Humans move loudly, even when they think they’re being careful. Their breath pushes against the air in uneven bursts. Their thoughts press outward too, soft distortions that ripple through the clearing. They don’t realize they do this. They don’t realize how far their presence reaches.
They stepped into the camp with their shoulders tight and their eyes wide, trying to understand what they were seeing. they always look at the objects first— the tents, the lights, the scattered tools— as if the arrangement of their belongings might explain what happened to the ones who left them behind.
They never look at the ground.
Not the way we do.
They couldn’t see the lines dug into the soil from years of quiet passage, the shallow grooves where the earth learned to fold and unfold itself around movement. The patterns were faint now, softened by heat and time, but still there—curving in deliberate arcs, intersecting at angles no human foot would choose.
They stepped across them without hesitation, scattering the edges, breaking the symmetry. The ground shifted in response, a slow, reluctant settling, erasing the message before it could be read.
They didn’t notice.
They never do.
They didn’t know the lines weren’t from the past. Not only from the past.
Some had been pressed into the ground long before they arrived. Some had been pressed by feet that hadn’t touched the earth yet. Some were still forming beneath their boots as they walked.
Time settles strangely here.
It pools.
It folds.
It waits.
The earlier ones had stepped into the pattern without understanding it. They had been lost in the way the island requires—unmoored, uncounted, unanchored—so it could draw them into the shape it needed.
These new ones were still tethered to themselves. Still too linear. Still too certain of where they stood.
But the island is patient.
I remember the moment my boot crossed the threshold of the clearing—sunlight hitting my face, the smell of damp earth rising up, the sense of stepping into something open. I also remember leaving it, pushing though the underbrush, branches catching on my sleeves as if trying to pull me back. Both memories sit beside each other with the same weight, the same immediacy, like two pages pressed together in a book that won’t stay open. I can’t tell which one came first. I’m not sure it matters here.
We stepped into the Comms tent like we were crossing into a different version of the camp—one that had been paused mid-breath. The air inside felt denser than outside, warmer too, as if the equipment had been running for hours longer than we had been gone. The hum of the consoles wasn’t steady; it wavered, rising and falling in a slow pulse that didn’t match any generator rhythm I knew.
Someone flicked on a headlamp even though the overhead lights should have been enough. The beam cut through the dimness in a way that made the shadows feel too thick, layered on top of each other.
The first thing I noticed was the log screen.
Still open. Still glowing.
Cursor blinking at the end of a sentence that hadn’t been finished.
Lena’s last entry sat there like a held breath.
A few of us leaned in, instinctively, as if proximity might make the words make sense. But the timestamp in the corner made my stomach drop.
10:22
The numbers glowed faintly in the dim tent, too bright for the failing light outside, too sharp against the soft amber dusk bleeding through the canvas. It felt wrong to see a morning timestamp in an evening tent. Wrong in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.
Someone exhaled behind me.
“It’s frozen,” they whispered.
But it wasn’t.
The cursor blinked.
The lantern light flickered, catching on the metal edges of the console, and for a moment the whole screen seemed to ache—like it was syncing to something outside. Or trying to.
The headlamp beam jittered as the person wearing it jerked, and that tiny movement was enough to make the shadows jump a fraction behind motion. A tiny lag. A skipped frame. Enough to make my stomach tighten.
“Did you see that?” someone whispered.
No one answered. No one wanted to be the first to say yes.
I leaned closer to the monitor. The cursor blinked at a steady pace— normal, mechanical, unremarkable. But the timestamp above it stayed wrong. 10:22. Hours old. Fresh. Both. Neither. The numbers didn’t change, but the glow around them gave a newer sheen.
“Maybe she left it open,” someone said behind me, voice too loud in the cramped space.
“Then why’s it still warm?” another muttered.
They were right. The console casing radiated heat. I pressed my palm against it, then pulled back. Not burning. But close.
The hum under the floorboards shifted again. Not metaphorically. Not imagined. A real, physical vibration, like something heavy had moved beneath the tent. A few of us instinctively braced, feet widening, hands hovering near weapons.
“Generators?” someone offered.
“No,” I said. “That’s the wrong direction.”
The sound had come from deeper in the camp. Or under it. Hard to tell with the canvas walls muffling everything.
The cursor blinked again.
Once.
Pause.
Once.
A normal pattern. A normal screen. A normal tent.
But the air felt wrong. The light felt wrong. The timestamp felt wrong.
And the longer we stood there, the more it felt like we weren’t reading Lena’s last entry.
We were standing in the moment she wrote it.
Just not from the same side.
They clustered around the glowing screen, trying to make sense of numbers that no longer belonged to them. Trying to make sense of a world that no longer belonged to them.
We watched them from the seam.
Their outlines reached us first—faint impressions of movement, the suggestion of bodies shifting through a moment that hadn’t fully settled. The rest of them followed a breath later, arriving in uneven pieces: a hand, then a shoulder, then the sound of a boot on wood. They never noticed the delay.
One of them reached for the flap of the tent, and the motion arrived to us first—an outline of intent, a shift in pressure, the faint displacement of air. A moment later, the tent opened.
Canvas lifted. Light changed. Their bodies adjusted to the new brightness half a beat after the flap moved, as if the moment had already happened and they were catching up to it.
They didn’t notice the mismatch.
We did.
They stepped through the opening with the confidence of people who believed they were moving in a straight line. Their boots hit the ground in a rhythm that didn’t match the pattern between them. The soil absorbed their weight reluctantly, the way it does when it’s already holding the imprint of something else.
They paused outside, scanning the clearing, trying to orient themselves.
We felt the hesitation before they did.
They still believed they were alone in the tent.
They still believed the equipment belonged to them.
They still believed the moment they were standing in was whole.
But the seam was widening.
Ahhhh! You keep drawing me in, making me feel it, and leaving me with so many questions! I love it!