94 DAYS UNTIL THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX
I glanced at Paulo as we walked, my old friend who, in many ways, was like a new friend. I had a million questions for him, but I didn’t press.
I’d learned quite a bit during my first stay here.
I wondered what Paulo had learned. After all, he’d never left. He had the lean muscles and long hair and quiet confidence to show for it, not to mention a leg laced with healed scars, hard proof of time served. He was a Nil survivor and Nil veteran—the oldest veteran on the island, a seniority marked not by age but days spent.
Paulo didn’t speak either. We walked in comfortable silence. As we left South Beach behind, Rives dropped back to chat with Thad.
Soon the Arches rose ahead, stunning and majestic. Massive rock formations, carved by the hands of invisible giants or Mother Nature herself, the Arches stretched toward the sky, curved and chunky and beautifully hollow. The black rock arches glistened with water at the base and winked matte black at the top, bathed in light from above.
Paulo broke the silence. “We took this route because I wanted to show you something at the Arches. It won’t take long.”
“You’re kidding.” Rives’s incredulous voice came from slightly behind us; I hadn’t heard him approach. “You said yourself we should get back by dark, and I think I’ve had enough Nil surprises for one day. Can’t it wait?”
“I don’t think it should. This place”—Paulo waved a hand—“is unpredictable. It could be gone tomorrow. Destroyed, altered. It’s not a chance I want to take. It’s nothing scary, I promise. But”—his eyes found me—“Skye needs to see it.”
“Rives, it is the longest day of the year.” I smiled. “We’ve got plenty of daylight left to see whatever this is.”
Rives’s tight expression didn’t shift. His eyes remained on Paulo. “Exactly what is it that Skye needs to see?”
“Just wait,” Paulo said, his tone encouraging. “See what unfolds.”
His calm confidence reminded me slightly of Maaka, but where Maaka always spoke like a condescending Confucius, Paulo was kind, and patient. But he didn’t elaborate on this mysterious detour.
Just wait, he’d said.
As much as it killed me, I did. I kept my questions to myself, wondering what the Arches could hold that I needed to see. And why me? Why single me out?
“This way,” Paulo said. Following his lead, I climbed up, past the Man in the Maze. We walked to the smallest of the rock arches, the one farthest from the water’s edge. Rives paused, waiting for the others to catch up, but his eyes stayed on me.
Behind the last arch, Paulo knelt. “Look.” He pointed to the ground near the arch’s base. A flat rock about the size of a dinner plate nestled against the base. Words graced the rock face, roughly cut into the surface.
Search.
Look inside.
Below the words, two smaller letters read S. B. All had a similar slant, as if carved by the same hand.
“Did you carve these words?” A powerful hope filled Paulo’s eyes.
Shaking my head, I knelt beside him. With one finger, I traced the letters S. B. “These are my initials,” I said, “and my uncle’s.” I glanced at Paulo. “Scott Bracken, the same uncle who met your aunt Rika.”
He exhaled, relaxing. “I was right to bring you here today,” he said with certainty. “I knew this was a clue. I’d thought perhaps you left it for me, but now I know your uncle left it for you.”
How could there be a twenty-year-old clue? I wondered.
You have a twenty-year-old journal, my mind offered helpfully.
I read aloud. “‘Look inside’? What does that even mean? I know they searched for gates, like us. But what does ‘Look inside’ mean? Look inside what? Ourselves? This rock?”
The rock didn’t budge.
“I don’t know,” Paulo admitted. He regarded me carefully. “I didn’t know you shared the same initials as your uncle, the one who knew my aunt. The one who told him about his destiny.”
Your destiny wraps the island from beginning to end, Paulo’s aunt had told my uncle.
But you didn’t end it, my guilty conscience said. You failed.
Then, like the whisper of the wind, a gentle thought brushed the others away.
It is not over yet.
Rives stood near the Man in the Maze, his profile to me, deep in conversation with Thad. Neither boy looked my way.
I closed my eyes, hearing the echo of a thought that wasn’t mine. Nil was everywhere: my past, my present, and maybe even still in my head. Or was that thought mine after all, whispered by my conscience? I couldn’t sort it all out.
“Skye?”
I glanced up at Paulo.
“In the weeks after you left, I sat here a lot, alone, thinking. The day I found this carving, I was specifically thinking of you. It’s like this carving was here, but I didn’t see it right away. Granted, the carving is shallow, and dirt had blurred the letters, but still. I didn’t see these letters until I was thinking about you. And now you’re here. Again. It feels—weird. Like a coincidence but not really.”
There are no coincidences on Nil. Johan’s words haunted me.
The letters, my initials. My failure and my return.
“What did we miss?” I asked Paulo, desperate for understanding. “We failed, Paulo. The island wanted to die; I think it still does. It’s why I’m here, why I’m back. I feel it. So what didn’t we do last time? What didn’t we see?”
“Skye, I’ve rewound that last day a million times, and I still have no answer. And since then? The island is—” He paused. “Different. Crueler. It’s the best word I can think of. More vicious, more volatile. I’ll see a rabbit one day, only to have a gate take it away before I can snare it. Then a camel falls out of the next gate, only to be eaten by a lion, and I don’t even eat camels so it’s like a warning: You’re next.” He shook his head. “There’ve been two earthquakes since you left. The first not so bad, but the second one opened steam vents on Mount Nil. The island is restless. I constantly feel a restlessness, and it isn’t mine.”
“Like the exhaustion wasn’t mine,” I said. Understanding crept close, then drifted away before I could grasp it.
“Looks like you found a little island graffiti.” Rives’s hands rested gently on my bare shoulders. “Your uncle’s?”
“I think so.” I stared at the rock, at the words etched in stone, letters looking back at me.
Search.
Look inside.
“He wrote in his journal that he heard the island telling him to search,” I said slowly. Was my uncle to search, or was this word left for me? Was it a mission left for someone else, for anyone else? Was there a difference, and did it matter?
Did the island tell him to leave this mark?
I spun around, moving so fast I startled Rives. “The island told my uncle to search,” I said. “But he didn’t know what he was supposed to search for. Gates? Answers? Understanding? People?” A familiar sense of frustration washed through me. “We’re back to square one, Rives. Sure, we know how to leave. We’ve got three months until our gate opens. But this time, we need to do more while we’re here. We have to figure out how to end Nil. Or at least destroy all the gates.” My voice reflected the urgent determination I felt.
Search.
Look inside.
“Maybe we aren’t looking in the right places.” My hands gripped Rives’s forearms tight; my eyes stayed locked on his. “The problem is, we don’t know what we’re looking for, but we’ve got to figure it out because if we don’t, then we’re just resetting the clock, again, and the next group will be even worse off. This place is getting crueler, Paulo said so himself. Rives, we’ve got to search—”
He gently put a finger to my lips.
“We will search, Skye. We’ll search this whole island. For people, for clues, for answers, and one epic island-ending solution. If it exists, we’ll find it. But not today. Today we need to get to the City, meet the people already there, and get everyone up to speed. And then as a team, we’ll make a plan, together. One step at a time. One day at a time. Okay?”
His green eyes were clear and bright, reassuring and ready—like Rives himself.
I nodded. “You’re right. Totally right.” I forced myself to take a slow breath. “Let’s get a move on back to the City. But tomorrow, we start searching. For anything unexpected. For island clues. For what we missed the first time. Deal?”
“Deal.” Rives smiled.
The breeze ruffled my hair, whispering like the girl in the dark, the one I couldn’t see until I chose to look. But this whisper was everywhere.
So I’ll look everywhere, I thought, lifting my chin. Inside, outside, in every Nil nook and cranny. No stone will be left unturned.
Switching subjects, Rives asked Paulo about the City, food stores, and a myriad of other daily details that seemed basic to survival, but I didn’t add any questions of my own. I didn’t just want to survive; I wanted more. I wanted escape and closure and an unequivocal end to it all. That was my focus, it always had been. I was already looking three months out, and I’d only been back for one day.
Less than a day, I reminded myself. More like an afternoon.
It felt like months, not hours. The exhaustion I’d experienced last time on Nil had roared back as if I’d never left. It had hit me the instant I’d come through the gate, initially making it hard to wake. Now fatigue swirled around me like a thick breeze pressing against my mind like the darkness of my dreams, but my constant fight with the darkness had served me well. Now I both acknowledged the fatigue and defied it, because I recognized it was Nil’s weariness, not mine. There was an invisible line defining where I ended and Nil began, a line I recognized, a line I reinforced because my mind was mine.
I looked at Rives and felt the same. Mine, I thought.
I would protect all that was mine, with all that I had.
Concern flitted through Rives’s eyes. “Skye?”
“Rives?” I countered, lifting my eyebrows.
A grin played at the corners of his mouth. “I know you’ve got it all under control, but for the record? I don’t like you being last.” He gestured ahead, to where everyone else waited.
“You never have. What makes today any different?”
Rives’s jaw tightened. The flash of levity was gone. “Don’t look, but I think we’re being followed.”