Page 21 of Tracked By the Possessive Alien

The last journal has forty blank pages at the back, and my uncle used four of them.

I find it on the return leg, wedged in against the spine where the stitching has pulled, and the entries aren't in cipher. They're in plain script, hurried, in an ink that ran because his hands were wet when he wrote them, and they cover the last fourteen months of his life.

The first one says: Third letter this year. Same hand. He signs himself a friend of the work.

The second says: He has offered to fund me. He knows the Sedge End plate exists. There are two people alive who know that and I am one of them.

The third says: They followed me to the weirs. Not close. They do not need to be close anymore.

The fourth is nine words long and I read it perhaps forty times.

If I drown, I did not drown. Tell Claire.

Nobody has called me Claire since my mother died. He hadn't seen me since I was eleven years old. He wrote a message for a person he had not laid eyes on in eighteen years, in a book he hid under a floor, because there was no one else on the entire planet he trusted with the sentence.

I cry in the belly of a moving boat, hard enough that Joren cuts the engine.

They give me a while. That's the thing about this village that has undone me completely: nobody assures me it's fine. Tilda hands me a rag that's cleaner than most of her, and Pip goes silent and doesn't fill it, and Draeven puts himself between me and everyone else's line of sight without appearing to move at all.

When I can talk, I read it out. All four.

“Well,” Edda says, that evening, when we've got the boats in and all of it has been repeated in her kitchen. “There it is.”

“You believed it already,” I say.

“I believed it the day they pulled him out.” She sets a cup down at my elbow hard enough to make a point. “Garrick knew that water better than he knew his own face. He'd swum it drunk. He'd crossed it with a broken arm. And I stood on that dock and listened to a frontier assessor write down misadventure, and I said nothing, because what does an herbalist know.”

“Edda.”

“I said nothing for four months.”

“You said something to me.”

She studies the table. “I said he chased ghosts.”

“You said it to a stranger who'd come to sell his house,” I tell her. “It's the only true thing anybody told me that week.”

The storm comes on the run south to the eighth site, and it comes fast enough that even Joren is caught by it.

There's a sound the marsh makes before the water rises. I know it now. It's a kind of hush, everything settling by a hand's width all at once, and then the rain arrives sideways and the channel we're in stops being a channel and starts being a general suggestion.

“Ranger post,” Joren shouts. “Two kilometers. It's on rock.”

“Go,” Draeven says.

We get the boats onto the rock shelf with eleven minutes to spare and drag them up past the waterline, and the four of us split up because the post is two buildings and the small one has a stove and the big one has a roof that's still arguing about it. Joren, Tilda, and Pip take the stove. Draeven and I take the roof.

I would like the record to show that this was not a scheme. Joren's decision. Purely practical. He said the words “you two won't stop talking about symbols” and shut the door.

The big room is bare planking, a table, a bunk frame with no mattress, and a lamp bracket that still works. Outside, the Long Quiet stops being quiet. Rain goes over the roof in sheets that sound like something being poured out of a much larger container.

We spread the maps. We ignore the maps completely.

“Tell me something,” I say.

“About the site.”

“About you.” I hitch myself onto the table because the only chair is holding the lamp. “I've known you nineteen days. I know how you take a corner, how you check a room, and that you don't eat in front of people if you can help it. I don't know one single thing about your life.”