“How’d that clue go again?” I mutter, scratching at the back of my head, trying to drag the words out of my brain. It mentioned memory loss, didn’t it? Figures.
“Retracing our steps, goddamn it!” Fabien snaps, his voice cracking like he’s been howling at me for hours. The fury underthat calm front of his is finally bubbling up, spilling over like it’s got nowhere else to go in this damn heat.
“Right,” I drawl, leaning back against a rock. “Because storming in circles has really been working for us.”
Fabien’s pacing like a caged animal, while I’m just trying to remember how to stand without the ground wobbling beneath me.
“How much more can we retrace our steps?” He barks, hands slicing the air. “We’ve come full path already! We tried mirroring it, too!”
“Yeah, yeah.” I wave a hand lazily. “Look, when Vini and I were picking apart that clue about the Sister Islands, he saw things I didn’t even know were there.”
Fabien glares at me, waiting. “And?”
“And,” I say, stretching the word out, “maybe it’s not so literal, yeah? ‘Retrace our steps’ could mean something else. Maybe it’s a little… I don’t know, clever. Or mystical. Or just another of the Lady’s twisted jokes. Think about it—what’s her play here? You know, just to rub salt into the wound.”
That catches his attention. His eyes go wide, and he stops pacing, feet planted as he whips his gaze to the sun, then back to the skiff. His face lights up like he’s been struck by lightning.
“Cagney, you’re a… damn genius.” He turns sharply, squinting at the sun, then jabs a finger in the skiff’s direction. “The position of the ship’s pointing southwest, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“So, the skiff’s marking south-west too!” He bolts to the skiff, like touching it somehow makes it real. His words hit me harder than I expected, and before I know it, I’m on my feet, my legs a little shaky as the idea clicks into place.
My mind is spinning.
“Retrace our steps,” I murmur, a grin creeping in. “Retracing could mean moving the same way back, but ‘mirroring’ might mean we need to reverse it somehow.”
Fabien nods, muttering under his breath, “The Lady would want us to sweat, to find exactly what we don’t know. Retrace our steps… hell, this whole island runs on the sun!‘Shadows lengthen, east to west.’The sun is the point of reference!”
Leave the island when the sun’s position will be the opposite of what it was when we arrived. But we have no way of tracing the sun. We can only work in directions.
What was the position of the sun when we arrived?
“The Trial will take place at dusk or dawn. Either twelve or twenty-four hours from now on,” that’s what Ridley said. That’s what we remember.
Oh, fuck.
I grip my hair with my fists.
“When we got here, the sun was either setting or rising, right?” I ask, following up on his thought process. “It was either low in the sky, in the west, or rising in the east.”
And the skiff points in the south-west direction.
“So, if we backtrack, metaphorically,” Fabien mutters, “we’d need to pick one of these directions. And in one of them, the sea might just let us through! That’s our way off these islands—swimming out in the right direction!”
Fucking brilliant.
All that’s left now is testing his little theory. And, naturally, making sure Rancour understands because of who we even came up with it.
I flash him a smirk. “Well, looks like I am owed a ‘thank you’ as well, don’t you think?”
This time when he smiles, his smile is not ugly at all.
45
Vinicola
Meanwhile...
