Because if I’m right, it meanshe’sstill watching. Still listening. Still… helping.
And worse?
I want him to. Which my behavior bears out. I return to the ledge again.
Every night now, like clockwork. No one notices. Or if they do, they’re too caught up in their own unraveling to ask. That’s the thing about fear—it makes people small, folded intothemselves. The camp’s dying by inches. I feel it in the hollow clang of the mess hall trays, in the way Darwin won’t meet my eyes anymore, in the silence between the perimeter drones as they flicker and hum and slowly degrade.
But out here? On this wind-chiseled ledge where the sand carves grooves through obsidian and the stars look close enough to kiss?
I can breathe.
There’s no cookie in my hand tonight. No offering. I stopped bringing them after Carson died, after the tension in my chest turned from grief to something quieter. Something I still don’t have a name for.
Now, I bring questions.
Soft ones, so the wind won’t carry them to ears that shouldn’t hear.
"Why are you helping me?"
The silence after is dense, like the whole world’s holding its breath.
"What’s your name?"
The cliff doesn’t answer. The canyon doesn’t echo. Just the distant hiss of steam vents bleeding off pressure and the high metallic chirr of insects nesting in the cracks.
"What do you want from us?"
That one feels heavier. Like it lands somewhere. I don’t know why.
I sit on the cold stone, wrapping my arms around my knees. The chill bites through my pants, cuts into bone. I let it. Maybe I deserve a little suffering.
But then—on the third night—I find it.
A pelt.
It’s draped across the rocks exactly where I always sit. Not haphazard, not thrown.Placed.Like someone considered the shape of me, the edge of the stone, the wind’s direction.
It smells… alive.
Like sun-warmed hide, coppery blood, the scorched dust of the plains. It’s thick, the kind of fur you’d take off a creature that doesn’t mind the cold but still respects it. There are faint claw marks on the edge. Too big to be human.
My heart punches once, hard.
He left this.
I don’t know how I know, I just do.
I run trembling fingers across the fur, then lower myself onto it like I’m afraid it might vanish if I move too fast. Itwelcomesme. Warmer than it should be, still radiating heat from something recently dead or freshly alive.
I can’t help it.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
And then, after a beat, I do something I hadn’t meant to.
I tell the truth.
“My name’s Jill.”
