Her.
My jaw tightens automatically. The reaction is older than thought.
I close my eyes and breathe the way I was taught—not just by my father and Mags, but by the men before them.
Cold creek water up to my ankles. Eleven years old. Uncle Rowan gripping the back of my neck hard enough to bruise.
You feel it before it feels you,he’d said.
And when it rises, you don’t chase it. You don’t feed it. You outlast it.
In for four.
Hold.
Out for six.
Control isn’t optional.
It’s inherited.
It’s just proximity, I tell myself. She’s out mapping rocks, and the range doesn’t like being measured. It pushes back against intrusion. Always has.
Nothing more than that.
Winnie sidesteps. I open my eyes.
Josephine sits among sun-blackened rocks near the eastern boundary markers, notebook tucked against her hip, phone angled toward the horizon. She’s not studying the rock this time.
She’s watching the sky.
Smart. Too smart.
The hum rises—not loud, but insistent. A pressure beneath my sternum, the same ache that used to split my vision when I was fifteen and couldn’t yet hold it steady.
Mags had watched me then, eyes unreadable.
You don’t suppress it,she’d said quietly after the others left.
You contain it. Suppression fractures. Containment endures.
I nudge Winnie forward before instinct becomes hesitation.
She hears the approach and doesn’t startle anymore. Just lifts her chin, steady and unimpressed, like I’m one of her petroglyphs.
“You’re closer than yesterday,” I say.
“So are you,” she replies.
The wind sweeps low across the scrub, bending sage in one unified direction.
Intentional.
My skin feels tight. Like it’s holding something in.
She gestures toward the outcropping behind her. “The orientation shifts three degrees from the previous site. That’s not random.”
“Everything out here shifts,” I answer. “Wind. Sand. People.”
