Page 45 of Silent Shadows

Usually after a field day, there’s a rhythm to how we settle back in.

Taylor dives onto the couch first, boots kicked off somewhere inappropriate, energy still bouncing even while exhausted.

Jax starts pulling footage, obsessively replaying anything somewhat questionable.

Maya organizes data with the intensity of someone preventing the fall of modern civilization.

And me? I catalog. Everything.

Every sound. Every environmental shift. Every possible explanation goes in my notebook before my brain gets too excited and jumps ahead of the evidence.

It keeps me grounded.

Normally.

Tonight, grounding feels a little harder than usual.

Because Daisy’s here.

And somehow, in less than forty-eight hours, she’s changed the energy of the entire Machine without even trying.

It’s subtle, as if static electricity got introduced into a room.

I feel aware of her constantly.

Aware of the way she’s curled sideways at the dinette now, laptop open, typing fast with her headphones half-on while reviewing audio clips from today.

Aware of the crease between her brows when she concentrates.

Aware of the fact that she stopped making jokes about this whole thing after the sound in the canyon.

That part sticks with me. The silence afterward. The way her eyes searched all of us, waiting for someone to explain it away. And none of us could.

That howl was epic. I listened to Jax’s recordings, but real life was next level.

We’ve been looking into unexplained phenomena for years now. And we always run into the things we still can’t rationalize.

I glance toward her again. She’s mouthing words to herself now while typing. And seeing her like that makes something click into place in my brain.

For all the teasing, commentary, and dumb recorder-clicking, she does take this seriously.

Maybe not the same way I do, but seriously enough.

“Quit staring.”

I look up sharply. Maya stands beside the monitor bank with two hard drives in one hand and an expression that says she’s already noticed too much.

“I wasn’t staring,” I snap.

“You were absolutely staring.”

“I was observing.”

Maya scoffs under her breath.

Outside, I hear Jax hauling wood around while Taylor criticizes his fire-building process despite contributing absolutely nothing.

The normalcy of it helps. A little.