Everyone was taking it rather well, all things considered.

  They had apparently started to find evidence pretty quickly, before Adelaide’s party had. As Emma and Olivia had looked around for water and potential hunting opportunities, they had noticed the same lack of wildlife that had stood out to Adelaide. By itself, that wouldn’t have been unprecedented — it was apparently pretty common to find flora without fauna. But it led them to explore a bit more, and they found a pair of cairns that were about the same height as each other, and that had sent them back to camp. Something in the way they told the story made Adelaide wonder if they’d been spooked, but she didn’t press it — it wasn’t as if she could blame them if they were.

  Ray had told everyone to stay at camp with their eyes open in case someone came towards them, and he’d gone to look for signs of anyone else on the island. Adelaide had made him stop there, and asked what his plan was if he had come across whatever hypothetical dangerous person he was imagining while he was all alone in unfamiliar territory. He had just given her a small smile and explained that he hadn’t found anyone, so it hadn’t come up.

  But they had found more cairns, as well as a few other signs that someone had been there before them. There was a little cliff, just a few feet above the water at high tide, which was lined with very smooth rocks that looked like they could have been the same color. And they had found a large flat black stone on the ground, and, when they’d lifted it, they realized it had been covering a small pit about three feet deep. It had a few of these little spiraly vegetable things in it, but it was impossible to know if that was the intention or just something that had taken root.

  That was the issue, really. You could see that something was artificial — there really wasn’t any ability left to argue that all of these things were accidental or the result of some strange natural process. But there were countless hypotheses for everything they saw. It wasn’t like wandering through someone’s house and trying to learn about them — that was only possible because of shared context.

  That may have been why everyone was taking it so calmly: it didn’t exactly feel like the giant moment it was while they still knew so little about the source of all of these artifacts. Emma and Olivia were no longer showing any fear (if they ever had, if Adelaide hadn’t just been projecting), and were now doing these regular little patrols of the area around the camp. Alessio was trying to film as much of it as possible, while Jim seemed to feel that he had seen enough inexplicable things for one day and was taking a nap. Percy had apparently found somehting of interest in how the cairns were designed, and he was now doing something relating to them on his laptop.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  And Trish … well, she’d need to check with Trish later, in private. Not that she was making a scene or anything. She’d gone to see the stones near the water and had apparently been sitting there all day. And that could mean nothing, or it could mean that she was really freaked out. Adelaide had seen that behavior before. And normally she’d go do something about it, but she needed to decide what to do next.

  That’s why she was standing with Ray, walking along a little stream, discussing their next steps. He’d repeated his assessment of the situation: while there were clear signs of some sort of intelligent life having been here at some point, there wasn’t anything that suggested it was here now: no tracks, no obvious signs of something hunting or harvesting, no shelter.

  “But that’s only so much to go on out here,” he said. “There could be any sort of creature here that just doesn’t leave tracks and eats something I wouldn’t think of as food. But, on the other hand, that’s always possible. That’s just what we signed up for.”

  “Not an especially comforting point, but you’re right,” Adelaide responded. “Do you think there’s anything to be done with what we’ve found?”

  “I mean, sure, for a … what’s the word for a scientist who studies different kinds of people?”

  “An anthropologist?”

  “Yeah, probably. Are you one of those?”

  “No.”

  “So I don’t know what you can do. I’d say we stick to the mission — you and I go up that other mountain, we get the Node, and then we rush home.”

  “It feels so strange, ignoring all of this — but you’re right, I should focus on the kind of research I’m qualified to do. And we made good time on the first Node, maybe this will be smooth too.”

  Ray smiled. “Sure. And, if it takes too long and we miss our window, we’ll just come back here and make some rock piles of our own.”