CHAPTER NINE:
The dawn did not come with light.
It came instead with confusion.
Kairo jolted awake on damp, unfamiliar soil. The jungle canopy above was still. The birds, usually loud at first light, had not sung. There was no trace of the campfire, no sign of the others—no Ember, no Dr. Lewin, no Mateo. Only silence thick enough to choke on.
His mind was fogged, like the sea the day they arrived.
He sat up slowly, wincing. His hands were scratched, his shirt torn. The last thing he remembered was the night—the screams in the dark, the hollow-eyed statues that seemed to move—but after that, blankness.
And then something strange: his journal lay beside him, closed neatly. He hadn't written in it since they arrived, yet when he opened it, pages were filled. Drawings. Notes. Phrases scrawled in his own handwriting:
> Don't trust the lagoon.
It watches.
She warned me again. The voice knows too much.
Time resets. Time resets. Time resets.
Each line more unhinged than the last.
Kairo stared at the ink. He had no memory of this. No memory of writing it.
As he staggered to his feet, he saw it: the camp was gone. Not destroyed—gone, as if it had never existed. The fire pit? Missing. Their gear? Vanished. Even footprints had disappeared from the earth.
Only his own prints remained, and they led in a perfect circle—around the clearing, back to where he had awakened.
He wasn't alone for long.
From behind the trees, Ember emerged, eyes wide and skin streaked with dirt and panic. "Kairo," she breathed. "Where were you?"
"I—I don't know. I just woke up."
"You disappeared for three days."
His stomach dropped. "What?"
"Three days," she repeated. "You walked away from the fire during your watch. We looked everywhere. Then this morning, I followed the whisper."
"The whisper?"
She nodded. "I heard it again. Calling your name."
Before he could speak, Dr. Lewin emerged too. He looked aged—more gaunt, his eyes sunken. "This place... it plays tricks. It tests you," he said grimly. "I've been writing down what I can. But even my notes keep changing."
They huddled, swapping fragmented memories, and came to a harrowing realization: the island wasn't just disorienting them. It was manipulating their sense of time.
Worse still, Ember swore Kairo had spoken to her two nights ago—but it wasn't really him.
"He walked like you, sounded like you," she said. "But his eyes… they were hollow."
The team pressed deeper inland, trying to regroup and make sense of what remained. They found one of Mateo's carvings, a small sigil etched into a tree—the same symbol that Kairo had seen in his journal.
The days became jumbled. Sometimes the sun set twice. Once, it hovered at noon for what felt like hours. The stars changed, constellations rearranging into shapes none of them could name.
At night, dreams blurred into waking life. Kairo saw his mother on the shoreline. Heard a lullaby he hadn't heard since childhood. Woke with wet sand in his palm.
One night, they found Mateo.
Or what was left of him.
He sat beside a fallen statue, still breathing, his eyes flickering with madness.
"I heard the island's name," he whispered. "But you can't say it aloud. If you do, it knows you."
His journal had no ink—just deep gashes into the pages as if he had tried to carve words with a fingernail.
And in the trees above them, the statues were no longer still.
They watched.
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