The moment the memory struck him, it did not arrive gently. It hit like cold water down the spine.
North. Morris had said north.
Adam's breath caught, not from exhaustion but from the sudden, brutal clarity of it. The singing threaded through the trees again, faint and terrible and intimate, and something inside his chest twisted so sharply he almost staggered. Luna's voice echoed in the back of his mind, steady and certain on that rocking boat earlier that day.
Sirens don't sing without a target.
His stomach dropped.
Then he ran.
Not the kind of running a human body could sustain, not the frantic scrambling of someone crashing blindly through underbrush. This was controlled violence. Precision wrapped in speed. His muscles fired in perfect sequence, tendons tightening and releasing like tuned cables. The earth seemed to recoil beneath his feet as he launched forward, leaves exploding upward in his wake.
In short bursts he could reach one hundred and ten kilometers per hour, but that kind of speed tore at the lungs if held too long. Instead, he settled into something just beneath that, a sustained eighty that felt almost effortless tonight. The world blurred, not because his vision failed him, but because everything else simply moved too slowly.
Branches arched toward him and he bent around them before they became obstacles. Roots jutted from the ground and he skimmed over them as if he had memorized their placement years ago. Fallen trunks became stepping stones, uneven terrain a suggestion rather than a hindrance. His body did not hesitate. It calculated.
Still, beneath the mechanical perfection of his movement, panic roared.
Why did I let him go alone?
The question repeated with every stride, harsher each time. He could see Morris laughing earlier, brown compression shirt stretched over lean muscle, flashlight swinging lazily from his hand, notebook tucked under his arm like this was some harmless midnight adventure. The memory felt unreal now, as if it belonged to a different night.
They had joked. God, they had joked.
Hakeem Morris talking about siren baddies like this was some twisted dating expedition. Adam had laughed, teased him about spending too much time around white folks, about chasing haunted houses and sky diving off cliffs like he had forgotten the unspoken rule. Black people do not run toward the horror. Black people survive the horror by leaving before the opening credits roll.
Morris had laughed so hard he nearly doubled over.
And Adam had let him walk north.
The singing grew stronger.
Not louder in volume, not exactly. The decibels did not increase the way sound normally would as distance closed. Instead, it sharpened. The edges of it became defined, as if someone had adjusted the focus on a lens. What had once been a hazy melody floating over water now felt like a thread tied directly to his sternum.
A normal human might describe it as haunting.
To Adam, it was directional.
A homing beacon.
The notes slid between trees and wrapped around him, brushing the insides of his ears without truly passing through them. His senses strained toward it against his will. He clenched his jaw, forcing his focus back to the path ahead.
Sirens don't sing without a target.
Each repetition of that thought tightened his throat.
He pushed harder.
The forest thinned as he approached the northern edge of the island. The air changed first. It grew cooler, heavier, carrying the faint metallic tang of open water and old stone. Pine gave way to scrub, and the soil beneath his feet shifted from loamy softness to packed grit.
His vision sharpened further. The world brightened as if someone had dragged dawn forward by hours. Even under the muted night sky, he saw everything. Individual grains of sand. The subtle depressions left by boots earlier that day. The faint tremor of insects disturbed by his passing.
His heartbeat thundered, but it did not tire him. Adrenaline in a human body is a spike, a frantic flare that burns out quickly. In him, it was refinement. It thinned his blood to liquid lightning. Oxygen flooded his muscles so thoroughly that they felt almost buoyant. Light. As if gravity itself had loosened its grip.
He felt like a feather in a storm.
The singing shifted.
What had been soft now pierced.
Not in sound, but in sensation. It stabbed at him from the direction of the coast, each note a silver needle threading into his skull. He ground his teeth and forced his breathing to steady. If he lost control now, if he let instinct swallow reason, he might reach Morris too late.
Trees broke apart ahead.
The coastline opened.
The northern shore of the island was nothing like the southern docks. No gentle slopes. No friendly sand welcoming boats and bare feet. This side was jagged. Hostile. Black rock jutted from the water like broken teeth, slick with algae and slicker still with years of lapping waves. The shoreline was uneven, pocked with sharp outcroppings and narrow pockets of coarse sand trapped between stone.
The lake stretched wide and deceptively calm under the moonlight. Its surface reflected the sky in fractured silver, but beneath that stillness was depth. Cold. Ancient.
And there, cutting awkwardly across the water, was a small rowboat.
Adam's eyes locked onto it instantly.
Morris.
He was rowing northward, away from the island, toward a darker shape barely visible against the horizon. The oars dipped and lifted in steady rhythm, but something about the movement was wrong. Too even. Too mechanical.
Sleepwalking?
Morris's posture was upright, shoulders relaxed, gaze fixed forward. Not scanning. Not adjusting. Not even reacting to the uneven current that nudged the boat slightly off course.
"Morris!"
Adam's voice ripped across the rocks and water, amplified by his lungs.
No response.
The oars kept moving.
"Morris!"
Nothing.
The singing wrapped tighter around Adam's senses now, and he followed its direction past the rowboat.
That was when he saw it.
The wreck.
It loomed like a carcass half devoured by time.
An old fishing vessel, large enough to have once required a small crew, now lay torn open along the rocky coast farther north. The metal hull had been split along one side, jagged edges curling outward like peeled skin. Rust coated every visible surface in deep reddish brown, flaking in thick patches that caught the moonlight like dried blood.
Part of the ship was submerged. The bow angled slightly downward, trapped against the rocks, while the stern rose at a crooked tilt as if still trying to pull free from the shoreline that had claimed it. Nets hung in shredded remnants from metal hooks. A section of railing dangled into the water, broken and twisted.
The name of the vessel had once been painted proudly along its side. Now only fragments of letters remained, ghostly white shapes eroded by years of wind and rain. Moss and barnacles clung stubbornly to the lower hull where it kissed the waterline. Each wave lapped against it with a hollow metallic groan.
The wreck did not look recent.
It looked forgotten.
Abandoned long enough for nature to begin its slow reclamation.
And beside it, half hidden by shadow and rock, he saw them.
Two pairs of eyes.
Jade.
Not reflective like animal eyes caught in a flashlight beam. These glowed softly from within, a muted green that pulsed faintly in rhythm with the song. They hovered just above the water's surface near the broken edge of the hull.
Watching.
The air in his lungs felt suddenly thin.
Morris's boat drifted closer to the wreck.
The singing intensified, threading through the crash of small waves against stone, weaving between the creak of metal and the distant rustle of night wind. It no longer sounded like a melody carried on air. It felt injected directly into bone.
Adam's resolve hardened.
He yanked his shirt over his head, the fabric catching briefly on his shoulders before he flung it aside onto the sand. The cool air hit his skin, but he barely registered it. Every muscle in his body coiled.
He sprinted.
Sand exploded beneath his feet as he accelerated. It did not simply scatter; it blasted outward in miniature shockwaves from the force of his push off. Pebbles skipped and rattled behind him. Within seconds he reached the first cluster of rocks cutting through shallow water.
He did not slow.
He planted one foot on a slick stone roughly ten feet from shore, used it as leverage, and launched himself forward. The next rock rose about fifteen feet beyond that, jagged and uneven. He adjusted midair with microscopic shifts of his hips and shoulders, landing with enough precision that his momentum barely faltered.
Spray burst upward around his calves.
The final stretch opened ahead. The last rock before deeper water sat nearly fifty feet out, barely wide enough for stable footing.
He drove himself forward.
The leap felt endless and instantaneous all at once. Wind tore past his ears. For a split second he hung suspended over black water, the wreck looming ahead, jade eyes flickering beside it.
Then he hit the final rock, compressed like a spring, and launched again without pause.
This time he did not aim for stone.
He dove.
The lake swallowed him in a rush of cold so sharp it bordered on violent. It wrapped around his skin, seeping into pores, dragging heat from his surface. To a human, the shock might have stolen breath.
To him, it was information.
He felt the density of it immediately. The temperature gradient between surface and deeper layers. The subtle shift in current pulling northeast. The faint vibration of Morris's oars disturbing the water ahead.
His body cut through the lake like a blade.
Arms drove forward in powerful strokes, legs kicking in tight, efficient rhythm. He streamlined instinctively, reducing drag, adjusting angle to compensate for crosscurrent. Each movement was exact. Deliberate.
The water felt textured against his skin. He sensed the microscopic turbulence forming along his forearms, the pressure changes around his ribs. He angled slightly downward, then back up, finding the fastest line through resistance.
Above the surface, the world was moonlit and silver.
Below, it was darker but not blind.
His vision penetrated the murk with eerie clarity. He saw suspended particles drifting lazily, disturbed now by his passage. He tracked the faint silhouette of the rowboat's hull ahead, the shadow of Morris's body outlined against the lighter surface above.
The singing vibrated through the water too.
Distorted. Warped. Yet unmistakable.
It threaded through his skull, pressing harder now, more insistent.
He kicked harder..
Closer.
The jade glow flickered again near the hull.
His instincts screamed at him, a low electric buzz crawling over his skin. The sensation from earlier returned, stronger now.
Watched.
Not by the sirens ahead.
By something else.
He broke the surface briefly for air, water streaming down his face, and turned his head sharply toward the shoreline behind him.
The rocks stood silent.
The forest loomed still and black.
Even with vision sharp enough to read a page in darkness, he saw nothing moving. No silhouette shifting between trees. No glint of eyes reflecting moonlight.
Yet the feeling persisted.
A pressure between his shoulder blades.
A gaze.
He did not have time to chase it.
He sucked in one controlled breath and dove again.
The water folded over him, closing the world into cold and pressure and song.