Behind him, the thing wearing his mother’s face screamed—not with a human voice, but with the sound of grinding rocks, the collapse of permafrost, the shriek of a billion mosquitoes dying in a flash of cold.

He looked at the open journal. At the words It looks like my mother. At the date: 1932.

On the sixth evening, he found the first sign: a tin cup, rusted into a cleft of rock. The stamp on the bottom read MONTREAL, 1927 . Elias held it carefully. Tivon Arkell had drunk from this cup. Had maybe sat on this exact boulder, watching the same endless sky.

Delilah circled once, landed on a small lake that hadn’t been there before, and taxied to the shore. She looked at him for a long time.

He stepped inside.

“Impossible,” he whispered, but he climbed down anyway.

The compass needle now pointed straight ahead, no longer trembling.

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“You wanted me to,” Elias replied.

Elias’s blood went cold. He heard a footstep outside. Not heavy—light, familiar. The click of a woman’s heel on stone.