POV: Seren Adaeze
Morocco I can handle.
I press my finger to the first outer point on the map and the Sight gives me a location I've painted twice, a specific valley between two ridges where the rock is red and the light comes in at an angle that has nothing to do with any light I've seen in person, and I file it and move to the second.
Iceland. A coastal shelf on the northern edge, black rock similar to this shore but colder, the sky above it a grey I've been mixing paint to replicate since I was twenty-three without ever quite getting it right. I've painted this place eleven times. I know exactly where it is.
Two locations I can hold without falling over.
I move to the third point on the map and I press my finger to it and the Sight gives me the location and I take my hand off the wall immediately, the way you pull back from something hot before the brain has finished processing that the surface burned.
I stand with my back to the map.
Lucian is watching me. He reads my face the way he's been reading it for six weeks, accurately and without comment, and he waits.
"Morocco," I say. "Iceland." I stop.
"And the third."
I look at the map point from a distance, the third glowing symbol, and I think about the building, the specific building, the one where my mother keeps her good dishes on the top shelf and the corridor outside smells like the neighbour's cooking and the wall by the window has a mark on it from where I put my hand every day for sixteen years leaving the house.
"Lagos," I say. "The building where I grew up."
He goes very still.
"The third orb is buried under the foundation of the building where I grew up in Nigeria," I say, and I say it in a level voice because I need it to be level right now, I need at least my voice to be steady while everything else is reorganising itself. "The place I painted as a child. The visions I had in that house. The symbols I drew on my bedroom wall at seven years old that made my mother go quiet." I stop. "She knew."
"You don't know that yet," Lucian says carefully.
"I know her face when she went quiet," I say. "I've known my whole life that face meant she understood something I didn't. I thought it was a mother thing. The particular knowledge adults have that they're not ready to share with a seven-year-old." I look at the map. "It wasn't that."
I take the satellite phone from the rock where Lucian set it and I look at the screen. One bar. The same unreliable signal that comes and goes without pattern, the island deciding what gets through and when.
The bar holds.
I dial my mother's number and I don't think about what I'm going to say because if I think about it I'll construct the careful version and the careful version is something I've been done with since the door on the shore opened to my hand.
It rings once.
Twice.
Then my mother's voice, clear and immediate and not remotely surprised, not hello, not Seren, just, "I've been waiting for this call. Which one did you find first?"
I sit down on the stone floor of the ruins.
She knew.
Not just the quiet face when I was seven. She knew, she has been waiting, she has been sitting in Lagos in the building above the buried orb knowing I would call from wherever I was when I found the first one, and she didn't tell me, she let me spend thirty years painting coordinates I thought were visions, she let me spend a lifetime afraid to follow the story to its end when she knew where the story went.
"You knew," I say.
A pause. Small and honest. "Your grandmother told me before she died. She made me promise to let you find it yourself. She said the Sight couldn't be guided from outside, that you had to walk toward it, that if I told you, you'd walk toward what I described rather than what was actually there." She pauses again. "I hated that promise for thirty years."
"You could have told me."
"I know." Her voice carries the weight of that. All thirty years of it. "I'm sorry. I'm telling you now. Everything I know."
I look at Lucian from the floor of the ruins. He is standing at a respectful distance, not listening, or giving me the shape of not listening, which is its own kind of care. I wave him over because I need him to hear this and there is no version of us that involves me managing what information he receives anymore.
He comes and sits beside me on the stone floor and I angle the phone so he can hear.
My mother talks.
The building in Lagos was chosen by my grandmother. Not because it was affordable or well located. Because she could feel the anchor point beneath it, the buried piece of the curse sitting in the web of magic that runs under the city, and she wanted to stay close to it, to watch it, to make sure nobody else found it before the right person came.
She spent forty years watching it.
She died watching it.
"There's something else," my mother says, and her voice shifts into a register I know and don't like, the register she uses when the difficult information is coming. "Your grandmother's notes. The ones she left me. She writes about the curse pieces and she writes about the people who have been trying to find them." A pause. "The boat that came to the island today."
I grip the phone.
"How do you know about the boat," I say.
"Because the family that sent it has been trying to find the orbs for sixty years," she says. "They knew about the curse. They knew about the restoration. And they have a very different idea about what should happen when all four pieces are together."
The map wall glows behind me.
All three outer points pulse at the same moment, once, urgent and bright.
"Mum," I say. "Who sent the boat."
Her answer, when it comes, turns the ruins completely silent.