POV: Seren Adaeze
Three knocks and my mother is already moving.
She turns from the doorway and goes down the corridor without hurrying, without explaining, with the particular calm of someone who was expecting this knock and has decided how to handle it, and I look at Lucian and he looks at me and we both move at the same time, he toward the window to look at the street below, me toward the door to listen.
I hear my mother's voice downstairs. Low and firm. Another voice, male, one I don't recognise. My mother's voice again, the tone she uses when a conversation is finished and the other person doesn't know it yet. Then the sound of the front door closing.
Lucian moves back from the window. "Two men. They're walking away."
"The same family."
"I don't know. But they were watching the building, not just arriving at it. They were positioned." He looks at me. "They know we're here."
I look at the orb in the tin box in my hands, small and dark and patient, and I think about the third location, Morocco or Iceland, and I think about the fact that both remaining pieces are reachable and someone else knows where they are and is not approaching this from the direction of destruction.
My mother comes back.
"Delivery," she says, in the voice that means absolutely not a delivery.
"Mum."
"I handled it." She looks at the glowing walls and her expression is the expression she has been holding back since we arrived, something large and careful that she has been keeping behind the practical face of opening doors and making tea. "They've come before. They'll come again. We have a little time." She looks at me. "Use the room."
She goes to make tea.
I look at Lucian. He nods toward the walls.
I turn back to my childhood.
The drawings are still lit, every line of every piece of work on every surface, and now that the urgency of the knock has settled I can look at them properly, the way I couldn't when the glow first came up and the scale of it knocked the breath out of me.
My school, drawn at age six, the specific angle of the front steps, and in the corner of the drawing a set of symbols I thought at age six were decoration. They are not decoration. They are coordinates, in the symbol language of the island, marking the building's position on the web of magic that runs beneath the city.
A six-year-old's crayon drawing of her school is a precise magical map reference.
I move along the wall. The market near the house, drawn at eight, crowded and busy and in the upper left corner, where the market opens onto the wider road, a cluster of the root-form symbols, the oldest version. Another coordinate. Another point on the web.
My street. My neighbour's house. The park three roads over where my mother used to take me on weekends. Every ordinary location of my ordinary childhood, recorded by a hand that was being very thorough and very organised about something my conscious mind had no access to.
The Sight was mapping the city.
The web runs under Lagos the way it runs under the island, invisible and structural, and a child who spent her whole life in one city and drew everything she saw was apparently doing fieldwork she wasn't aware of, and the fieldwork connects, every location linking to the next in the web's grammar, the same language I read on the island walls, and underneath all of it, running deepest, the specific pulse of the anchor point directly below where I'm standing.
I've been standing above it my whole life.
Something shifts in my chest. Not dramatically, not the large physical unlocking of the island door, something quieter than that. The specific shift that happens when a thing that has been heavy for a very long time is finally identified as the weight it actually is rather than the weight you assumed it was.
I thought the visions were a burden. A thing that happened to me that I had to manage and contain and keep at a careful distance so it didn't take over the life I was trying to build. I thought the paintings were evidence of something wrong with me, something that needed to be sold out of the flat quickly so it couldn't stare at me.
It wasn't a burden. It was a record. A careful, thorough, lifelong record made by a part of me that understood exactly what it was doing and trusted that the rest of me would eventually catch up.
I look at the drawing I made at age two, the one at the very bottom of the wall near the floor, small and imprecise and unmistakably the ruins. My first drawing. The island, before I could spell my own name.
I sit down on the floor in front of it.
I sit with it for a long moment and I let myself feel the full weight of the lightness, which sounds like a contradiction and isn't, because some things only feel light once you've understood how heavy they actually were, and the understanding itself takes a moment.
Lucian is in the doorway.
I know he's there because I can feel the shift in the room that happens when he enters a space, the specific quality of his attention settling around the edges of things, and I don't turn around yet because I'm not ready to arrange my face.
I look at the drawing on the wall. I look at the symbols in the corners of every picture, the secret record hiding in the decoration of a childhood, and I think about thirty years of a Sight that trusted the process even when the person carrying it didn't.
I stand up and turn around.
He is standing in the doorway and he is looking at me with his face in the fully open version, the one that has been appearing more since the door, and the quality of it is different from anything I've seen in it before, something that has gone past the careful nothing and past the unguarded exhaustion and arrived somewhere more final, more settled.
He doesn't know it's visible. That's the thing. He is looking at me and his whole face is saying something enormous and he doesn't know his face is saying it.
My mother appears behind him in the corridor with two cups of tea and she looks at his face and she looks at me and she mouths two words.
Slowly. Clearly. Making sure I see.
I shake my head.
She nods. Firmly. Once.
Yes.
From downstairs, the front door opens without a knock.