Ah...

The rest of the dead.

At first I thought animals had been digging. Then I stepped closer and saw what the digging had uncovered.

Dozens. Dozens of trenches. Rows of them. And they had been opened recently.

I stood at the edge of the nearest one and looked down. Bones. Hundreds. No, thousands. The trench continued farther than I could comfortably see, and every section of exposed earth contained more remains.

For a while I just stared, because it turns out there is no proper emotional preparation for accidentally discovering a mass grave belonging to species that are not supposed to exist. 

Some skeletons were almost human until you reached the waist, where the spine continued into the body of a four-legged animal. Centaurs. Actual centaurs. Others had skulls with a single orbital socket in the center of the face. Cyclopes.

You do not need a degree in biology to recognize the skeleton of a child.

I stood there for a long time, looking across the trenches.

The journal had convinced me a genocide happened. This was worse. The UN had not wiped out a single people. 

They had wiped out an entire world.

Naturally, after discovering dragons and centaurs, I decided following the mysterious humming noise was a reasonable life choice.

I followed it through the trees until I found a cave. The entrance exhaled cold air that smelled faintly of ozone.

Suspended in the center of the chamber was a slowly rotating purple vortex, surrounded by crawling arcs of lightning.

A wound in the air itself.

I stared.

The vortex pulsed once. Then again. Then it began to shrink. Slowly at first, then faster. The light dimmed. The opening contracted inward. The edges drew together.

I don't know how I knew. I just did. This was the door. The door through which all of them had come.

And it had been closing for fifty years. I had arrived just in time to watch it disappear.

A few moments later, the last trace of purple vanished. The cave fell silent. And the door was gone.

***

The next morning, the weather turned.

Dark clouds gathered over the ocean in enormous rolling masses, swallowing the sunlight piece by piece. The wind strengthened by the hour. Waves struck the shore harder. The trees bent and hissed.

I stood near the beach, staring at the island one last time. The captain came ashore shortly after dawn. His expression told me everything. “We need to leave.”

I spent the next several hours making difficult decisions. The dragon. The graves. The impossible portal. Evidence scattered everywhere. Enough evidence to rewrite history. Enough evidence to shake governments. Enough evidence to shatter humanity's understanding of itself.

And I could take almost none of it.

Even photographs would be questioned. Fabrication. Editing. Special effects. Modern technology had made disbelief convenient.

I needed something physical, unmistakable, something impossible.

A thing that should not exist. A thing that had existed anyway. One skull. That was all I carried away from an entire erased civilization. It would have to be enough.

Hours later lines were cast off. The anchor came up. And slowly, almost reluctantly, the ship pulled away from shore.

Nobody lingered on deck except me. The sailors knew better. I stood at the rail and watched the island recede. The shoreline became smaller. The forest became a green smudge. The mountain ridge faded into the distance. And still I watched.

Eventually my eyes found the other ship: Richard's ship. It remained exactly where I had first seen it. No movement, no crew, no Richard. Nothing. I watched it until distance reduced it to a tiny shape against the shore.

Then that too disappeared.

And just like that, the greatest discovery in human history ceased to exist except inside my head and within a crate below deck containing a single skull.

***

The captain turned us toward home.

The irony wasn't lost on me. Years spent chasing the wrong coordinates. Years spent searching for the wrong island. And the real location had been practically next door all along.

Normally I would have spent the journey reviewing evidence or preparing arguments. Instead, I spent most of my time sitting alone and thinking. 

The dragon. I still couldn't quite believe it. Even now, when I closed my eyes, I could see the enormous ribcage emerging from the earth.

Sometimes, late at night aboard the ship, I wondered whether that was why Richard had vanished.

But even that wasn't what occupied most of my mind. Mostly, I thought about Zainab. About the expression on her face before I left. The tension in her shoulders. The fear she had tried to hide. The waterproof book cover. The baby. Especially the baby.

Whenever my thoughts drifted toward dragons, graves, portals, conspiracies, or missing rivals, they eventually circled back to the same place.

Home.

I was coming home early. Earlier than planned, earlier than promised.

***

By the time I reached the house, I was already planning how many times I intended to mention that I had returned early. Not because I wanted praise. No, I absolutely deserved it.

I opened the front door. The house was quiet. Weird quiet. Wrong quiet.

I found Zainab in the kitchen.

She was standing in front of an open cabinet, holding a bottle of pills in one hand.

On the counter: a prescription slip. The date was printed clearly on the label. I'd memorized that date the moment she'd said the words: “I'm pregnant.” The prescribing physician was named Sasha. Mm...

I pulled my eyes away from it and looked at Zainab.

I had seen her composed, amused, annoyed, and occasionally, against all odds, happy. What I was looking at now was none of those things. Her face was completely still. Composed. But the composure was the problem, Zainab never had to try to be composed. This was effort.

It was, I realized, the most frightening thing I had ever seen.

Then she saw me. “Dexter?”

For the first time in years, I saw genuine shock on her face. The bottle vanished into the cabinet so quickly that I almost questioned whether I'd seen it at all.

“You can't be here.” That was her first sentence... Wow.

I blinked. “Hello to you too.”

“The coordinates. You couldn't have traveled there and back this quickly.”

“I reversed them.”

Zainab froze. “You what?”

“Ah. Not Alpha Red. Didn't go there.” I reached for a glass on the counter. “Remember the first Island; the decoy the UN fed the public? I reversed those coordinates.”

“Why??”

My hand stopped mid-reach. The question came out immediately. As though it was something I was never supposed to do...

I stared at her. “I don't know. A whim.”

For several seconds she simply stared back at me. Blinking. Then I explained everything: The dragon skeleton, the graves, the portal. The entire impossible story. Zainab listened without interrupting. By the end of it, she looked horrified. And somehow I knew it wasn't because of my discovery...

I ignored it and smiled. “Still, I made it home early,” I said, glancing at her rounded stomach. “Apparently just in time.”

“No.”

No?

Zainab pressed a hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes and began repeating that single word. “No. No. No.”

“What's wrong?”

“Its nothing.”

I stared at her.  I didn't believe her. Actually, I hadn't believed her for quite a while. The waterproof book cover. That had been the beginning.

“I know the coordinates on Alpha Red were forged to send me on a wild goose chase.” My voice came out cold. I hadn't planned that. It just... was. “The handwriting was yours.”

Silence.

“Your W's are two V's that never quite connect.”

Zainab said nothing.

“You wrote it on the supply list.” I laughed once. “You know, that's exactly why I trusted a whim more than those coordinates.”

Nothing.

“The captain too. The mysterious woman who paid the advance and disappeared. That was you, wasn't it?”

Zainab lowered her hand. Her eyes opened. And for the first time since I'd met her she looked at me without any guard at all. Her shoulders relaxed slightly. The look on her face was one of surrender. “Dexter...”

“Omega Blue wasn't destroyed. You found it. Kept it. Hid it.” I felt sick. 

“Vince found out you gave it to Richard.”

“The real coordinates: 40.2525 N, 58.4396 E. They were in Omega Blue. And that's why Richard reached the island. That's why you were arguing with Vince.”

“Yes. But no.”

I laughed once. A terrible sound. “Geez, pick a side. Which is it?!”

Zainab closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was something almost impressed in her expression. “Every fact is correct.”

The sick feeling didn't go away. It just went cold.

“But your conclusion is completely wrong.”

I laughed again. “Then tell me what conclusion I'm supposed to reach.”

“Dexter.”

“Were you working with Richard?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Dexter.”

“The pills.” I pointed at the cabinet. “Are you—were you going to—”

Zainab winced. “Yes. But not anymore.”

“Why?”

“Dexter.”

I barely heard her. If she had lied about this... If she had hidden this... Then another thought surfaced. An ugly one. A thought that never really occurred to me until now. The sentence burst out before I could stop it.

“Is the child even mine?”

The slap landed before I finished processing my own question.

I had never heard her sound like that.

“I would never betray you like that.” Silence. Then she continued. “It was Vince.”

I blinked.

“He found Omega Blue and stole it from me.”

“What?”

“He sold it to Richard and joined his expedition team.” The room suddenly felt very small. “He needed money. He said you stopped caring. That after we got married he lost his best friend.”

I couldn't speak.

“I don't know what you heard but the argument wasn't about me confessing to Vince.” Her voice hardened. “It was about me accusing him.”

The argument. Omega Blue. Everything. Before I could speak, Zainab suddenly winced. Her hand moved to her stomach. I instinctively stepped forward. “Zain?”

She inhaled sharply. Then looked down. A few seconds passed. “Oh.”

My heart dropped. “Oh?”

Zainab looked up at me. “My water broke.”

***

I never understood why Zainab hated hospitals.

Okay, that wasn't entirely true. I understood the reasons she gave. What I didn't understand was how those concerns continued to outweigh what seemed, to me, like the very obvious advantage of being surrounded by medical professionals when a baby decided it was time to arrive.

Hence, the moment her water broke, I suggested a hospital again. The nearest one was only twenty minutes away.

It didn't matter. Even through the pain, she refused immediately. Completely. Absolutely.

Under normal circumstances I would have argued. But one look at her face informed me further discussion would be both pointless and hazardous to my continued well-being.

So I offered the only alternative I had thought of. My sister. Sasha was a physician. At that moment, I had never been more grateful for another human being's career choices.

She lived about forty minutes away in the opposite direction. Not ideal. Nothing about the situation was. But she was trained, she knew Zainab, and most importantly, Zainab tolerated her, which for Zainab was practically an official endorsement.

When I suggested it, she nodded emphatically. It wasn't the home birth she had planned. But it wasn't a hospital either. So we left immediately. When we arrived, Sasha opened the door, took one look at Zainab, then another look at my face.

Whatever she saw there convinced her not to ask questions. She simply stepped aside and let us in.

***

I'd always imagined this moment differently.

A hospital room. A bed. Me sitting beside Zainab, pretending to be calm while secretly panicking. 

Instead, I had been exiled to Sasha's living room.

Since arriving, I had spent my time rotating between sitting, standing, and pacing. Occasionally I tried staring at a wall for variety. It did not help.

At first the sounds from the bedroom had been manageable. Controlled breathing. Sasha's calm voice. The sort of noises that allowed a person to pretend everything was proceeding according to plan.

Then the hours passed and the breathing became harder. Strained. Painful.

Every few minutes I checked the clock. Somehow an hour would have passed. Then another. And through it all my mind kept circling back to the same thing: Vince. It had been Vince. Not Zainab.

Which solved one problem and created another. Because if Zainab had never betrayed me, if she had never hidden an affair, if she had never been working with Richard, then one question remained.

Why?

I didn't want the answer. But it was forming anyway: why she sent me to fake coordinates, hired the captain to delay me. Her reaction when I revealed I reversed the coordinates. The pills in the kitchen cabinet. The UN had kept this secret for fifty years. They'd have people. People whose job was making sure no one dug too deep. I didn't want to believe it. But it fit. Everything fit. What agent would want a pregnancy complicating her assignment?

I was halfway across the living room when I suddenly stopped. Something felt wrong.

The house was silent.

Far too silent.

I hadn't heard anything from the bedroom for a while.

Before I could decide whether that was good or bad, the door opened. Sasha stepped out. Her face was pale. My heart immediately attempted to abandon ship.

I asked about Zainab. Sasha blinked. “Huh? Oh, she's fine. Tired, but fine.”

Relief hit me so hard I nearly sat down on the floor. But I knew there was still one person unaccounted for.

Sasha hesitated. Her eyes shifted away from mine. “T-The baby is... w-well...”

That was enough. I brushed past her and shoved the door open.

Immediately, I heard crying. A baby's cry. Loud. Healthy. Absolutely furious about being born.

I stopped moving. The baby was alive. The baby was fine. I placed both hands on my waist and exhaled. The worst fear I had ever experienced quietly collapsed.

Zainab sat propped against pillows, exhausted, drenched in sweat, but alive. In her arms was our child. Still crying. Still incredibly furious.

I crossed the room.

Zainab watched me the entire time, and by the time I reached the bedside I found myself slowing down without really meaning to.

For a moment I simply stood there beside her, staring.

Then, carefully, as though I might somehow startle the situation into disappearing, I held out my hands.

Zainab looked up at me immediately. Her eyes met mine and did not look away.

At first I thought she was simply tired, which would have been completely reasonable considering what she had just accomplished. But the longer I looked at her the more I noticed something else hiding beneath the exhaustion.

Something fragile.

Only then did I notice her fingers. They were gripping the towel wrapped around the baby just a little too tightly. My confusion must have shown on my face. “Zain?”

She blinked. Then blinked again. Rapidly enough that it looked suspiciously like someone trying very hard not to cry.

That realization startled me so much that I almost forgot about the baby entirely.

Zainab lowered her eyes toward the bundle in her arms. She stayed that way for a few seconds, staring quietly at our child. Then she looked back at me.

Neither of us spoke.

The room seemed oddly quiet despite the crying.

Zainab continued looking at me, and I found myself looking right back, waiting...

Then, eventually, her fingers loosened their grip on the towel. And without taking her eyes off mine, she finally held the child out to me.

I took the baby into my arms. She was still crying. The first thing I noticed was how small she was. Alarmingly small. I looked down at her feet. Then, for reasons I cannot adequately explain, I started counting her toes.

One. Two. Three. By the time I reached ten, I realized I had not consciously decided to do this. Ten perfect toes. I almost laughed. I wasn't entirely sure why.

My gaze drifted upward. One tiny fist was waving angrily through the air opening and closing as she protested her circumstances with admirable enthusiasm.

I found myself wanting to touch it.

But the fist looked so small I was genuinely concerned I might accidentally damage something important simply by making contact. So I stared.

Then my attention wandered to her face.

It was scrunched up from crying and red from the effort. Her nose was tiny. Tiny, squashed, a ridiculous little thing. I loved it. And her ea—

I stared. The silence stretched. Blinking did not help so I looked again. Carefully. Just to make sure.

The ears remained the same.

Pointed ears. My daughter had long, pointed ears.

That sentence formed inside my head. Then formed again. Somehow it failed to become more understandable the second time.

Very slowly, and very reluctantly, I lifted my gaze.

Zainab was watching me. Her eyes were wet. With... tears.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a completely unrelated thought appeared, wondering whether I had ever seen Zainab cry before.

I looked back at the ears. Then at Zainab. Then back at the ears. Then at Zainab again.

And somewhere during that increasingly unproductive sequence, something else caught my attention.

Slowly, I turned my head and looked at Zainab's enormous afro.

The hair she never cut. The hair she always kept high, full, and absurdly wide. The hair I had spent years affectionately describing as my navigational aid.

I stared at it. Then at the pointed ears. Then back at the hair.

Ah...