The island was beautiful. I remember thinkingThis is paradiseright before vomiting a whole bucket of seawater onto the sand. And I was right. It was paradise.
Martre: And that was—
Rowan: Cerna! Yes, yeah. Sorry to interrupt. Yes. That was Cerna.
Katrine: Do I remember when I arrived on Cerna? Six years ago? Are you really asking me that? Of course I remember. It was a day that changed everything about me, forever.
I don’t want to go into it.
But I’ll tell you this much: I know what it’s like to wake up on an island after a shipwreck, thinking you’re all alone.
Martre: Were you all alone?
Katrine: No. You of all people—
Martre: Because the family was there?
Katrine:... Yes. The family was there. I’m the youngest of the four, the newest to be rescued by the island. I was eleven when I arrived. Idryss and Greta and Odette were already there, obviously, and Idryss was in charge of them, and so it felt natural to let her be in charge of me too.
Anyway. I said I don’t want to talk about her right now. Maybe I don’t want to talk about her ever again. I don’t know.
Martre: What about the day Rowan arrived?
Katrine: What about it? We watched the sea. The ship sank. We watched from afar as the sailors dragged themselves, ragged and half-drowned, onto our shores.
Martre: Were you excited to see them?
Katrine: No.
Rowan: I woke up under the roots of one of those whaddayacallems, the trees that grow by the big river and you can see all their roots? And when I say under, I meanunder—I was squashed between a couple of different sets of roots, and under me was just mud. I felt like I’d lost a fight with a horse. A big drunk horse. I don’t even know how I got under the tree.
I was the first to wake up. I went around rousing the others and we regrouped. Over the course of that day, we got ourselves together. Figured out who was alive.
Out of the hundred that had been on the ship, ten of us made it to the island.
Katrine: Twelve of them made it to the island. Two walked into the forest before Rowan woke up. We’ve never talked about what happened to those two. I think Rowan probably knows, though. Right?
Rowan: We already had the river for water—it let out right into the ocean and the water was clear and clean, so that wasn’t a problem. The little cove we were in was pretty well protected from the elements by these big rock formationsand trees, lots of trees. We split up into teams and started gathering deadfall to build a fire, trying to rig up shelter for that night, looking for food. It was scary, being on our own, the captain and all the officers having gone down with the ship. But we were determined to survive.
Katrine: They were determined to die from the moment they arrived. They ignored all the signs, all our warnings. We’d posted them everywhere, in every language Greta could remember from the ones who had come before. Twenty languages in all. Idryss didn’t like it when we put up the signs. I never knew why back then.
Rowan: There were these signs littered around the cove in all kinds of languages. Only one of them was in —————, though, and anyway only a few of us could read to begin with. I wasn’t one of the ones that could read, but Dane could, and he said that one of the signs read “Do not leave the cove. If you leave the cove, you will die.”
We didn’t know what to make of it. It was a clear... well, a clearsignthat someone had come before us. We thought maybe it was meant to be a warning about a creature in the forest? But we had to leave the cove to find out if there was anything on the island, any other people. So we compromised. We didn’t go anywhere alone. We went in pairs.
It should have worked great—but on the third day, one of the pairs didn’t come back.
Katrine: We put up all those signs! We let the forest grow thick and wild around the cove! We did everything we possibly could to keep them from seeing us. We tried to follow the rule.
Martre: Which rule?
Katrine: The rule. The one Idryss explained to each of us when we woke up on the shore. The rule that says we can see them, but they can’t see us. If they see us, bad things will happen.
Martre: “Bad things”?
Katrine: Don’t pretend you don’t know. This whole time, you could have—
Martre: I just need it in your words.
