As Lo neared the trailers, an abrupt rustling in the trees, a lifting, made her leap back. Gray-bellied seagulls, apparently spooked by the eclipse, exploded out of the branches and Dumpsters, like winged shards of glass from a smashed window, scattering in all directions.

The droning voices were sharper now, grown almost painful. Calling on her. Like a chorus of the damned, the cacophony rising from a whisper to a roar and back again, struggling to articulate one word, sounding like, as best she could make out:

“…hhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrHERE.”

She set down her headphones on the edge of the tarmac, hanging on to her filtered glasses for when the eclipse ended. She veered away from the Dumpsters and their rank garbage smell, instead going toward the large storage trailers. The sound seemed to be emanating not from inside the trailers, but maybe from behind them.

She walked between two six-foot-tall containers and around an old decaying airplane tire, coming upon another row of older, pale green containers. Now she felt it. Not just heard the thrum but felt it, a nest of voices vibrating in her head and in her chest. Beckoning to her. She placed her hand on the containers but felt no pulsation there, then continued forward, slowing at the corner, leaning out.

Set on top of the blown trash and uncut, sun-bleached grass was a large, ancient-looking, ornately carved black wooden box. She ventured into the small clearing, wondering why someone would throw such an obviously well-maintained antique all the way back here. Theft—organized and otherwise—was a fact of life at the airport; maybe someone had stashed it here, planning to swing by later to pick it up.

Then she noticed the cats. The outer airport was crawling with wild cats. Some of them were pets who had escaped their transport cages. Many had simply been released onto airport property by locals looking to get rid of unwanted pets. Worst of all were the travelers who abandoned their cats at the airport rather than pay high kennel fees. Domestic cats who did not know how to fend for themselves in the wild, and who, if they avoided becoming prey to larger animals and survived, joined the colony of feral cats roaming the hundreds of acres of undeveloped airport property.

The skinny cats all sat on their hindquarters, facing the cabinet. A few dozen of these mangy, dirty felines—until Lo looked at the trash-strewn tree and along the hurricane fence, and saw that there were in fact close to a hundred of these feral cats, sitting and facing the wooden box, paying her no attention.

The box wasn’t vibrating, wasn’t emitting the noise she had been attuned to. She was mystified, after coming all this way, to discover something this strange here on the outskirts of the airport—and that was not, in fact, the source she was seeking. The thrumming chorus went on. Were the cats tuned in to it as well? No. Their focus was on the closed cabinet.