“What we need is to get off this island,” someone else wails. “I don’t want whatever got Karl to get me!”

A babble of voices respond, the noise growing louder with every second. Hemslock raises two fingers to his mouth and whistles shrilly, breaking through the mayhem.

“Anyone who wants to leave the island is free to do so, as soon as the helicopter arrives,” he says. “I won’t stop any of you. I’d ask Alon here to ferry you all back to the mainland if you don’t want to wait, but that boat isn’t going to hold more than three, maybe four people at a time—”

“No,” I say, interrupting him.

“What?”

I point wordlessly at the sky, where dark clouds have been looming on the horizon since our return. Askal whimpers quietly beside me, staring upward as well. “It’s coming up fast. We’d be caught in the storm before we’re more than halfway across.”

Hemslock scowls. “Which means the helicopter isn’t likely to make it here in time, either.”

“We’re delaying filming indefinitely until we find Karl,” Gries decides.

“I’m not going back in there!” the researcher says violently. “I don’t care if you don’t pay me. I’m never going back in that cave after…after that!”

“I got it running,” comes the breathless response from the workstation where Straw Hat is hunched over, running through the footage that the group had recorded inside the caves before everything turned to chaos. “Here we go, Mr. Gries, Mr. Hemslock.”

Hemslock is by his side soon enough, with Gries close behind. At least half the group follows, gathering expectantly around the screen as Straw Hat plays the video.

The night vision built into the camera casts the cave in black shadows tinged with an alien green. Hemslock’s voice echoes across the wide cavern, loud and clear and sounding pleased with himself. The lens is from his point of view; I see his hand press against the cave wall, right above where the ancient script had been carved into the surface. “We now have independent evidence of the eight deaths’ curse beyond Key’s and Cortes’s journals. We’re one step closer to unlocking the Godseye’s mystery.”

As he continues to talk, his flashlight plays against the strange letters, highlighting the word the historian had confirmed meant feed.

The scream Leo heard does not register on the playback. I catch sight of myself on the screen, my head jerking toward the producer over a sound that isn’t picked up by the recording. The camera shifts wildly away from me, focusing on Gries’s face, which is as pale as paper. “I can hear someone calling my name. I—it sounds a lot like Elena’s voice,” he says.

And then it is Hemslock’s turn to behave erratically. Something on the rightmost corner of the camera catches my attention—a shadow where there shouldn’t have been, idling by the smaller tunnel the historian said had not been there before. It flits out of view.

“I don’t understand it,” one of the scientists says shakily, staring at the screen before him. “We were thorough. There wasn’t an entrance there. It couldn’t have magically appeared—”