I look at the photos the crew has printed of the corpse tree, and then at a painter’s illustration of Oliviero Cortes. He doesn’t look as intimidating as one might think, whatever his exploits with Magellan. “Cortes wanted to steal the Diwata’s power,” I say, finally. “This is his punishment. The eight deaths aren’t rewards.”

“Karl didn’t steal from your god.”

“He drinks.”

Hemslock chuckles despite himself. “Your god preaches sobriety? He’s mad that Karl likes beer?”

“He drinks because he wants to forget. Because he committed a terrible thing.”

Hemslock’s face grows more serious. He sits on a chair across from me.

“How did you know?”

I gaze down at my hands. “I saw her, too.”

A long silence stretches between us before he speaks again. “You’re right. He did do something terrible. Hit and run. A teenage girl. Her family was poor, and he paid them off to settle out of court without press. He’s been drinking ever since. He does his job well enough despite it, so we let him be. But it was an accident. He didn’t even know her.”

“No,” I say. “He did.”

Hemslock doesn’t look surprised by that revelation. “And how did you find that out?”

“The living bring their own ghosts to shore, and only the latter are honest about why.”

He nods. “Yeah, you’re right. He knew the girl. Didn’t want to make him look bad while he’s still missing. I was told that they argued. He got into the car, and she tried to stop him from leaving. He didn’t see her when he—it was still an accident.” He sighs, spreads his hands. “He started drinking after that. Only so much we all could do to help. We’re gonna find him. We have to. You think he’s a candidate to be the fifth sacrifice, don’t you?”

He takes my silence as confirmation and turns back to the board. “Fourth to birth. I thought at first that the pregnant woman was the sacrifice. I was wrong. I think she was collateral damage. It was her all along.” He points at Watson’s picture. “The god chose her for the fourth sacrifice. The riddle doesn’t talk about the sacrifice’s condition. It talks about what is the sacrifice’s purpose. Ironically Watson killing that woman qualified her to be a sacrifice herself. And now she’s birthed all these fucking tree monsters that keep coming after us.”

I say nothing again, and he smiles, satisfied. “And you knew all this, didn’t you? I can believe that you didn’t know anything about the cultists since that was before you were even born, but you would have known the specifics of the ritual. We’re paying you to tell us this shit. So why didn’t you?”

I meet his gaze. “There have been far too many people trespassing here, hoping to recreate the ritual. The cultists came the closest, but they weren’t the first.”

He nods. “Cortes was one of the first recorded, I assume. But there would have been other Filipinos on the island who’d tried to wrest control from Lapulapu. Just like Watson. She learned what Cortes had. She tore the pages of that journal because it showed her exactly how to perform the ritual. But it backfired.”