"The walls look worse today," Bryce noted, and then slipped something out of his pocket. It was the knife I’d found.
"There's a problem with the condition of this knife," he muttered as we headed back to the intact barracks room where our mystery man had once set up camp. It was empty, of course. "Lyra, whoever owned this knife took great care of it, and it strikes me as odd that this rust looks so new. It’s covered in rust, but the metal around it is gleaming and polished. The rust itself is all made up of small specks, they haven’t had time to grow. A knife usually wouldn’t rust before the shine dulled, even if it was exposed to the elements."
I listened to him as we moved into the room, scanning to make sure nothing nefarious was lying in wait for us. "Could it be a side effect of the meld?" I suggested as we reached the barracks room.
"Maybe," Dorian said. "Things are different here. It's like time is staying the same, but the plants are moving far faster than they should." His handsome glacial eyes darted up to the ceiling, and I followed his gaze. A branch had lodged itself in the ceiling of the barracks room. It had caused a ceiling tile to fall, creating a white pile of crumbling debris that wasn't there the day before. A sunbeam passed through the hole, illuminating the area so we no longer needed any extra lanterns to see in the darker corners of the barricaded areas.
"The forest is eating this place," Bryce grumbled as he rooted around the room. We all went to work, picking over the items to see if there was anything of note. My fingers danced across the wall near the bedroll, which was tattered and faded, as if it hadn’t been used for years. I found a strange bulge coming out of the wood of the wall. With my fingernail, I scraped at it, and my nail caught the razor-thin edge of a panel.
"There's something here," I told them, and tugged on the tile. It came out easily enough, clearly having been used frequently. Inside was a broken compass and a note.
Don't forget who you are, Joseph.
Reading it chilled me to my bones. It seemed our theory was right that Joey was the person we were tracking. Bryce groaned.
"Was it a reminder to himself?" he wondered. "Perhaps he was going mad out here. If the trees grow like this and move, it could drive anyone to insanity."
I held the note and then handed it over to the others, letting them pass it around. Sike held it up to the light. I grabbed the broken compass and ran my thumb over the shattered glass in the front. Why would he hold on to a cryptic note and a busted compass?
My breath caught as I turned the compass and the needle spun wildly.
"Something's wrong with this thing, and it's more than the glass," I muttered, and tested it. No matter where I turned, the compass rotated every which way, as if it couldn't get a lock on anything.
Cam peered at it with me. "Perhaps the Leftovers are letting off disruptive magnetic waves. It might explain why our technology is only working periodically."
Whoever this Joseph was, he kept these things because he’d thought they were important.
"Let's take them with us."
We found nothing else inside the room that we hadn't spotted yesterday. As we passed through the building, I reevaluated the crumbling walls. There was far too much damage to be explained by a few months’ exposure to the elements. Things were deteriorating here. How was this possible? Maybe Bryce was right. Just like the knife and the walls, things were aging far faster than they were supposed to. The knife was probably pristine two days ago. I noticed a bit of rust on the compass. Yet, the wood in the building was holding up rather well. Some materials are aging faster than others. Maybe we can get some information about it from Sike's measurements.
Cam approached the closed door and stopped abruptly. I slammed into him, having been focused on the compass.
"Something's out there," he whispered. "Did you hear that? I think… it's the creature."
I had fought my fair share of monsters, and yet, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I hadn't heard anything except the sway of the trees. I strained to listen as Dorian pushed gently past us to get to the front. Sike fired up the scanner.
If I listened closely, I could hear the tree branches scraping together despite the lack of a breeze. Except now, I wasn't sure it was the trees. It sounded like nails softly scraping on a chalkboard. It was so light that I barely registered it until Cam pointed it out. My skin pricked with dread. We had been hearing the creature subtly the entire time, but we hadn't known what we were listening to.
A wall buckled, and I jerked away from it, surprised by the sudden decay. This building was falling apart. Dorian shot me an urgent look and gently pried the door open to peer outside. The sound grew louder. I could hear it clearly now.
Dorian let out an exasperated breath and threw the door the rest of the way open. Instead of a fierce monster, an injured blue rodent with spiky fur huddled before the doorframe. It was limping badly, its injuries identifying it as the one we’d seen yesterday. Its ears, wide and large with plenty of fur, twitched, making the same sound as the trees.
"It's hurt, but alive," Cam muttered, impressed. The twitching ears were so loud, up close. "I think that might be another distress
