Morning arrived wearing the same face as danger and pretending it was sunlight.
We'd slept in shifts that weren't sleep, drank coffee that wasn't mercy, and learned the way a mountain sounds when it's waiting for you to earn it. The jaguar had taken the night like a cat takes instructions—considered, ignored, then obeyed in a way that made disobedience look like wisdom. The wolves sang and then didn't, which felt like trust insisting on being a verb.
I woke to the low hum of the research wing alive before its people. The screens had learned their owners and lit as our feet came near. On the wall map, dots blinked and paused and lied.
Yara didn't look up as I entered. She was shaping noise, pulling threads from a tangle the world had thrown away. On her left-hand monitor, poacher boards argued with themselves. On the right, the procurement chatter she'd warned us about—men who called animal parts "product," and data centers "vaults," and lives "units."
"Good morning," she said, without looking. "I brought you a ghost."
"Haunting or helpful?" I asked.
She smiled into the screen. "Sometimes they're the same thing."
She hit a key. The center display changed to a field of grainy stills—camera-trap images, time-stamped along a night that had happened years ago and refused to become memory. In four frames: grass. In the fifth: a shape that did not belong to now. A tail thick at the base, thin at the tip. A back with shadows that could have been light lying wrong and could have been stripes.
Haruto stepped in behind me and forgot the mug in his hand. The coffee went cold in one breath. "Where?" he asked, voice small the way a scientist's voice gets when it's flirting with sacrilege.
"Northwest Tasmania," Yara said. "Private trap. The account that posted it went dark. Two days later, a different account insisted it was a dog. Six hours after that, both were gone." She pulled up a second feed: old audio—a short, clipped yelp, not fox, not dog, not anything smug. "Signal analysis says ninety-one percent match to a call last recorded when we still had the arrogance to call a year nineteen thirty—something like that."
"Thylacine," Haruto said, as if the syllables were a door that had waited a hundred years for a hand.
Elara slid into the room and leaned on the back of a chair, hair still damp, eyes bright. "We knew we'd get here," she said quietly. "We just didn't know when the map would have the decency to pencil itself in."
Marcus arrived last and did what he always did—tested the floor with his eyes before he trusted it with his feet. "What's the cover story for flying halfway around the world to rescue a ghost?" he asked.
"The truth," I said. "We're going to look for something we're prepared to be wrong about and ready to be right for."
He tilted his head. "And if the people selling crates decide to add us to their inventory?"
"Then we teach their plans to forget our names," Yara said without looking away from the screen.
Navarro's voice came from the doorway, warm as flint. "I've always wanted to steal a myth," she said, stepping in and hitching her pack higher. "Cats are honest thieves. Stripes are something else."
We didn't go that day. The mountain had not finished the work we'd told it we were doing.
The jaguar's first room—his true room—stood waiting under Elara's hand. Stone ribs had been cored and softened; platforms had been built that weren't platforms until the cat decided they were; a pool mirrored the ceiling and lied to it in a way water does when it hopes you'll forgive it. A tunnel led to a blind so cunning you could read an animal's pain and dress it in stitches without your breath making it worse.
Haruto ran a palm over the ladderwork of bolted trunks that climbed the west wall. "He'll leave a mark," he said, "and the room will be better for it."
"Rooms should be," Elara said. "People too."
We staggered introductions the way a good host staggers toasts. Pérez from enrichment had strung scent threads—jaguar, river otter, tapir—like a story told in languages we could only pronounce badly. The baffles would stay until the cat wrote his own comfort into the stone. The wolves would smell him, he would smell them, and the room would not require that anyone solve that math in a hurry.
"Open," Elara said, and the transfer doors slid with a whisper. She'd re-machined them twice so they would sound like wind and not like memory.
The jaguar walked through without being told. He stood at the pool and counted his sins, then forgave us one. He climbed the nearest trunk halfway and hung there in muscle and thought. He flattened his ears and tested the ceiling with his eyes.
Elara didn't breathe. "Now," she whispered, "we find out if three degrees of flex is prayer or promise."
He pushed. The laminates sang once and held. He moved sideways like ink deciding to be a paragraph. On the far platform, he lay down, put one paw over the other, and looked at us the way kings look at peasants who had better be useful.
Haruto exhaled like a man who had set a bone that deserved to heal. "He'll be fine," he said, meaning we will be.
The wolves watched the new neighbor through smell and patience. The alpha took to standing on the ridge during false dusk, ears forward, as if taking attendance. The juveniles made a game of darting up the slope, stopping, and darting away as if they understood that some gods accept worship best when it looks like defiance.
I moved among them with my ribs speaking quietly. The voice thread that meant enough when a juvenile got too bold, and the one that meant you've done well when the alpha chose consideration over pride. The sanctuary breathed around us—air cycling, water falling, stone doing the only honest thing stone ever does: being itself.
Between rounds, I walked the back corridor where the sketches lived. The new blank page waited with an attitude, like a stage that wanted an opening line. The old boy in me—the one who had drawn hawks with too many feathers—picked up a pencil and gave the page stripes.
Not prisoner bars. Not shadows. Stripes like an argument with extinction and the nerve to win.
Upstairs, the mask put on a tie. We had buyers to mislead and a city to convince we were only what we told it. The letterhead on my desk asked me to join a "closed-door thought leadership consortium" on deep-foundation data centers with nonstandard thermal profiles. The sender's logo was new money and old greed. The meeting was in a hotel that loved mirrors.
"They're coming to you because we did too good a job pretending to be something we don't hate," Yara said, reading over my shoulder and drinking tea that smelled like it had opinions about weather. "If you don't show, they'll find someone else with a shirt and a story. If you do, we write their minutes."
"You want me to go," I said.
"I want them to stop asking questions we haven't taught answers to yet," she said. "Go be their favorite liar."
"Elara?" I asked.
"Wear the gray suit," she said, not looking up from a cross-section of ducting. "Talk about cooling loads until their eyes cross. Sign nothing. Eat nothing. Bring back their pens so I can see what kind of metaphor they think they are."
Marcus leaned on the doorframe and made the decision for me by not arguing with it. "I'll sit in the lobby," he said. "And smile like a man who knows how to read a fire exit."
Navarro slung her pack higher. "And I'll stay home with the cat," she said. "He likes me. He said so with his eyes."
"He said," Haruto corrected gently, "that you are difficult to catch and therefore worth the effort."
"Same thing," she said, pleased.
Before we booked tickets to sell our mask to men who sold masks, the mountain gave us another present.
Yara slid a USB across the table with two fingers and a warning. "This showed up in our dead drop," she said. "No sender. No ransom note. It wasn't mailed. It was placed."
"That's someone who knows where our ghosts go to drink," Marcus said, not happy and already working the problem.
"It came with one word," Yara said. She touched the keyboard, and the main screen printed it in the middle of a black field: STRIPES.
On the drive: three clips. The first was video, shaky and too dark, then suddenly not. A tail. A back. A head that turned once and remembered it didn't belong to our century. It trotted across a track cut into scrub and vanished into tea-tree like a rumor choosing to be true.
The second clip was audio. A short, clipped yelp, three notes that hopped and did not repeat, and something under it like a growl trying on the idea of laughter.
The third was a map. Not GPS. A hand-drawn thing with a creek line and an old shed and a penciled X that had the audacity to be almost believable. In one corner, a block-letter scrawl: NIGHTWATCH—THREE NIGHTS—NO DOGS.
"Trap?" Marcus asked.
"Bait," Navarro said, rolling the word around like a coin. "And I am the fish that believes in miracles."
Haruto swallowed and did not blink. "If there is even a chance—"
"We go," I said.
Elara didn't argue. She put her pencil on the plan and then put her plan on the table and then pressed both palms flat. "We go," she said. "But we do not go stupid."
No one looked at me to see if I understood the difference. They had learned I did and would ignore it if the thing on the other side of the door was worth the danger.
"Two teams," Marcus said, turning into a road map of a human being. "One to the consortium, one to the island. The suit is bait for the men who like rooms with carpet. The island is a room with teeth."
"I'll take the teeth," Navarro said.
"I'll go with her," Haruto said, surprising no one and everyone.
Elara nodded once, already building a second plan behind her eyes, the one where we had to carry a striped body out of a place we'd found too late.
Yara tapped the screen until the map and the audio and the tail learned to share a space. "I'll run cover from here," she said. "Drones, chatter, the mask's mouth."
"And I'll carry your pens," I told Elara.
"And don't eat their canapés," she said.
"I never eat anyone's canapés," Marcus said, offended on principle.
We packed in silence. The kind of silence that belongs to surgeons before the cut and climbers before the exposed traverse. Navarro checked the tranquilizer kit and then checked it again and then put it down and then put it in a different pocket because pockets are superstition and superstition is a tool. Haruto slid a cool box into the crate, full of vials that could be medicine or mercy depending on how the night sang.
I walked the mountain once more before the world reached for us. In the wolf forest, the alpha met my eyes and then did the thing he does when he wants to admit grace without losing face: he yawned. The juveniles mobbed my knees, then pretended they hadn't. I sang to them until sound was breath and breath was promise.
In the jaguar room, the cat watched me from his platform with the lazy attention of an emperor who had learned to trust his keepers enough to ignore them. The ear looked clean. The sutures had settled. He curled his tail, once, like punctuation neither of us could read.
Door, I told him, and the word rang in the stone and didn't leave.
On the roof, Elara and Santi tightened the last clamp on a duct that would teach heat to lie. The valley breathed cold. The lay-by was empty. The sky was not. Somewhere, men in vans were writing down wind and calling it evidence.
"Bring me their pens," Elara reminded me, smiling because she refused to scowl at futures she hadn't met.
"I'll bring you their words," I said.
"Bring me both," Yara said from the doorway, without turning.
Marcus eyed the horizon that had the good manners to pretend to be a line. "Wheels up in two hours," he said. "Wear the gray suit. Pack the other voice."
I touched my throat. The scar there was invisible now until you knew where to look. The voice inside it was not my father's. That would have to be enough.
We split at the elevator—down for Navarro and Haruto, where crates and rope and a cooler waited with their own instructions; up for Marcus and me, where ties and lies lived.
The doors slid shut. In the sliver of mirror that believed it was part of a wall, a man who used to be a boy who drew hawks looked back at me.
"Door," I said to him, to the mountain, to the future that was deciding if it wanted to keep us. "Stay open."
The elevator hummed. The mask smiled. The world inhaled.