The mountain let us go without comment. That would have to count as a blessing.
We split at the elevator like a cell deciding to become two lives. Navarro and Haruto took the service level, where crates and rope and vials knew their jobs. Marcus and I rose toward the mask—glass, carpet, a lobby orchid pretending it had not been born in a factory.
Wear the gray suit. Elara's voice stayed with me, practical as a wrench. Bring me their pens.
Marcus scanned the street from behind sunglasses that never reflected the same thing twice. "We're not going to learn anything true," he said, "but we'll learn what they hope is true."
"And then we write it for them," I said.
He almost smiled. "Attaboy."
The consortium loved mirrors. The ballroom ceiling reflected a forest of chandeliers and men who called lies "narratives" and secrets "verticals." Everything smelled faintly of citrus polish and the kind of money that never touched dirt.
A keynote speaker described a future where data centers lived underground, "synergizing geothermal profiles with sustainable cloud." Slides flashed: heat maps, airflow schematics, the word innovate used unforgivably often.
I could feel my father's ghost trying to sit in my mouth. I kept my lips closed until the urge passed.
Marcus posted by the bar where nothing tasted like anything and watched exits the way cartographers watch rivers. I took a plate I wouldn't eat from and shook hands I would wash later. Men in suits told me the stories they were rehearsing for each other. I said "cooling load" and "foundation shear" and "water-rights escrow" until even my blood sounded like filings.
An older man with a smile that was all acquisition introduced himself as Laughton. His tie cost a forest. His handshake was a contract's idea of intimacy. "Mr. Hale," he said, as if we were old friends and also competitors. "Your father liked windows. You like basements. There's poetry in that."
"I like stability," I said.
"And privacy," he said, letting the second word enjoy itself too much. "Whispers say your foundation runs deep."
"The geology is cooperative," I said. Don't eat the canapés. Bring back pens.
Laughton slid a brochure across the bar. Renderings of towers that were lies, diagrams of thermal loops that were almost true. "We're assembling a coalition," he said. "Public-private. Underground facilities that don't fear audit because they define it. We value visionaries." His eyes flicked, just once, to the floor as if he could see the mountain through the carpet. "And the… unconventional."
"What do you mean by unconventional?" I asked, all innocence taught by wolves.
"Load profiles that don't map to racks," he said smoothly. "Biological research that prefers the terms subsurface and discretion." He watched my face for flinch and got none. "We're friends to pioneers."
Subsurface. The word had the wrong teeth in its mouth.
Marcus's phone buzzed once in my pocket—the prearranged ghost of a text. I checked it like a man bored with weather. A photo filled the screen. A close crop of a forearm with a snake tattoo coiled around a compass rose. The caption: BRIDGE BOY. LOBBY.
Our poacher. Washed, collared, drinking from a glass he couldn't afford alone.
Laughton kept speaking. "We help write building codes," he said. "We make inspection regimes efficient. We purchase risk the way other men purchase timber. Our coalition has an appetite for anomalies, Mr. Hale."
"I prefer predictability," I said.
"No one does," he said. "Not really."
"Your pen?" I asked, smiling like a man who collects odd things. "I like the weight."
He blinked at the change of weather, then recovered and handed me a silver pen with his company's logo embossed where conscience might have been. "Keep it," he said. "Consider it a token."
I clicked it once. The weight was wrong. Too heavy for ink. Laughton's smile didn't reach his eyes.
Later, I told myself. Later we open the pen and ask what it thought it was going to hear.
Across the room, Marcus's posture changed—a fractional angle that meant game on. The man with the snake tattoo laughed too loudly at a joke that didn't exist and drifted toward the doors as if pulled by tide.
"Excuse me," I told Laughton. "Duty calls."
"Duty," he said warmly. "Or destiny."
Both, I thought, and went to where Marcus's eyes pointed.
Tasmania, three time zones away, had a different idea of afternoon. Navarro and Haruto stepped off a bush plane into air that smelled like tea-tree and rain. The pilot tipped two fingers to his cap. "Shed's where the map says," he told them, not asking what two people from nowhere were doing following a rumor. "Watch the wallabies. They'll steal your food and your religion."
The track was a crease in the scrub. The creek line matched the map as if memory had drawn it. The shed was a scar that had the decency to age.
Navarro moved like a story the land already knew. Haruto moved like reverence learning to carry a pack. They spoke only when the land asked a question.
"Audio recorder here," Haruto said, planting one at the edge of the clearing. "Trail cam to cover the game trail. Lure—no dogs," he added, almost to himself.
"No dogs," Navarro agreed. "We don't court ghosts by inviting the wrong ancestors."
They spent the first hour erecting ritual: scent lures that were not lies so much as invitations; a strip of fresh kangaroo meat placed not as bait but as proof that the world could still be generous; a blanket in the shed for the kind of waiting that teaches you what your bones are for.
Night came in pieces. Rain wrote on the roof in a handwriting Navarro pretended to know. Haruto checked his watch, then pretended not to.
"I know what it's like," he said into the dark, surprising himself with a confession. "To want a thing so much you court delusion. To be ready to forgive a trick because you love the shape of it."
Navarro smiled without teeth. "And I know what it's like to be right after everyone decided you were wrong. They don't forgive you for that either."
He chuckled once, soft. "We'll be wrong until we aren't."
"And then wrong about something else," she said, and the rain approved.
The recorder blinked a small green truth. The cam watched. The meat breathed its generous breath. The first night decided to end without deciding anything else. They slept the kind of sleep you carry in pieces.
The consortium became panels. Men said resilience and meant profit. Women asked about compliance and meant permission to cheat better. Marcus ghosted, brushing shoulders, mapping exits, watching the snake-tattoo man text without smiling.
Between panels, Laughton herded a handful of us into a smaller room where the mirrors were subtler and the coffee more honest. "We're drafting a letter of intent," he said. "Public-private partnership. Tax abatements for deep-foundation sites that meet novel thermal criteria. We can get permits no one else can."
"Congratulations," a woman in a navy dress said. "You've discovered lobbying."
Laughton beamed. "We've perfected it."
I watched the pen in my pocket as if it had legs. Bring me their pens. Sometimes Elara's voice sounds like common sense wearing a lab coat; sometimes it sounds like a prophecy. I turned the pen in my hand and felt the seam where plastic met secret.
"Gentlemen," I said, standing when no one wanted me to, "if you're serious about underground, you'll need to become botanists. Your airflow models don't account for humidity spikes that have nothing to do with human occupancy. Your heat budgets assume machines obey schedules. Dirt doesn't. You can't force earth to behave like a spreadsheet; you have to design with its rhymes."
Several men frowned. A woman scribbled and nodded. Laughton looked like he had just met a new kind of animal and wanted to feed it money.
"And your security posture," I added, turning, letting my voice drop into the register that made rooms decide to listen. "If you build where you think no one will look, you are playing a child's game. Assume drones. Assume corporate espionage that calls itself procurement. Assume a regulator who thinks curiosity is a virtue. Your mask needs a soul, gentlemen. Or it will starve."
Marcus texted: SNAKE EXITING SOUTH. Then: DOORMAN GETS NAME: "BRAD." Then a photo of a business card picked up with two fingers: Operations Associate, Laughton Strategic.
Of course. Poachers graduate. Markets diversify. Greed is a passport.
I put the pen back in my pocket and smiled without affection at the room.
"I'll consider your coalition," I lied. "Send me the letter."
"We already have," Laughton said.
Yara's text hit my wrist at the same moment: EMAIL FROM COALITION. ATTACHMENT FLAGGED. LIKELY BEACON. DO NOT OPEN. Then, a second later: I OPENED IT IN A BOX. IT TOLD ME A JOKE ABOUT METADATA. WE DIDN'T LAUGH.
I shook hands and left before the room could invent another word for hunger.
Tasmania's second night learned our names.
It began with the yelp, clipped and improbable, puncturing silence like a thumb through paper. Haruto's hand crushed Navarro's sleeve; Navarro's knife found her palm and then put itself away.
The recorder caught it clean. The camera caught something else: a flash at the edge of frame, low and quick, tail carried stiff, head turning not like a fox or a dog but like a question with a spine.
"Don't move," Navarro whispered. "It knows the shed is a lie."
Haruto closed his eyes because sometimes that sharpens the rest.
The yelp came again, farther left, then a rustle where tea-tree forgot its manners. Something crossed the clearing without asking their permission to be ancient.
"Visual," Navarro breathed, impossibly calm. "Backline, between the stringybark and the stump."
Haruto opened his eyes into a world that wasn't ready for this. He saw it because his whole life had been practice for the three seconds the universe would offer him. The back—sloped. The tail—thick then thin. The stripes—there and gone like memory's favorite trick.
He did not stand. He did not cry. He did not say thylacine out loud in case the name broke something delicate.
The animal paused in profile—there is a god for profiles who loves scientists—and looked at the shed where two hearts had stopped and then gone carefully on. Its mouth opened. The yelp came again, softer, almost amused. Then it melted into scrub and took the universe with it.
Navarro let out a breath not even she had known she'd been holding. "Okay," she said, and smiled in the dark like a person who'd cheated death by believing in life. "Okay."
Haruto's eyes shone in the shed's thin light. "We need hair. Scat. Print. Anything."
"And an exit plan," Navarro added, already on her knees at the threshold, reading dirt with her fingertips. "We're not the only ones who brought questions to this place."
On cue, her phone hummed—the secure line Yara wore like a second skin reaching across oceans.
YARA: Heads up. Procurement chatter spiked on your grid square. Not poachers. Surveyors with clever words. Maybe government, maybe someone wearing the word for fun. Two vehicles. Thirty minutes out if they keep believing their map.
Navarro's laugh was short and holy. "Always a party," she said. "Pack the church."
Haruto killed the recorder and slipped the card into his breast pocket as if tucking in a child. Navarro swept the floor with a branch until their presence looked like the wind's. They pocketed the lure. They left the meat—generosity didn't get revoked because men were coming.
"Proof?" Haruto asked, eyes on the dirt, the creek, the corner where the animal had been.
Navarro crouched where the clearing narrowed and pointed. In the damp: a print that didn't belong to any dog, rear pad narrower, middle toes aligned, claw marks faint to absent.
"Print," she said softly. "And here—" She lifted a twig with a hair caught like a secret between its teeth. "Gift."
Haruto's hands shook. He made them stop. "We go," he said, as if teaching himself the word.
They went.
The hotel had decided it was evening. The mirrors changed color accordingly. Marcus and I walked out beneath a chandelier that looked like it had been designed by a god who envied ice.
Snake Tattoo—Brad—stood in the porte-cochère pretending to smoke a cigarette and actually texting. He looked up when I passed as if the scent of his bad decisions had attracted something it didn't understand.
"Mr. Hale?" he said, trying the name on like a stolen coat.
"Brad," I answered, and didn't pretend we'd met. His pupils tightened. The compass rose around his wrist seemed to spin. "Tell Laughton he should fire you for being late to ideas."
He flushed the color of a sky daring itself to storm. "I don't know what you mean."
"I know," I said kindly, and kept walking. Marcus fell in next to me with the satisfied quiet of a man who has recorded everything and will remember it in order.
Back in the car, I clicked Laughton's pen open.
A microphone the size of a freckle stared up at me like a disappointed child. Marcus laughed once without humor and plucked it free with tweezers he kept in the glove box because he is the kind of man who keeps tweezers in a glove box.
"Hungry pen," he said. "Let's teach it a diet."
I texted Yara a picture. Souvenir.
She replied with one of her own: a hair against a ruler, banded pale and dark in a way dogs don't bother with. Souvenir.
Haruto? I typed.
HARUTO: Alive. Three notes exactly like the recording. Print and hair. Leaving before the island remembers we don't belong.
I closed my eyes and let the mountain come back to me through distance. Wolves, water, stone. A cat on a platform teaching a room to be honest. A shed in scrub where a century had taken a breath and then, perhaps, decided to keep going.
We were not ready for what any of it meant. We went anyway.
Marcus's phone buzzed again. A low chime we'd assigned to emergencies we wouldn't describe out loud in rooms with mirrors.
Yara's message lit the screen:
DRONE OVERLAY RETURNED. SAME OPERATOR. NEW ALTITUDE. HE SAW OUR MASK SMILE AND WANTS TO SEE ITS TEETH. ETA: TEN MINUTES.
At the same moment, Navarro's voice slid through my earpiece from a hemisphere away, whisper-joy and warning braided together:
"Visual again," she breathed. "Backline. Closer. Stripes… confirmed."
Two rooms. One truth.
The world inhaled.