Cats Eat Birds - Damian Wayne/OC

77 | CRISTEN ALONE

??? | NIGHT-TIME | CRISTEN

     THE WHIZZING ZETA energy died in Cristen's ears. She didn't feel dizzy, but she definitely felt unprepared. It was hard for her insight to predict what she would meet on the other side when her atoms were getting rearranged by the JL teleporter.

When her vision cleared, she was alone. The forest behind her, lush and blue, spoke quietly with the ocean Cristen faced. Soft sand kissed the breathing waves and the breathing waves would leave the kiss and enter it with each mighty breath, entranced by each other. To Cristen's surprise, the island seemed... serene. Safe. Wind, usually so cruel to Cristen's insight, swirled down the beach, sweet-smelling and damp. On it was the smell of wild fruit blown seaward and then pushed back in, like even the air couldn't escape the precious bubble around the island. Nothing in, nothing out. As nice as it seemed, Cristen knew what had happened here. She wasn't ready to trust it yet. The part of her that loved Damian more than her soul could understand or her body could handle insisted that she wouldn't.

And as serene as the island seemed, the bubble wasn't exactly metaphorical. At the ends of the beach rib cages and spines with rotten, dried flesh beat with the water against the shore. If she stretched her insight out to sea, Cristen could feel... bodies. Decaying in the water after all this time, chained by the ankles and wrists, thrown into the ocean and drowned there. The island may be peaceful now, but it had gone a long time where that hadn't been the case.

Cristen didn't want to draw attention to herself, so she retracted her armor into a necklace and dropped it into her tank top. Without it glinting off the barely-there sunset, Cristen was any other soft bruise of shadow that drew long against the light. With Damian's cape strong on her back, she gave the beach a final look and then drew quickly into the forest, shuddering in disgust.

Like the beach, the only word in the forest was the word of the leaves. They weren't any kind of tree that Cristen recognized. The further she drew in, the taller the mountain in the distance became, and the more the fauna grew unfamiliar to her. At one point, she could have sworn the plant she was inspecting on the edge of the forest was an Argyroxiphium virescens. A spiral of bats shot overhead in the forest canopy, all of them with long silver hairs on their bellies like Palau flying foxes.

Both of which, as Cristen's scientist brain reminded her, were supposed to be extinct.

Her insight scanned constantly for people. It found many; dozens, hundreds, centuries of people existing on the island. The sensation was so foreign to her that Cristen nearly opened her comm to call down backup, but she soon realized what it was she was feeling. The hollowness in each soul. The empty quietness of the island.

Ghosts. They were ghosts.

Cristen couldn't sense ghosts on her good days, or her bad days, or any of her days, but it wasn't hard to explain why this island let her sense them. She couldn't feel the source of it yet, but she had to be getting close. Reason one: there were ruins up ahead, likely a citadel. Reason two: she was being followed.

Cristen ignored it. Whatever it was, it was huge, dangerous, and full of teeth. But considering she'd just walked through a forest of extinct flora and fauna, the scientist in her didn't mind encountering something bigger than a bat.

Hand calmly on the hilt of Damian's sword, Cristen broke out of the lush, lively forest and into some kind of broken-in courtyard. The architecture was interesting. It was careful not to invade the room of the forest too much, going out of its way to weave between the copperwood and royal palms, like they'd built around the forest instead of cutting into it to make room. Nature ruled this place. In fact, it seemed like it had been encouraged to grow by whoever had stayed here, even when it crawled into building nooks and ensnared walking paths.