Nemi brought nothing to the grove and Sorrel brought nothing, and that felt right, the way it feels right to come to certain work with empty hands.
It was the fifth morning since Sorrel washed up. They had argued about it the night before, not loudly, because Sorrel did not have loud in them anymore. Vara had said Sorrel was too weak. Sorrel had said the point was awake enough now to help carry the cost, and that waiting only meant doing it later with less of themselves left to spend. Nemi had listened to both of them and said the thing he’d been circling for four days, which was that he wanted to feel it fully, once, before he decided anything about what it meant for him. Vara had gone quiet at that. She knew the shape of a person deciding to do a thing, and she knew you could not knot that shape closed once it had opened.
So they went at dawn.
Sorrel knelt between the stones and put both hands flat on the ground, and Nemi knelt across from them and did the same, and for a moment nothing happened but the cool of the earth and the small sounds of the grove waking, a bird somewhere, the sea a long way off.
“Find it,” Sorrel said. “The way I showed you. Underneath.”
He found it. It was easier now that he knew the shape to listen for, the slow steady pressure under the cool, the thing going somewhere. He held his hands to it the way he’d hold them to a joint he meant to test.
“Now don’t push,” Sorrel said. “You don’t force an anchor point. You ask it. You let it know someone’s here who means to keep it.” Their voice was already thinning. “Just be here. Both of us. Let it feel us being here.”
Nemi did not know how to do that on purpose, so he did the only thing he knew, which was to pay attention. He put his whole attention into his palms and into the ground and into the steadiness underneath, the way he put his attention into a broken thing before he understood how to mend it, waiting for the thing to show him what it needed.
The light changed.
The other light, the one that came up through the ground and not down from the sky, the one Nemi had seen every day of his life and never named. It got brighter. It came up through the earth and through the stones and through the flats of his hands, and he could see it behind his eyes with them closed, a warmth that had a color he had no word for.
Then the stones began to hum, and this was not the almost-feeling from before, the thing in the back of the teeth. This was an actual sound, low and even, coming up out of the ground and out of the stones and filling the grove, and Nemi felt it in the soles of his feet and in his hands and in the spaces between his ribs where something had always felt slightly hollow, and the hollow filled, and for one moment he understood.
Not with words. With his whole body at once. Pell was not an island. Pell was a door, a place where the world had once been joined to the rest of itself, and the joining was still here, sleeping under the grove, and it had been calling to him since before he could walk and he had spent his whole life answering it without knowing there was a question. The warmth everyone on Pell lived inside was this. The light from below was this. It knew him. It was glad.
Then the light pulled back.
It went the way a tide goes, not all at once but drawing down, the brightness dimming and the hum dropping from a sound back to a feeling and then to almost nothing, until it was only the ordinary glow of an ordinary morning coming up through the ordinary ground. Nemi opened his eyes.
Sorrel was on the ground.
Not dead. Breathing. But the color had gone out of their face, gone to the gray of old rope, and their hands had come off the earth and lay in the dirt shaking in a way that was not cold and was not fear, a deep wrong tremor, as though the thing that held Sorrel together had come loose at a joint.
“Sorrel.”
“I’m here.” A whisper, almost nothing. “Did you feel it. Tell me you felt it.”
“I felt it.”
“Good.” They tried to sit up and could not. “That’s good. It knows you now. It’ll remember.”
Nemi got his arms under them and lifted, and Sorrel weighed nothing, and it was the wrong kind of nothing. Not the lightness of a small person. The lightness of a thing that has had something taken out of it that is not coming back easy. He had carried enough to know the difference, and he stood there in the grove with the difference in his arms and did not want to understand it.
He started the walk back.
—-
He felt it on the path, halfway to Vara’s house, with Sorrel gone quiet against his chest.
The ground was wrong.
It was not the steadiness he’d learned to feel these last days, and it was not the steadiness gone quiet either. It was a new thing entirely, a pull in the earth under the path, faint but insistent, dragging at the soles of his feet in a direction the path did not go. He stopped. He shifted Sorrel’s weight and stood still and felt it come up through his boots, a lean in the ground itself, as if the island had tilted a degree while his back was turned and was trying to slide him east.
He looked down the slope toward the east shore, where the foam pulled southeast across the rock and always had. He could not see the water from here. But he could feel, in the ground, that whatever pulled it was pulling harder now than it had pulled this morning, and it was pulling on more than the water.
Sorrel stirred against him. “What is it,” they murmured. “Why’d you stop.”
“The ground,” Nemi said. “It’s pulling. It never pulled before. Not like this.”
Sorrel went very still in his arms, stiller than the weakness alone could account for, and did not answer, and Nemi felt their breath change against his chest, and he understood that Sorrel knew exactly what it was, and that whatever it was, it frightened them more than the sea had.
