Crown Of The Forsaken

Mira was running through a forest she had never seen before.

A root caught the toe of her shoe. She stumbled into a tree, scraped her palm down its bark, and pushed away before she could get her balance. Something was following her. She had heard it since the path narrowed, a heavy movement through leaves that stopped whenever she turned to listen.

She couldn’t remember how she’d come into the forest. That bothered her almost as much as the footsteps. She knew there ought to be a road somewhere, a car, someone she could call. She searched her pockets while she ran and found nothing.

The ground sloped. She slid in the damp earth, caught a low branch, and kept going. Leaves brushed her cheeks. There was water underfoot now, although she hadn’t heard a stream.

Ahead, the trees opened around a patch of bare ground.

A man stood there.

He was tall and dressed in dark clothing, his hands hanging at his sides. Mira could make out the straight line of his shoulders and the pale suggestion of a throat above his collar. The rest of his face seemed to fall outside the little light that reached the clearing. She tried to look directly at it, but her eyes kept returning to his hands.

The footsteps behind her stopped.

Mira glanced over her shoulder. The path was empty. She should have been relieved. Instead, she was suddenly aware that the man had been watching her approach the whole time.

“Who are you?” she called.

He didn’t answer.

“Is there a road out of here?”

His head moved a fraction, as though she’d asked an unexpected question. He made no attempt to help her. Mira looked around him for a way through the trees. There was enough space on his left if she ran fast.

Cold water touched her ankle.

She looked down. Black water was rising between the roots, filling the marks her shoes had left in the soil. It carried no leaves or silt. Mira stepped backward and heard the wet suction of mud beneath her heel.

When she looked up, the man was closer.

She hadn’t heard him walk.

“Stay away from me.”

He watched her without moving. She backed up again. Something slick closed around her ankle beneath the water, and she yanked hard enough to lose her balance.

Mira woke kicking at her bedsheet.

For several seconds she could feel the thing around her foot. She dragged her legs free and sat on the edge of the mattress, one hand braced against the wall. Her bedroom emerged slowly: the dark wardrobe, the chair with yesterday’s clothes on it, the familiar click of the ceiling fan. A strip of streetlight showed beneath the curtain.

She bent and touched her ankle. Nothing was there.

Her phone lay on the floor beside its charging cable. The screen read 4:17 a.m.

“Brilliant,” she muttered. “Now I’m scared of trees.”

On the bedside table stood the photograph Iris had sent from Brazil.

Mira picked it up. A pale tree leaned over dark water. Blue fabric hung from a branch near the bank, too far away for her to tell what it was. The picture had always seemed like an odd choice to send home. Iris usually photographed people making unfortunate faces or animals she insisted had personalities. This one contained almost nothing.

Four years earlier, at the airport, one wheel of Iris’s suitcase had squeaked so badly that people turned to look. Mira had offered to carry the bag. Iris insisted it was fine, then spent ten minutes trying to find a pen while the suitcase continued protesting every time she moved it.

“You could buy a new one,” Mira had said.

“And abandon this loyal companion?”

“It’s begging for retirement.”

Iris had laughed and kept walking. At security she’d turned back with her passport still in her hand.

“Call Mum if she starts worrying. I’ll have terrible reception.”

Mira had rolled her eyes. She’d been in a hurry to get home, already thinking about the washing she needed to do before work. She hadn’t hugged Iris a second time.

Iris called twice from Brazil. The second time, she complained about damp boots and asked whether their mother was still insisting on sending her photographs of the garden. Then she stopped answering her phone.

Now she still checked unfamiliar numbers before dismissing them. Sometimes the phone rang during a meeting and she felt a quick, foolish certainty that this time it would be Iris.

Mira set the photograph beside the lamp.

“I’m coming,” she told it. “You can be furious with me for interfering when I find you. I won’t even argue. Much.”

Her phone buzzed.

Sana: Please tell me your passport is packed.

Mira looked toward the carry-on beside her wardrobe. Its inner pocket was open. The passport sat by her keys on the desk.

Mira: Yes.

Sana: In the bag? Not beside the bag?

She sighed, got up, and slid it into the pocket. The zip snagged on a loose thread. She freed it, checked the passport was still there, and pulled the zip closed.

Mira: In the bag. Why are you awake?

Sana: I could ask you the same thing.

Mira: I’m experiencing a perfectly ordinary amount of travel anxiety.

Sana: Yours or mine?

Mira: Both, apparently.

A moment later, Sana called. Mira answered before the second ring.

“You’ve checked the medication?” Sana asked without greeting her.

“Yes. And the water filter. And the spare batteries you made me buy.”

“Good. Have you slept?”

“A bit.”

“Mira.”

“I had a dream. I woke up. That’s all.”

After the call, Mira sat on the floor beside her bag and checked the side pockets again. Iris’s brass compass was wrapped in a clean cloth, where she’d put it the evening before. Her sister had given it to her years ago, after a disastrous school camping trip in which Mira had managed to get lost within sight of the toilets. When she lay down again, she left the photograph upright. The man’s face from the dream remained impossible to picture, even though she could remember the position of his hands perfectly.

Three days later, Mira was in a motorboat on the Rio Negro, trying to decide whether she was seasick or merely tired of travelling.

The river was almost black beneath the hull, turning tea-brown where sunlight struck its ripples. Forest pressed close to the channel, flooded roots twisting along the banks. The boat smelled of fuel, damp rope, and Theo’s sunscreen. He had applied another layer ten minutes earlier and was now peering anxiously at the bottle.

“Does this say water-resistant or waterproof?” he asked.

“It says reapply after swimming,” Sana said.

“I’d prefer not to swim.”

João Mendes steered around a half-submerged trunk. “Then stay in the boat.”

“Excellent plan.” Theo pulled his camera bag onto his knees.

Sana leaned toward Mira, whose phone still displayed Iris’s photograph. “You’ve been staring at that since we left the dock,” she said.

“I’m also admiring the scenery.”

“You asked whether a heron was a vulture.”

“It was far away.”

“It was beside the boat.”

“I said I was admiring it. I didn’t claim to understand it.”

Sana nudged her shoulder. Mira put the phone away, grateful for the interruption and irritated with herself for needing one.

Across from them, Dr. Camila Rocha studied a map on her tablet. Her hair had worked loose from its clip, and she kept trying to put it back without taking her other hand off the screen. Mira had met her in person only two days earlier. They’d spoken on video calls before that, always with too little time and a careful list of questions.

“How far to camp?” Mira asked.

“About forty minutes if the smaller channel stays clear,” Camila said.

“And the old station?”

Camila looked up. “We’ll walk there tomorrow. This afternoon we need to unload and check the equipment.”

“Is that where Iris was last seen?”

“Her team worked there. It was one of the places searched.”

“I know it was searched. I read the report.”

“Then you know there were several sites.”

Mira kept her voice even. “I know the reports disagree about which one she visited last.”

Camila lowered the tablet. She looked as though she might say more, but João called to her from the motor to check the depth marked on the chart. She answered him in Portuguese. Mira caught numbers and very little else.

She looked back at the water. She didn’t want her questions to make Camila regret bringing her. That was the calculation she kept making, and she resented it. For years she’d had to be grateful to strangers willing to answer questions about her own sister.

Six nights earlier, an anonymous email had arrived while she was clearing junk mail at home. There was no greeting, only a scanned fragment of a notebook page and a set of coordinates. She’d recognized Iris’s handwriting at once, then forced herself to compare it with birthday cards and old shopping lists. Wanting a thing to be genuine was a poor way to prove that it was.

At the bottom of the page Iris had written, The trees aren’t the boundary.

The phrase had been underlined once. Mira knew the pressure of that pen stroke. Her sister often underlined things that irritated her, especially questions she intended to answer later.

Mira had replied to the email. The message bounced back. She tried again from another account with the same result. She checked the attachment for anything else she might have missed and found only the image and coordinates. Somebody had wanted her to receive the page without giving her a way to ask where it came from.

She had sent Camila the coordinates and asked whether they lay inside the research area. Camila recognized the abandoned monitoring station and said her new survey permit would allow a visit. Mira volunteered to help organize archival records. She could do that work, but she also wanted to see Camila’s reaction to the page in person. Sana insisted on joining them; Theo was hired to photograph the survey.

Mira’s mother knew about the research visit. She knew Camila had worked with Iris. She didn’t know about the anonymous message. Mira had written three versions of an explanation and deleted them all. She could still picture her mother at the kitchen table, reading one more improbable clue and wondering whether to encourage Mira or ask her to come home.

“Are you listening?” Sana asked.

“To what?”

“I was offering you a biscuit.”

“Then yes. Passionately.”

Sana passed her the packet. The biscuits had gone soft in the humidity, but Mira ate two. Theo accepted one and immediately regretted removing his hand from the camera bag when the boat rocked.

A blue butterfly rested briefly on the gunwale before drifting toward the flooded trees. “My sister once convinced me she’d discovered a species called the royal splendiferous,” Mira said.

Theo looked up. “Please tell me that is a real thing.”

“I announced it at school. I had prepared an entire speech.”

Sana laughed. “You made Iris sign a certificate.”

“She signed it. That’s what made it official.”

Mira could remember Iris at the kitchen counter drawing an absurdly detailed insect with six wings and a crown. She couldn’t remember which teacher had corrected her. Iris’s delighted, helpless laughter when she heard about the assembly remained clear.

The butterfly vanished among the leaves.

“Did Iris like being here?” Mira asked Camila.

“Most days,” Camila said. “She hated wet socks. Borrowed a pair of mine and never gave them back.”

“That sounds right.”

“She made the team stay late when the instruments disagreed. She’d check a result three times and still want another reading.”

“What was she measuring?”

“Water levels. Environmental conditions. We had several instruments running.”

“And what went wrong?”

Camila stared down at the map. “We’ll go through the records tomorrow. You’ll see the readings yourself.”

Mira wanted to press her. She also knew how it felt to be trapped in a conversation on a boat with nowhere to escape to. She turned toward the bank. Beside her, Sana shifted just enough that their knees touched. She didn’t say anything, and Mira was glad.

They reached camp with the daylight already weakening behind the trees. Buildings stood on timber posts above muddy ground, joined by narrow walkways. Water collected where the planks bowed, and someone had wedged a strip of rubber beneath a loose step. A generator rattled beside the cooking shelter. Under its corrugated roof, tin plates were stacked next to a bowl of green plantains.

A woman in a faded green shirt came down the steps to meet them. Mira helped unload the boxes while the woman carried vegetables toward the kitchen. Another staff member took the heavier fuel containers from João, and Camila began checking the equipment against a list. Sana found a dry patch of railing and started arranging their bags where they wouldn’t block the walkway.

Mira carried a box of notebooks into the cooking shelter. Six small metal bells hung from the beam beneath the roof. Their green strings were worn and uneven, as though they’d been tied there at different times.

She nudged the nearest bell with a finger. It swung without a sound.

“Someone forgot the clappers.”

The woman from the landing was sorting vegetables at the table. She glanced up.

“They came from the old station. They’ve been here longer than I have.”

“Why hang them if they don’t ring?”

“You’d have to ask whoever put them up.”

It wasn’t a particularly helpful answer, but the woman seemed more interested in the box Mira was still clutching.

“I’m Mira,” she said.

“Lúcia. And that will be easier to unpack if you put it down.”

Mira laughed and set the box on the table.

A short, heavy shower passed before dinner. They ate rice and fish around a table patched with strips of tape. Insects collected near the overhead bulb, and Theo kept moving his glass away from the light to protect it from falling wings.

“That bird on the way here,” he began. “The black one. Did anyone know what it was?”

“I thought you were a photographer,” Sana said.

“I photograph things. I don’t necessarily know their names.”

“You spent twenty minutes telling us about a goose at your university.”

“That goose and I had history.”

It emerged, through several interruptions, that Theo had once tried to feed a goose half his sandwich, changed his mind, and been chased all the way across the campus lawn.

“The goose had a reasonable complaint,” João said.

Theo looked at him. “Are you taking its side?”

“You were outnumbered in determination.”

Mira laughed into her cup and nearly spilled her drink. The sound came out before she remembered why she’d come. For a few minutes she let the story go on. Theo argued his case. Lúcia asked whether the goose had caught him. Sana said she hoped it had.

Iris would have sided with the goose. She would have wanted details about its size and whether Theo had kept the sandwich. Mira found herself turning toward the empty space beside her to share the joke, and the pleasure drained out of it.

After the plates were cleared, Camila went to rinse the cooking utensils at the outside sink. Mira waited until the others were occupied. She took the folded copy of the notebook scan from her bag and followed her.

“There’s something I need you to see.”

Camila turned off the tap. She dried her hands on her trousers before Mira had fully opened the paper.

“Where did you get this?”

“Someone emailed it to me. No name, no message. They included the station coordinates.”

“When?”

“Six nights ago. Is that Iris’s handwriting?”

Camila held the page under the yellow bulb. Water dripped from the edge of the sink into a bucket. Mira watched Camila’s thumb hover above the underlined sentence.

“Yes,” Camila said.

The answer should have been a relief. Mira had wanted someone who knew Iris’s handwriting to confirm it. Instead it made the anonymous email more troubling. Whoever had sent it had access to something her family had never seen.

“What did she mean by the boundary?”

“I don’t know exactly. We had readings near that station that didn’t agree with the positions on our map. Iris thought we’d misunderstood where they were coming from.”

“You told me it was a routine environmental survey.”

“It was. We collected different kinds of data. When something strange appeared, we checked the instruments.”

“Did you find a fault?”

Camila looked at the page again. “We didn’t establish one.”

“You could have told me that when I asked about her research.”

“I wasn’t sure it mattered. I’m still not sure.”

Mira pressed the fold of the paper flat against her palm. “You knew I was coming because somebody sent me those coordinates,” she said. “You didn’t ask how I got them.”

“I thought you found them in the reports.”

“Those exact coordinates weren’t in the copy I was given.”

Camila’s eyes lifted to hers. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’m not asking you to promise Iris is alive,” she said. “I’m asking you to stop deciding what I can handle.”

Camila’s shoulders sagged a little. “You’re right. I should have told you about the readings.”

For a moment Mira expected a further explanation. Camila only folded the page along its original crease and handed it back.

“Tomorrow I’ll show you the remaining records,” she said. “All of them. You can judge for yourself.”

Mira nodded and went to find Sana. She was sitting on the damp steps outside their sleeping quarters with two mugs of coffee. She held one out as Mira approached.

“You heard?” Mira asked.

“Enough to know you didn’t threaten to throw her in the river. I’m calling that progress.”

“I was perfectly pleasant.”

“Then I hope never to see you being unpleasant.”

Mira took the mug and sat. The wooden step was damp through her trousers. Across the clearing, Theo was trying to photograph a moth near the kitchen lamp without getting close enough for it to fly at him.

“She recognized the handwriting,” Mira said. “I was so sure I’d feel better if she did.”

“What did she tell you?”

Mira explained the strange readings and the promise of records.

“You think Camila knows more,” Sana said.

“I think she’s leaving things out. I don’t know if she’s doing it on purpose.”

“Then we’ll find out tomorrow.”

“I keep thinking she might have been alive when they searched,” Mira said. “That somebody went the wrong way, and she was close enough to hear them.”

Sana set her coffee down. “You’ve thought about that a lot.”

“I know.”

“I wish I could tell you something useful.”

“You came all the way here. That’s fairly useful.”

Sana leaned against her. Mira allowed herself to rest there. She could smell the mosquito repellent on Sana’s sleeve and the burnt coffee in her mug. Those ordinary things helped. The night didn’t feel quite so far from home.

“Do you remember why Iris called me Bird?” Mira asked.

“You found that sparrow after it flew into your window. You made the whole house whisper for three days.”

“It was recovering.”

“You were nine and appointed yourself its doctor.”

“It flew away.”

“After you tried to keep it in a shoebox.”

Mira smiled. Iris had cut air holes in the box with a craft knife while Mira stood beside her issuing instructions. They’d argued for half an hour about how much water a sparrow needed. Iris had eventually found a wildlife-rescue number and made the call herself, but she’d let Mira tell everyone they had saved the bird together.

“I’m going to find out what happened,” she said.

“I know. Just don’t disappear on me while you’re doing it.”

Mira heard the effort Sana had made to keep her voice light. She wanted to promise. She thought of the anonymous email and the way Camila had gone quiet when she saw it. Tomorrow might be the only chance she got to look through the station records herself.

“I’ll stay with you,” she said instead.

Sana accepted the answer, though Mira wasn’t sure it was enough.

Later, in the small room she’d been assigned, Mira laid her things out on the bed. Her phone had a little charge left. She found Iris’s last photograph and opened the digital copy.

She’d looked at the picture hundreds of times, but she usually stopped at the tree. Tonight she enlarged the blue fabric, wondering whether it had been part of a tent or a strip tied to mark a survey point. Beyond it, three scratches crossed the pale bark. She hadn’t noticed how deliberate they looked until she was sitting here, about to visit the place where it had been taken.

She shifted the image sideways and caught a shape near the bottom of the screen.

Mira enlarged the water beneath the tree.

There were three figures reflected there, standing close together. The tallest seemed to have broad shapes rising behind its shoulders. The image was blurred by ripples, too uncertain to say what those shapes were. She studied the clothing, the spacing between them, the faint outline of something that might be an arm.

Then she zoomed out.

The bank above the reflection was empty.

Perhaps the image had been corrupted when Iris sent it. Perhaps the reflection came from somewhere outside the frame. Mira knew how easily a person could invent meaning from a blur. She’d been doing it with every grainy photograph and uncertain report for four years.

But why hadn’t she noticed these figures before?

Outside, through the screened window, she could see João at the landing mending a length of rope. The floodlamp near the cooking shelter cast enough light onto the walkway to reach him.

Mira took the phone and hurried outside.

“Can you look at something?” she asked.

João kept the rope in his hand while she held out the screen. He enlarged the reflected figures once, then looked across the river toward the opposite bank.

“Where was this taken?” he asked.

“Near the old station, I think. Do you recognize that tree?”

“There are many like it.”

“Maybe. What about the people?”

“Reflections can mislead you.”

“You looked across the river.”

“I’m a river guide, Mira. I look at the river.”

She almost smiled. Almost. She glanced toward the bank herself. The trees were dark now, their lower trunks disappearing into water. She couldn’t tell whether João had recognized a particular place or merely checked the channel as he always did.

“Please,” she said. “If you know anything about Iris, tell me.”

João gave the phone back. His fingers were rough from the rope, and he took care not to touch the screen with his wet hand.

“I know people can get hurt out here when they leave a group,” he said. “Tomorrow you stay with Camila and the others. Whatever you find, you find it together.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I have.”

Mira was about to ask why he looked so troubled by a photograph when a thin ringing sound came from the cooking shelter.

She turned.

The six small bells were moving on their green strings. Nothing else beneath the roof stirred. The plates on the table were still. There wasn’t enough wind to move the damp towel hanging beside the sink.

“Didn’t those have no clappers?” Theo called from near the lamp.

The generator coughed. Its light dimmed, flashed once, and went out. The kitchen bulb followed, leaving the landing in darkness.

Mira heard a chair scrape behind her. She turned toward the steps, about to call for Sana.

Then somebody spoke from the far bank.

“Bird?”

The voice reached her across the water. Mira knew it as intimately as the sound of their front door closing at home.

“Iris?”

João caught her wrist. His fingers were painfully tight.

“Don’t answer it again,” he whispered.

A figure stood between two trees on the opposite bank. Mira could just make out its outline against the pale strip of sky above the water. She pulled against João’s grip, trying to see a face.

The figure raised its head.

“Come here, little Bird,” it said in Iris’s voice. “I’ve been waiting.”

******

Hi Loves!

I know, I know. I am sorry for disappearing on you. But that's the way life is right? All chaos.

Speaking of which, here is the new world of chaos for you to dive into! I hope you all will love them as much you loved Romero and Akira. They will give you hard time though but I'll make sure it's worth it!

Let me know what you think it!

Love

A.J