"To arrive where you began is not arrival — it is exposure."
Day 4 – 03:00 p.m. – Camp Null
So, Camp Null. Yeah, the name fits—more "meh, why bother" than "bold expedition." The place wouldn't sit still for five minutes. Reeve tried to fence it in with chalk, rope, those little wooden pegs. By sunrise, everything had shuffled around, like the whole camp had sleepwalked while nobody was looking.
Oh, and forget about tools. Compasses? Just spinning in circles like they're trying out for a dizzy bat contest. Clocks? They'd freeze, start up again, but only if you weren't peeking. Even the tents had a habit of… migrating. Inch by inch, just to mess with your head.
Aanya, the only adult in the room (even though she's barely thirty), barked, "Write it down. On paper. Don't trust your brain here." She wasn't kidding.
Yara didn't even need the warning, honestly. She was already scribbling pages of weird symbols she'd never seen before. Dream stuff. Her hands shook, but she kept writing anyway, like if she stopped, she'd lose the plot.
Meanwhile, Malik was hunched over a patch of dirt, poking at it with his bioscanner, mumbling under his breath. The readings looked less like soil, more like a brain scan—neurons firing, or something pretending to be neurons.
"This place isn't alive," he grumbled, fiddling with the settings. "It's sentient."
Day 4 – 05:22 p.m. – Displacement
Aanya volunteered to check out the jungle edge—because of course she did. She strolls out, comes back five minutes later, looks fine. But the scanner's screaming: her heart's racing, muscles are shot, metabolism's jumped ahead two hours.
Reeve tries the same trick. Nada. Not a blip.
Yara, being Yara, just wanders off in a different direction (why not?). She's back with mossy hands. No clue how. Didn't touch anything, apparently. Sure, Yara.
Malik, scribbling away: "The island measures time by intention. Not by distance."
They all just sat there, staring at each other, while the sun did its weird folding-in-on-itself thing.
Nobody slept. The sky didn't even bother getting dark, just pulsed—like it was remembering how to be night.
Day 5 – 07:00 a.m. – The First Echo
In the morning, the camp was ringed with footprints. Not paw prints. Boots. Their boots, down to Malik's lopsided heel.
Reeve: "Anyone take a midnight stroll?" Silence. Everyone's side-eyeing each other, and themselves, honestly.
Aanya pulled a Sherlock, scooped up some soil, checked the prints. "Ours. But the soil says they're from tomorrow."
Yara went pale. "So... we'll walk here tomorrow?"
Aanya just shook her head. "No. We already did."
Day 5 – 09:13 a.m. – Phantom Gear
Reeve dug up some rations, hidden under a rock—official seal and everything. Expiry date: 2048. Three years too late for comfort.
"Guess someone's planning a comeback tour," Malik said, crouching next to him.
A few feet away, Yara pulls up a dusty hand mirror. There's a note scratched on the back: You will need this. Her own handwriting. Not just similar, but dead-on. Only problem—she never wrote it.
Day 5 – 12:45 p.m. – Self-Observation
They sent up another drone, just because, right? Thing blinked out almost instantly. When it finally buzzed back online, the feed showed… well, them. Standing in the same clearing. Only rougher—clothes ragged, faces hollow, like they'd lived through something big.
"We're looping," Aanya breathed, looking like she'd just lost a bet. "Every visit splits off. Every step messes with the timeline."
Reeve snorted. "How many of us are out there?"
Yara just kept staring at the screen. "Enough to forget which one's me."
Day 5 – 04:00 p.m. – The Watcher
Reeve was fiddling with a solar panel when he saw it. Someone at the treeline. Still as a statue. Wearing their gear. Face half in shadow.
It looked just like him.
He raised his hand. The figure mirrored him. Then it slipped back into the trees and was gone, like a bad magic trick.
Aanya checked the camp footage later. "Not a reflection," she muttered.
Yara: "Not a ghost either."
Malik stood at the boundary, so serious. "It's us. The versions we didn't become."
The jungle answered back. Not words—just this warped echo, like it was in on the joke.
Day 5 – 06:00 p.m. – Sleep Deprivation Test
Night watch. No one's supposed to sleep alone. But at 2 a.m., poof—Aanya's gone.
They found her an hour later, standing in the lake, water up to her knees, eyes open, mouth moving. Whispering numbers. Fast. Over and over.
Wouldn't answer. When they finally snapped her out of it, she just blinked and went, "Is dinner ready?"
No clue she'd left camp.
Malik logged the numbers. Coordinates. When he plotted them, they formed a perfect circle. Bang-on center of the island.
He circled it in red. "We're supposed to go there."
Reeve just stared at the map, jaw set. "Or maybe we already did."