The pollen clearing in the afternoon had a quality to it that none of the other locations on Regret Island quite matched — something about the light coming through at this angle, the amber suspended in the air like the day had decided to take its time dissolving. The three of them had ended up here without particularly deciding to, the way they ended up most places on the island, following no logic except that the walking felt good and the clearing appeared.
They were sitting in the pollen — in it rather than watching it, the clouds drifting at chest height around them, occasionally parting and reforming. Lynn had her face tilted up. Lily was lying on her back watching the pollen drift overhead. Tiger was sitting with his knees up and his hand in his pocket looking at nothing specific.
It was the kind of afternoon that didn't require anything from anyone.
Tiger said, without preamble, without building toward it:
"How long have you actually been here."
Lynn turned her head.
"Regret Island?" she said. "A few weeks. You know—"
"Not Regret Island." Tiger looked at her. "Here. In this universe. How long."
The pollen drifted between them.
Lynn opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The pause was not long. Half a second, maybe. But it was the wrong shape for a mortal's pause. A mortal calculating how long they'd been alive reaches for a number the way you reach for something you know the location of. Lynn's pause was the pause of someone calculating how much of the number to say.
The air in the clearing got warmer.
Not much. Just enough. The light shifted a degree toward amber and the pollen near Lynn began moving slightly differently from the pollen everywhere else — slower, more deliberate, curving in ways that had nothing to do with the breeze.
"Oh," Lily said, from her back, looking up at the pollen overhead. "That's — hm."
"I've been around a long time," Lynn said carefully. "You know how it is. Immortal. Hard to keep track after a certain—"
"How long," Tiger said again. Same tone. Same patience. The patience of someone who has been waiting to ask this for a long time and has no intention of accepting a direction instead of an answer.
Lynn looked at him.
Lily sat up.
She looked at the pollen near Lynn. Looked at the light. Looked at Tiger. Looked at Lynn.
Then she said:
"Okay so here's the thing about time." She said it with the energy of someone stepping in front of a moving object. "Time is — and I want to be very precise about this — deeply, fundamentally, philosophically subjective for anyone who has been alive long enough. Which we all have. Because we're all immortal. Which means the question of how long anyone has been anywhere is actually unanswerable in any meaningful sense because the framework for measuring it keeps collapsing under the weight of the experience of living through it." She looked at Tiger. "You agree with this."
"No," Tiger said.
"You partially agree with this."
"I understand what you're doing."
"I'm making a philosophical point."
"You're making a wall."
"Walls are philosophical." Lily turned to Lynn. "You don't have to answer that."
"She does," Tiger said. Not unkindly. Just factually.
"She doesn't." Lily pointed at him. "Nobody does. Including you. How long have you been here Tiger, actually, in this universe, and before you say a number I want you to really sit with whether that number is accurate or whether it's just the number you've been using because it's easier than the real one."
Tiger looked at her.
"That's different," he said.
"Is it."
"Yes."
"Convince me."
"Lily."
"I'm waiting. Convince me. How is it different." She had the expression of someone who was genuinely arguing and also buying time and knew Tiger could see both things simultaneously and was doing it anyway because that was the only move available.
Tiger looked at her for a long moment.
"It's different," he said, "because I'm not the one the pollen is doing that for."
They all looked at the pollen.
It was undeniable now. The clearing had a center and the center was Lynn and the pollen knew it — drifting in slow curves that all bent the same direction, the amber light concentrating where she sat, the air around her specifically warmer than the air three feet away in any direction. Not a weather phenomenon. Not the planet's natural atmosphere. Something directional. Something coming from somewhere.
From someone.
Lynn sat in the middle of it.
And she was smiling.
Not the performed smile. Not the warmth arriving half a beat late. Something larger than that — a smile that was too wide and too still simultaneously, that didn't move with her breathing the way a real smile moves, that had arrived from somewhere underneath the mask and brought with it a quality that was not the Lynn they knew. Too much. Too present. The way a light is too bright when you're in a dark room — not wrong in itself, just wrong for the scale of the space.
Something that wasn't quite the Lynn they knew at all.
Lily went very quiet.
Tiger looked at Lynn with an expression she hadn't seen on him before — not accusatory, not afraid, just the look of someone whose patience had finally reached the end of what it could hold without spilling.
Then Lynn blinked.
The smile pulled back. Not all the way — it left a trace, like something that had been too large for the container and left marks on the way out — but enough. Lynn was back. Lynn breathing normally, Lynn with her hands in her lap, Lynn looking at the pollen around her like she was seeing it for the first time and didn't fully like what she was seeing.
"Sorry," she said. "I was—" She looked at the pollen. At the warm concentrated light. At the clearing that had organized itself around her without being asked. "I was thinking about something."
"Lynn," Tiger said.
"I'm fine." She laughed — the performed one, arriving on time, working harder than it should have needed to. "That was — I don't know what that was. The clearing does something to the light sometimes. We noticed that before. When we came here before. The light does things."
"The light does something," Lily said, carefully.
"So that's probably—"
"Lynn," Tiger said.
She looked at him.
The pollen had slowed around her. Still moving, still present, but quieter now. Like something that had been briefly allowed to show itself and had been asked to be smaller.
Tiger looked at her for a long moment. At the clearing that had organized itself around her. At the smile that had been too large for a person's face. At all the small things — the fruit always ripe, the language nobody speaks anymore, the previous cycle, the creature waiting for her to pass, the question she couldn't answer — that had been leading to this exact afternoon.
"What are you," he said.
Two words. No preamble. No accusation. Just the question that had been building since the day she walked out of the treeline soaking wet and claimed acquaintance rights, finally outside of him, sitting in the amber air between them where everyone could see it.
Lynn looked at him.
The clearing held very still.
The pollen drifted.
Lily looked at Lynn.
Lynn looked at Tiger.
And said nothing.