Okay so I lied about not being worried.
I am a little worried.
Not a lot. I want to be clear about proportions here. On a scale of completely fine to actively panicking, I am at about a four, which is the level where you notice something is wrong but you have not told anyone yet because telling someone makes it real and you are not sure you are ready for it to be real.
Let me explain what moved me from a three to a four.
Tuesday
Day Ten morning, I woke up before everyone else. This is unusual because I am not a morning person and on a normal school day Mom has to come in twice and Rodrick has to slam his door once before I get up. But I woke up early and I could not get back to sleep so I went outside.
The village was quiet. Not empty, a few winged people moving between the platforms in the early part of the day, but quieter than the main hours. The light was the usual warm gold. The air was the usual temperature. The particles drifted in the usual slow circles that I had been trying not to think about.
I sat on the platform outside our building and looked at the village.
After about ten minutes, Solen came out of his building across the path and walked toward the food building. He had a specific walk, deliberate, slightly forward-leaning, wings folded close. I had seen it every morning.
He went inside the food building.
Two minutes later, a woman with orange-brown wings came from the direction of the tree platforms. Lira, Mom's language exchange partner. She walked to the food building and went in.
Five minutes after that, a man I recognized but did not know the name of, wide gray wings, came from the direction of the stone bridge and also went to the food building.
I watched this and thought: okay, morning routine, people getting food, normal.
Then I thought: wait.
I had seen this exact sequence before. Not approximately this sequence. This exact one. Solen first, then Lira, then the gray-wing man, in that order, at this time of morning. I had seen it at least twice before over the last nine days and had not registered it as notable because morning routines are repetitive and that is the point of them.
But I had been watching the village for days. Carefully. And now that I was paying specific attention to the sequence, I was almost completely sure that the gap between Solen going in and Lira going in was the same both times. And the gap between Lira and the gray-wing man was the same.
Not similar. The same.
I sat with that for a minute.
Then I got up and went to get breakfast.
The thing about noticing patterns is that once you start you cannot stop.
I do not mean this in a good way. I mean it in the way where your brain, having identified that there might be a pattern somewhere, becomes completely committed to finding it everywhere, even in places where it might not exist, until you cannot look at anything without wondering if it is repeating.
This is not a comfortable state to be in.
By midmorning of Day Ten I had catalogued the following potential repetitions.
The wind on the main platform changed direction slightly every afternoon at what felt like the same time. I had noticed this before but attributed it to normal wind behavior. Now I was not sure.
Two of the village kids who played near the big tree always chased the same small fast animal I had seen on Day One in approximately the same direction before it disappeared into the roots. Every day. Same direction. Same root gap.
The sound the trees made in the wind, that low soft rushing sound, rose and fell in a cycle that I had internalized as background noise. But sitting still and listening to it on Day Ten morning, there was a structure to it. Not random. Rhythmic in a way that real wind in real trees was not.
I sat very still and listened for a while.
Then I stood up and walked away quickly because sitting still and listening to the trees was not a thing I wanted to be doing with my morning.
I found Rowley at the flat rock and told him what I had been noticing.
I told it to him straight because Rowley is the kind of person who listens without immediately trying to explain things away, which is usually one of his less useful qualities but in this situation was what I needed.
He listened to all of it. The morning sequence at the food building. The wind. The kids and the animal. The trees. The phrases from earlier. The weather.
When I was done he was quiet for a moment.
"What do you think it means?" he said.
"I do not know," I said. "It might mean nothing. It might be that I have been here long enough that I am starting to see patterns in normal things because my brain is bored."
"Or?" Rowley said, because he knows me well enough to know when there is an or.
"Or something about this place is not quite how it appears," I said. "Like it is running on a loop somehow. Or like it is a really good copy of something that is not quite perfect."
Rowley thought about this with genuine seriousness, which I appreciated.
"Like a dream?" he said.
There was the word. I had been not-saying it for two days.
"Maybe," I said.
Rowley looked out at the sky. He was quiet for a bit.
"Greg," he said. "Can I tell you something I noticed?"
"Yes."
"The glowing pond on the jungle island," he said. "Feyn and I went back there yesterday. And the stone I found the first time, the one I showed everyone at the gathering, it was still there. In the same spot I found it."
I looked at him.
"I moved it," Rowley said. "I picked it up and I had it for a whole day and then I gave it to the gathering and Solen kept it. But it was back at the pond in exactly the same spot."
I sat with this.
"Maybe there are more stones like that one," I said.
"Maybe," Rowley said. He paused. "But it was the same stone, Greg. It had this small chip on one side, like a crescent shape. I remembered it. Same chip."
We looked at each other.
"Okay," I said finally.
"Okay what?" Rowley said.
"I do not know," I said. "I am working on it."
I went to find Manny.
I know. I know how that sounds. He is five. He cannot tell me anything useful. He barely talks.
But he had said "different soon" and he had spent hours with the silver-wing woman and he had been sitting with the elder from the third island too, I had seen that briefly on our visit, and there was something about the way he moved through this place that had been bothering me since Day One and I needed to address it directly.
Manny was on the lower platform of the big tree, alone for once, sitting and looking at something small in his hands. I went over and sat next to him.
"Manny," I said.
He looked at me.
"Can I ask you something?"
He waited.
"Do you know what this place is?" I said.
Manny looked at the thing in his hands. It was a piece of the pale blue crystal, like the one that had been in my collection but smaller. I had not seen him pick one up.
"Manny," I said. "Do you understand what is happening here? More than the rest of us?"
Manny was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, "It is a good dream"
I felt something go still in my chest.
"What do you mean a dream," I said. My voice came out more careful than I intended.
"Soft," Manny said. He touched the crystal. "Like when you fall asleep fast and it is soft."
"Manny, are we in a dream right now?"
He looked at me with his calm three-year-old face. "You always wake up," he said. "That is the rule my imaginary friends say so that are smart."
Then he put the crystal in his pocket and slid off the platform and walked away toward the village.
I sat on the lower platform of the big tree for a long time.
Here is what I decided after sitting there for a long time.
I was not going to tell anyone.
Not yet. Here is my reasoning.
One: Manny is three and sometimes says things that sound significant but mean nothing. "It is a good dream" from a three-year-old might mean "I like it here" and not "we are literally inside a dream." I could not be sure which it was. I also feels like his intelligence is higher than in reality/originally.
Two: if I told Mom, she would immediately make it a family meeting and then a discussion and then a learning opportunity, and I could not handle that right now.
Three: if I told Dad, he would escalate his safety concern level from its current setting of high to something that did not have a name yet, and the resulting anxiety would spread through the whole family and ruin whatever time we had left here.
Four: if I told Rowley, he would believe me completely and immediately, which sounds like what you want, but then he would also tell Feyn, and Feyn would tell people, and then it would be a whole thing.
Five: if I told Rodrick, he would laugh and tell me I had been outside too long.
So I kept it.
I added it to the corner of my brain that was getting crowded.
But here is the thing about that corner. It used to be a neat stack. Things I had noticed but set aside. Separate items, each with its own explanation if I needed one.
Now they were not separate. Now they connected to each other. The hum and the particles and the weather and the phrases and the bridge kids and the pond stone and Manny and Rowley saying it smells like a dream and the elder woman saying the right time and the patterns in the morning sequence at the food building.
They all pointed somewhere.
I was not ready to look at where.
I need to also report what happened with the second stone bridge on Day Ten, because it is relevant and I did not imagine it.
There are two stone bridges on the main island. One goes to the second island, wide and well-traveled. One goes to a smaller outer island that is mostly used for storage, I think, based on what I have seen people carry back from it.
On Day Ten afternoon I was crossing the first bridge back to the main island when I stopped in the middle.
I had heard the hum again.
Not from under the island this time. From the bridge itself. Very low, very faint, the way a large object hums when something resonates in it. I crouched down and put my hand flat on the stone.
The stone was vibrating. Not visibly. Not enough to feel unless you were paying attention. But it was there, a constant very fine vibration, like the bridge was alive in some way, or like something was running through it.
I pressed my ear against the stone.
The hum was clearer from here. It had a tone, not random, a specific held note that continued without variation.
I stayed like that for probably thirty seconds, ear against the stone bridge, looking extremely strange to anyone who happened to be watching.
Then I stood up, because I had identified the note and I did not have anything useful to do with that information and also I was standing on a bridge in the sky with my ear on the ground and my dignity had to count for something.
But I remembered the note. I hummed it quietly to myself as I walked back to the main island.
It matched the hum from Day Two. Same note. Same tone.
The island itself was humming. Quietly, constantly, all the time.
Day Ten evening, after dinner, I sat with Rowley at the edge of the first island and we watched the water below glow blue-green in the not-dark.
We did not talk about the dream thing again. But it was in the air between us the way big things are when they are present but not discussed.
"Do you think the gathering thing is soon?" Rowley said.
"Solen seemed to think so. The elder woman said it was close."
"Are you going to do something at the gathering?" Rowley said. "Like the button, but more."
"I have been thinking about it," I said.
"What are you thinking?"
I looked at the glowing water. "I think whatever this gathering is, it is important. And I think it might be connected to the things we were talking about this morning."
"The patterns?"
"Yeah."
Rowley was quiet for a moment.
"Greg," he said. "If this is a dream."
"We do not know that for sure."
"If it is, though. Does that change anything?"
I thought about this.
Did it change the knot-learning. Did it change the morning drums in the almost-dark. Did it change Rowley humming with Feyn's family. Did it change Solen nodding at the reorganized shelves.
"I do not know," I said honestly.
Rowley nodded like this was a satisfying answer even though it clearly was not.
Then we sat there for a while longer and the water glowed and the particles drifted their slow circles overhead and somewhere in the village someone was singing, low and far away, and the stone bridge hummed its quiet single note under everything like a heartbeat.
Day Ten: patterns confirmed, Manny said the word, pond stone returned to its place, bridge is humming, the corner of my brain is full.
Different soon.
I believe him.
[SKETCH: Greg crouched on the stone bridge with his ear pressed flat against the stone surface, eyes focused and intent. His hand is also on the stone. The bridge stretches out in both directions over open sky. In the background, a winged villager is crossing from the far side, looking at Greg with significant confusion. Greg does not notice or does not care.]