Chapter 16 - The Lighthouse Burns

They saw the smoke on the second day.

A thin gray column rising from the coast, visible for miles across the flat scrubland. At first she thought it was just weather, a low cloud catching the light wrong. But clouds didn't stay in one place like that. Clouds didn't rise from a single point on the horizon.

"Is that where we're going?" Linn asked.

She didn't answer. Just walked faster.

The lighthouse was burning.

Not in flames anymore. The fire had happened days ago, maybe a week. What remained was a blackened shell, stone walls standing but empty, the glass eye at the top shattered and dark. The small house at the base had collapsed entirely, reduced to a pile of charred timbers and ash.

She stood at the edge of the cliff path and looked at what was left.

All those maps. All those records. Decades of collecting proof that the world had once been larger, more complex, more real. Gone. Destroyed. Whether by accident or intention, it didn't matter. The result was the same.

"Maybe she got out," Linn said. The girl was standing beside her, close enough to touch, voice uncertain. "Maybe she's somewhere else now."

"Maybe."

But she didn't believe it. The Cartographer's Daughter had spent her whole life in that lighthouse, surrounded by her work. She wouldn't have left voluntarily. And if the fire was deliberate, if someone had decided the old woman knew too much...

Another casualty. Another person erased, one way or another.

She walked down to the ruins anyway. Had to see for herself, had to know if anything survived.

The house was a total loss. Nothing but ash and fragments, the occasional piece of metal or ceramic that had been too stubborn to burn. She kicked through the debris, looking for anything recognizable. A book spine. A rolled map. Anything.

Nothing.

The lighthouse itself was in slightly better shape. The stone walls had protected the interior from the worst of the flames, and the door at the base was still intact. She pushed it open and stepped inside.

Dark. The smell of smoke and something else underneath, something organic that she didn't want to think about too carefully. She let her eyes adjust.

The ground floor was empty. The furniture had burned, leaving metal frames and springs scattered across the stone floor. The staircase leading up was damaged but passable, and she climbed it carefully, testing each step before putting her weight on it.

The second floor was worse. Whatever had burned here had burned hot, leaving the walls blackened and the ceiling sagging dangerously. She didn't go far.

The third floor was inaccessible. The stairs had collapsed entirely, leaving a gap too wide to jump.

She stood at the edge of the broken staircase and looked up at what she couldn't reach. The top of the lighthouse, where the Cartographer's Daughter had kept her most precious maps. The ones that showed the world before the cuts, the seams where reality had been stitched together.

All of it gone. Or if not gone, unreachable.

She climbed back down and stepped outside into the gray afternoon light.

Linn was waiting at the edge of the ruins, her notebook open, pen in hand. Writing something. Always writing now, like she was afraid to stop.

"Anything?"

"No. It's all destroyed."

"What do we do now?"

Good question. The lighthouse had been her only lead on finding the network. Without the Cartographer's Daughter's maps, without her knowledge of the seams, she had no idea where to look.

She could go north. Follow the original plan, head for the mountains and the Backwards River. But the sibling's warning was clear. Don't go alone. Don't make the same mistake.

And she was more alone now than ever.

They made camp in the ruins of the house.

Stupid, probably. If someone had burned this place on purpose, they might come back. But she was tired and the light was fading and she couldn't bring herself to walk away just yet.

Linn built a small fire from the unburned scraps of wood. The flames cast strange shadows on the blackened walls, making the ruins look even more like a tomb.

"I need to tell you something," Linn said.

She looked up. The girl's face was pale in the firelight, her expression troubled.

"I've been reading my notebook. The entries from the past few days." Linn held up the battered book. "I don't remember writing most of them."

"That's normal. The Disease—"

"It's not just that." Linn's voice cracked. "Some of the entries are about things I don't remember happening at all. An island. A library. Something that talked to us in the dark." She looked at the notebook like it belonged to a stranger. "I know I was there. I can see my own handwriting. But when I try to remember, there's just... nothing."

The island. The archive. The Guardian. All of it erased from Linn's memory, leaving only the written record behind.

"It's getting worse," Linn said quietly. "Faster than before. This morning I woke up and didn't know where I was. Didn't know who you were for a few seconds. It came back, but..." She shook her head. "I'm scared. I don't want to forget. I don't want to become someone who doesn't remember why they're here."

She should say something comforting. Should tell Linn it would be okay, that they'd find a way to slow the forgetting, that the Disease wasn't fatal.

But she couldn't lie. Not about this.

"I'm scared too," she said instead. "I've been scared for months. Watching myself disappear, piece by piece. Knowing there's nothing I can do to stop it."

"How do you keep going?"

"I don't know. Spite, maybe. Stubbornness. The refusal to let them win." She poked at the fire with a stick. "And the messages. The hidden ones, in the journal. Knowing that someone I loved left them for me, that they believed I could do this even when I don't believe it myself."

"The messages." Linn frowned, flipping through her notebook. "I wrote about those. You found messages from someone. Your... sibling?"

"Yes."

"And they told you to find others. To build a network."

"Yes."

Linn was quiet for a moment, reading her own notes. Then she looked up.

"I don't remember them. The sibling. You've told me about them, I can see that in what I wrote. But when I try to picture them, there's nothing. Not even a blur. Just emptiness."

"That's how it works. The erasure takes the direct memories first. The connections, the feelings, those last longer. But eventually..." She didn't finish the sentence.

"Eventually I'll forget you too."

"Probably."

"And then I'll wander off somewhere and not know why I'm sad. Not know that I lost someone. Not know that any of this ever happened."

She wanted to tell Linn it wouldn't come to that. Wanted to promise she'd find a cure, fix everything, make the forgetting stop.

But she was down to twelve pages in the journal now. Two more had gone blank since they'd left the city. At this rate, she'd be empty before Linn was.

"Write it down," she said. "Everything you want to remember. The things that matter most. And then when you start to forget, read it back. Let the words remind you who you were."

"Does that work?"

"Sometimes. Not always." She touched the journal in her bag. "But it's better than nothing."

They sat in silence for a while, watching the fire burn. Two people disappearing in different ways, trying to hold onto each other while their hands went numb.

"If I forget," Linn said eventually. "If I wake up tomorrow and don't know you anymore. What will you do?"

"Keep going."

"Alone?"

"If I have to."

"The messages said not to go alone."

"I know." She pulled out the compass, held it in her palm. She hadn't looked at it in days, hadn't wanted to see what it was pointing at. "But I might not have a choice."

She opened it.

The needle was moving.

Not spinning randomly like it had when she'd first gotten it. Not pointing at her chest like it had for weeks. It was drifting, slowly, like it was searching for something. Finding a new direction.

She watched it settle.

It was pointing away from her now. Away from the fire, away from Linn. Pointing toward the ruins of the lighthouse, toward the north, toward something in the distance she couldn't see.

"It changed," Linn said. "You said it points at what you fear most. What does it mean if it's pointing somewhere else?"

She didn't know. For months the compass had been aimed at her own heart, a constant reminder that her deepest fear was giving up, surrendering, letting the search end.

But that fear had faded. Not because she'd conquered it, but because she'd made peace with it. She wasn't going to give up. That was settled, certain, no longer in question.

So the compass had moved on. Found a new fear. A deeper one.

She stood up and started walking toward the ruins of the lighthouse. The needle tracked with her movement, staying pointed at the same spot.

The blackened doorway. The collapsed stairs. The unreachable upper floors.

"There's something in there," she said. "Something I'm afraid of."

"What?"

"I don't know. But the compass knows."

She stepped back inside. The dark pressed in around her, smoke-smell thick in her throat. The needle pointed up now, toward the top of the lighthouse, toward the floors she couldn't reach.

Something was up there. Something that scared her more than giving up, more than forgetting, more than dying alone.

She needed to find out what.

It took an hour to figure out a way up.

The main staircase was useless, collapsed beyond repair. But the walls of the lighthouse were rough stone, full of handholds and footholds if you knew where to look. She'd climbed worse in her life. Probably.

Linn watched from below, notebook ready, as she started up the inside of the wall. The stone was slick with soot and her fingers kept slipping. Three times she nearly fell. Three times she caught herself, hung on, kept going.

The third floor was a charred mess, but passable. She pulled herself over the edge and lay there for a moment, breathing hard.

Then she looked around.

Maps. Burnt, damaged, but still recognizable. The Cartographer's Daughter had kept her most important records up here, in the room just below the light. The fire had reached this floor but hadn't destroyed everything.

She crawled across the scorched planks, looking for anything useful. Most of the maps were ruined, ink smeared or paper burned through. But near the far wall, under a fallen beam, she found a metal box.

She pried it open.

Inside were papers. Dozens of them, folded tight and packed together. Protected from the fire by the metal, though the edges were singed and the heat had made the ink run in places.

She pulled them out and started going through them.

Notes. In the Cartographer's Daughter's handwriting, cramped and careful. Names of places she didn't recognize. Coordinates that might have meant something once. And repeated throughout, a phrase that made her heart stop.

The Rememberers.

She read faster.

The network exists. Has always existed. For every cut the Editors make, there are those who remember what was lost. We find each other in the seams. We pass our knowledge down. We wait.

I am one of them. My mother was one. Her mother before. All the way back to the beginning of the cuts.

The girl came to me asking about the lost places. I showed her what I could. I gave her a map of the seams. But I didn't tell her about us. She wasn't ready. Wasn't part of the network yet.

If she survives, if she keeps searching, she'll find us eventually. We always recognize our own.

The girl. That had to be the sibling. The Cartographer's Daughter had known about the network, had been part of it, and had chosen not to tell.

She kept reading.

There are signs. Ways to find us if you know what to look for. We mark the seams with symbols. Old signs that mean nothing to most people but everything to us.

Below that, a list. Symbols drawn in faded ink, each one with a description.

A circle with a line through it. Means "safe house here."

A triangle with a dot in the center. Means "records preserved."

Three wavy lines. Means "danger, Editors watching."

More symbols. More meanings. A whole language she'd never known existed.

She kept going through the papers, looking for more. Found coordinates. Dozens of them, scattered across the pages. Places where the Rememberers had hidden themselves, preserved their knowledge, waited for someone who understood.

The network. She'd been looking for it and it had been right in front of her the whole time.

She folded the papers carefully and tucked them into her bag. Started to head back toward the hole in the floor.

Then she saw it.

One more paper, stuck to the underside of the box's lid. She almost missed it, would have missed it if the moonlight through the shattered window hadn't caught the ink at the right angle.

A map. Simple, hand-drawn. Showing the coastline she recognized and a route heading north. Into the mountains. Toward a spot marked with a symbol she hadn't seen in the list.

A river, drawn flowing upward. Against gravity. Against sense.

The Backwards River.

And next to it, in the Cartographer's Daughter's handwriting:

This is where they went. The girl with the yellow scarf. I tried to stop them but they wouldn't listen. They said they'd found something in the archives, something that proved the Editors could be defeated. They were going to the source.

I don't know if they made it. I don't know if they survived.

But if anyone follows them, if anyone reads this and thinks about going after them: don't go alone. Don't make their mistake.

Find the others first. Find the Rememberers. Build something strong enough to survive what waits at the source.

Please. Learn from what I couldn't teach them.

She stood there in the burned-out lighthouse, holding the map, reading the same warning she'd already been given.

Don't go alone.

But the compass was still pointing. Not at her anymore. Not at the fear of giving up.

It was pointing north. Toward the mountains. Toward the River.

She climbed back down. Showed Linn what she'd found. Explained about the symbols, the coordinates, the network that had been hiding in plain sight.

"So we have a map," Linn said. "Places to find the Rememberers. People who can help."

"Yes."

"And we have a route to the Backwards River. Where your sibling went."

"Yes."

Linn looked at her with eyes that were starting to go foggy around the edges. The Disease taking hold, moment by moment.

"The warnings say not to go alone. The sibling said it. The Cartographer's Daughter said it. Everyone who knows anything about this says the same thing."

"I know."

"So we find the Rememberers first. Follow the coordinates. Build the network."

She looked at the map in her hands. The careful route north. The symbol of the river flowing wrong.

She should do what everyone told her. Take the slow path. Find allies. Build something strong enough to survive.

But the journal was dying. Twelve pages left. Maybe a few weeks before there was nothing.

And Linn was fading. Maybe days before the girl forgot everything, forgot her, wandered off into a world that would swallow her whole.

"What if there isn't time?" she said quietly. "What if I spend weeks finding the Rememberers and the journal goes blank before I can use what they teach me?"

"Then at least you tried the right way."

"And if the right way is too slow?"

Linn didn't have an answer for that.

Neither did she.

She dreamed that night.

Not the usual dream, the one where she walked through vanished cities with someone she couldn't see. This was different.

She was standing at the edge of a river. But the water flowed upward, climbing the riverbed like it was falling in reverse. Impossible. Wrong. Beautiful in a way that made her chest hurt.

And on the other side, someone was waiting.

She couldn't see their face. Could never see their face. But she knew them. Knew them the way she knew her own heartbeat, her own breath.

They were saying something. Calling to her across the impossible water. But the river was loud, the sound of it drowning out everything else.

She stepped toward it. The water rushed past her ankles, cold and wrong, pulling upward instead of down.

Another step. The current grabbed her calves, her knees. Fighting to pull her upstream.

She looked at the figure on the far bank. They were gesturing now. Waving their arms. Trying to tell her something.

Wait.

That was the word. She couldn't hear it but she could read it on their lips.

Wait.

But she was so close. So close after so long. How could she wait when they were right there?

She took another step and the river swallowed her whole.

She woke gasping.

Gray dawn light filtered through the ruins. Linn was still asleep, curled near the dead fire, notebook clutched against her chest.

She sat up and pulled out the compass.

It was still pointing north. Toward the mountains. Toward the River.

But now she understood what it was pointing at.

Not the destination. The fear.

She was afraid of getting there. Afraid of what she'd find. Afraid that after all this searching, after all this loss, the sibling would be gone in a way that couldn't be fixed.

Or worse.

Afraid that she'd reach the source and discover that none of this could be undone. That the cuts were permanent. That all her hope had been based on nothing.

The compass had been pointing at her heart when she was afraid of giving up. Now it pointed at the River because that's where her fear lived. At the end of the journey, where all her questions would finally be answered.

And answers could be terrible things.

She put the compass away and looked at Linn. The girl was starting to stir, eyelids fluttering, lips moving in silent conversation with dreams she wouldn't remember.

One more day. That's all she was willing to give this. One more day to decide.

Go north to the River and risk everything on a desperate rush. Or follow the coordinates, find the Rememberers, do it the way everyone said she should.

By tomorrow, she'd have to choose.

But first she had to see if Linn remembered why they were here.

She waited as the girl's eyes opened. Watched the confusion cloud her face, then the slow recognition.

"Morning," Linn said. Her voice was rough from sleep.

"Morning."

"Did you find anything? In the lighthouse?"

She remembered. Thank god, she remembered.

"Yes. A map. Coordinates. The network is real."

Linn sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. "That's good. That's really good."

"It is."

"So what do we do now?"

She looked north, toward mountains she couldn't see from here but knew were waiting.

"I'm still deciding."