Chapter 3: The Glass Shore

Marina cut the engine and let the Delphine drift toward the island on the current. The shore was unlike anything she had studied in her years of coastal geology. Instead of sand or rock, the beach was composed of smooth, translucent pebbles that caught the fading sunlight and scattered it into tiny rainbows. She dropped anchor in the shallows and waded ashore, her boots crunching on what sounded like a thousand small bells. The air smelled different here. Not the familiar brine of the open Pacific, but something sweeter, almost floral, like jasmine carried on a warm wind. Tall grasses lined the edge of the beach, bending in unison as though choreographed. Beyond them, a dense forest of trees she could not identify climbed steeply toward the interior. Their bark was pale silver, and their leaves shimmered with a faint bioluminescence that grew brighter as the daylight faded. She pulled the journal from her waterproof bag and compared Keeper Ellsworth's descriptions to what she saw. He had written about the glass shore and the singing trees with a mixture of wonder and dread. According to his account, he had visited this island seven times over the course of six months, each visit revealing something new and increasingly disturbing. On his third visit, he found ruins. On his fifth, he heard voices. By the seventh, he wrote that the island had begun to change shape between his arrivals, as though it were alive and rearranging itself. Marina photographed everything methodically, labeling each image with GPS tags that she suspected would be useless once she returned to the mainland. The light she had seen from the water was coming from higher ground, pulsing with a steady rhythm that reminded her uncomfortably of a heartbeat. She shouldered her pack and began to climb, following a narrow path worn into the hillside by feet that had walked here long before hers.