Morganta Talks

She hadn't planned to do it that morning.

She'd woken up early, earlier than Lexus, and lay in the quiet of the bedroom for a while thinking about Callum's timeline and Priya's frequency data and the direction the mapping pointed, further into the trees than anyone had been, and at some point in the middle of all that thinking she'd made a decision that she hadn't been consciously working toward but that felt, once she'd made it, like something that had been inevitable since Nina Voss walked into her office.

She was going to tell them what happened in Fraser. All of it. The version she hadn't told anyone.

She got up and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window while it was still dark outside and thought about what that meant practically — what she would say and in what order and where to start — and tried not to think too much about how it would feel, because thinking about how it would feel was the kind of thing that made you change your mind.

Lexus found her in the kitchen at six. He looked at her standing at the window in the dark with her coffee and read something in her posture and said nothing for a moment, just made his own coffee and stood beside her.

"I'm going to tell them today," she said. "The full account."

He was quiet for a second. "Everything?"

"Everything."

He nodded slowly. "Including what you didn't put in the report?"

"Including that."

He looked at her sideways. "Are you sure?"

"No," she said. "But Priya's data is pointing somewhere and Nina's pattern is pointing somewhere and Della Voss has been missing for nearly a week and I'm not going to be the reason this takes longer than it has to because I didn't want to say something out loud." She looked at her coffee. "They need to understand what they're dealing with. And the only way they can understand it is if someone who's been inside it tells them the truth about what it was like."

Lexus put his arm around her briefly, a simple and solid gesture that didn't try to be more than it was, and then let go and drank his coffee.

"I'll be there," he said.

"I know," she said.

She called Nina at eight and told her to bring the team to ML Detectives at ten. Nina said they'd be there.

They arrived at five to, all four of them, and filed into the meeting room with a quiet efficiency that suggested Nina had told them something was happening that required them to pay attention and not fill space unnecessarily. Callum had his laptop but didn't open it. Priya left her equipment cases in the car. Ro came in and sat against the wall in her usual spot, slightly apart from the others, and folded her hands in her lap.

Morganta waited until they'd settled. Lexus sat beside her. She looked around the table and then looked at the surface of it for a moment, collecting herself in a way she didn't try to make invisible.

"I'm going to tell you what happened in Fraser," she said. "The complete account. Not the version in the report — that version is accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves things out. Things I decided at the time weren't appropriate for an official document, or that I wasn't ready to put into words, or that I knew wouldn't be understood in the context of a standard police-adjacent report." She paused. "I'm telling you now because you need to know it to do this safely. Not because it's easy or because I've decided I'm fine with it. Just because you need to know."

Nobody said anything. The room held a particular kind of attentive quiet.

She started at the beginning.

She told them about the road, about finding the tyre marks and the glass and Addison's phone. She told them about Enzo, about the security footage, about Rachel and the voicemails and the name Trent that had turned out to be a thread that went nowhere useful. She told them about the investigation building, about the sense of something underneath the ordinary missing persons case that kept pushing up through the surface no matter how many conventional explanations she reached for.

She told them about the day they found the car.

She described the clearing — the way the forest opened up, the vehicle sitting there half hidden like it had been placed rather than driven, the glass scattered outward, the doors hanging open, the jacket still folded on the back seat. She described Karl and Jason Martin arriving and Karl's expression when he saw the car and how she'd hit him, and said it without apology or explanation because it wasn't relevant and it wasn't what she was here to talk about.

Then she told them about the sound.

She took her time with this part. She'd described it before, in fragments, in the partial accounts she'd given over the years when someone asked directly and she'd decided to give them something. But she'd never described it fully, never tried to put the whole thing into words in one sitting, and there was a difference between the fragment and the full account that she was aware of as she spoke. The full account required her to stay inside the memory rather than dipping in and out of it, and staying inside it was different from visiting it briefly.

She described the way it came from everywhere at once. The way her brain kept trying to locate it and kept failing, kept reaching for a direction to orient herself toward and finding none. The layered quality of it, too many of them at once, the rhythm that was almost right and therefore more wrong than if it had been completely different from anything human. She described the feeling of it — the thing that Priya's recording hadn't captured, that no recording could capture — the sense that it was aware of them. That it wasn't simply a sound happening in their proximity but something that knew they were there and was responding to their presence in real time.

She described the arm in the branches.

This was the part she'd never described to anyone in full. She'd mentioned it in the report, briefly, clinically, a visual anomaly observed in the upper branches of the tree line. She hadn't described what it felt like to look up and see it. The way it hung there with that specific wrongness, the wrongness that came not from it being obviously terrible but from it being almost normal — an arm, just an arm, except that it wasn't moving with the wind and it wasn't responding to gravity the way things respond to gravity and it was there in a way that felt deliberate rather than incidental. She described Enzo saying that's John's shirt in the voice of a man who already knew something the rest of them were only beginning to understand.

She described what Lexus had told them about the Red Choir. The name. The layered breathing. The notes from old case files, the pattern, the sacrifice.

And then she described the sacrifice.

She described it plainly and without dramatising it, because it didn't need dramatising and because dramatising it would have been a way of putting distance between herself and the telling of it, and she wasn't doing that today. She said that someone stayed behind. She said that was what it cost for the rest of them to get out. She didn't say who and nobody asked, and she was grateful for that, and she held onto the gratitude for a moment before continuing.

Then she told them the thing she hadn't put in the report.

She'd stopped walking. She'd reached the edge of the clearing on the way out, the others already moving ahead of her, and she'd stopped and looked back. She didn't know why. She'd told herself afterward that it was instinct, that something made her look, but the honest answer was that she didn't fully know why she stopped and looked back. She just did.

And when she looked back she saw that the arm in the branches was gone.

That wasn't the part she'd left out of the report. The arm being gone she'd noted and filed as consistent with the group's departure, whatever that meant.

What she'd left out was what was there instead.

Where the arm had been, in the upper branches of the tree line at the edge of the clearing, there was now a face. Not a full figure, not a body, just a face in the branches, pale and still the way the arm had been still. Looking at her. Not with malice, not with anything she could comfortably identify as an emotion. Just looking. With the particular quality of attention that belongs to something that has been doing this for a very long time and is not in any hurry and finds the current situation simply interesting.

She held its gaze for a moment. She couldn't have said how long. Time had a different texture in that clearing and she'd long since stopped trying to be precise about durations.

Then she turned and walked out of the clearing and didn't look back again.

She hadn't told anyone that. Not Lexus, not the official report, not anyone in the two years since it happened. She'd held it privately, turned it over occasionally in the way you turn over something you don't have a category for, and put it back down again.

She told them now.

When she finished the room was very quiet. The particular quiet that comes after someone has said something that takes up a lot of space and needs a moment before anything else can come in around it.

Callum was looking at the table. Priya had her hands folded in front of her and was looking at Morganta with an expression of careful attention. Nina had taken her glasses off and was holding them in one hand, which Morganta had come to understand was what Nina did when she was thinking hard about something and didn't want any additional input from her visual field.

Ro was looking at Morganta from the chair against the wall. Her expression had changed from the careful detachment she usually wore. It was more open than that. More present. Like something in what Morganta had said had connected to something she'd been carrying for a long time and the connection had surprised her.

Nina was the one who spoke first, after a moment that had stretched long enough to feel complete rather than uncomfortable.

"The face," Nina said. "When you held its gaze. What did you feel?"

Morganta had expected a different first question. Something about the frequency, the acoustic properties, the objective characteristics of what she'd observed. She'd expected the researcher's question. Nina had asked the human one instead, and Morganta found she respected that.

She thought about how to answer it honestly. "Recognised," she said finally.

Nina looked at her. "By it?"

"Yes," Morganta said. "Not threatening. Not — it wasn't communicating anything I could identify. Just." She stopped. "Like it knew what I was. Not who. What."

Nina put her glasses back on. She looked at her laptop, then at the table, then at Morganta. "That's consistent with the account from the 2019 incident in the Millhaven records," she said. "Gerald Fitch described something similar. Not a visual encounter but a feeling during the auditory experience. He said he felt categorised." She said the word carefully, like it was the right word and she was aware it sounded strange. "Like something was deciding what he was."

"And then he woke up twenty miles away," Callum said quietly.

"Yes," Nina said.

Morganta looked at Lexus. He was watching her with that steady expression, the one that didn't try to fix anything, just stayed present. She gave him a very small nod that meant she was alright, she was through the hard part.

Then the door opened slightly and Lexus got up immediately, which surprised everyone including Morganta, and she turned to see what had made him move that fast.

Ro had stood up from her chair against the wall and was at the door, one hand on the frame, facing away from the table, facing the corridor outside. She wasn't leaving. She'd just needed to be at the edge of the room rather than inside it for a moment. Her shoulders were up slightly, the physical expression of something she was working to manage.

Lexus reached the door and stood near her without touching her, near enough to be present without crowding her. He said something to her quietly that Morganta couldn't hear from across the room.

Ro said something back. Her voice was very controlled in the way that means the control is costing something.

Then she turned around and came back to her chair and sat down. She looked at Morganta. "I'm sorry," she said. "Keep going."

"There's nothing more to tell," Morganta said. "That's all of it."

Ro nodded. She pressed her lips together briefly and looked at the table. Then she said, quietly and to nobody in particular: "The face. Marcus's friend — the one who got out — she described the same thing." She swallowed. "She said it looked at her like it was counting her. Like she was being counted." She looked up at Morganta. "She died two years later. Not from — she just got sick. But I always thought she never really came back from it. Not fully."

The room held that.

"I'm sorry about your brother," Morganta said. She said it directly, not wrapped in anything, because Ro was the kind of person who would find wrapping it in things more difficult than the plain version.

Ro looked at her for a moment. "Tell me we're going to understand what this is," she said. Not asking for false comfort. Just asking for a direction, something to point herself at.

"That's what we're trying to do," Morganta said. "That's exactly what we're trying to do."

After the research team left that afternoon, Lexus stayed behind.

He tidied up the meeting room slowly, stacking chairs, folding Callum's timeline back along its creases, collecting the coffee cups. Morganta sat at the end of the table and watched him do it and didn't help, which he didn't comment on because he understood that she needed to be still for a while.

When he'd finished he sat down across from her.

"You didn't tell me," he said. "About the face."

"No," she said.

"Why?"

She thought about it. The honest answer was complicated in the way that honest answers to simple questions often are. "Because telling you would have made it more real," she said. "And for a long time I needed it to be less real." She looked at him. "I'm sorry."

He shook his head. "Don't apologise." He leaned forward on the table. "Does it change anything? Knowing I know now?"

Morganta thought about that. About the face in the branches, pale and still, that quality of attention it had turned on her in the moment before she walked away. The sense of being categorised. Of being counted. She thought about what it meant that it had been looking at her specifically, that out of everyone in that clearing it had been her face it had turned toward in that last moment.

She'd thought about that a lot over two years. She'd come to a conclusion she'd been sitting with privately that she hadn't shared with anyone for the same reason she hadn't shared the rest of it.

She thought about sharing it now. About whether now was the right moment.

"Morganta," Lexus said quietly.

She looked at him. His face across the table, patient and steady and completely without pressure, just waiting for whatever she decided to give him.

"I think it let us go," she said. "I don't think the sacrifice was a transaction. I don't think it was a rule that we discovered and used. I think it made a choice." She looked at the table. "And I think the choice included me specifically. I think it looked at me and decided to let me leave." She paused. "And I've spent two years not knowing whether that means something or not."

Lexus was quiet for a long moment.

"Does it feel like it means something?" he said.

Morganta looked at the window. At the ordinary afternoon city outside it, people going places, a pigeon on the opposite ledge, everything completely untouched by what was said in this room.

"Yes," she said. "It feels like it means I'm not done with this yet. That it isn't done with me."

Lexus reached across the table and put his hand over hers.

"Then we're not done with it," he said. "Together."

Outside, somewhere across Kingsport, Della Voss was still missing. In a rented house in Fraser, four researchers were going through data and building a picture of something that had been there long before any of them and had shown no signs of being finished.

And on the left side of West Kingsport Road, in the trees past the clearing, at a location Priya's frequency mapping was slowly pointing toward with increasing precision, something waited with the patience of something that understood that time worked differently for it than it did for the people who kept coming to find it.

It had looked at Morganta once and let her leave.

She had spent two years wondering why.

She thought she was about to find out.