Ro Goes Into The Forest

Priya's two words — come tomorrow — turned out to mean something larger than Morganta had been prepared for even after lying awake most of the night thinking about them.

She and Lexus arrived at the rental house in Fraser at eight in the morning to find Priya and Callum already at the kitchen table with two laptops open and printed spectrographs spread across every available surface and the particular wide-awake energy of people who hadn't slept because they hadn't wanted to rather than because they couldn't. Empty coffee cups. A takeaway bag from somewhere that had apparently been open late. The quiet buzzing aliveness of people who had found something and were still inside the finding of it.

Nina was there too, sitting at the end of the table in the same clothes she'd been wearing the previous day, which suggested she'd been called at some point during the night and hadn't gone back to bed. She looked up when Morganta and Lexus came in and nodded once in that serious efficient way of hers.

Ro was not in the kitchen.

Morganta noticed this immediately. She stood in the doorway and looked at the table and at the four chairs around it and at the chair against the wall where Ro habitually sat and she said, before anyone had started explaining what they'd found: "Where's Ro?"

A brief silence. The kind of silence that has information in it.

Callum looked at Nina. Nina looked at Morganta. "She's in her room," Nina said. "She's fine."

"Why are you saying it like that?" Morganta said.

Nina set her glasses down on the table. "Sit down," she said. "I'll tell you what happened and then I'll show you what Priya found. In that order."

Morganta sat. Lexus sat beside her. She looked at Nina and waited.

What had happened was this.

Priya and Callum had gone out to the road at eleven as planned and set up the equipment and begun recording. The night conditions were good — low wind, no traffic after midnight, the ambient noise floor dropping steadily as the town settled into quiet. Priya had positioned the directional microphones at a new configuration based on the previous night's data, angled to refine the triangulation of the frequency source. They were working well. The recordings were clean. The frequency was present and stronger than in any previous session, which fit the pattern Priya had been building of the signal intensifying in the hours between midnight and two.

At approximately twelve forty, Callum had noticed Ro.

She had come from the direction of the rental house on foot, which meant she had walked nearly a kilometre along the road in the dark alone without telling anyone. She was standing at the verge about thirty metres from their setup, at the point where the shoulder met the tree line, looking into the trees. She wasn't moving. She was just standing there in the dark looking into the forest with that quality of focused attention that made Callum put down what he was doing and go to her immediately.

He reached her and said her name. She didn't respond straight away. He said it again, closer, and she turned and looked at him and the look on her face was one he hadn't seen on her before — not frightened, not distressed, but somewhere else, like someone being gently pulled between two places and not yet having committed to either.

He took her arm and walked her back to the car, firmly and without making a big thing of it, and she came without resistance. She got in the passenger seat. Callum got in the driver's seat. They sat there for a while. After a few minutes Ro said, in a completely normal voice, that she'd heard Marcus. She said she'd woken up and heard his voice coming from somewhere and she'd followed it outside and down the road before she was fully awake enough to know what she was doing. She said she knew it probably wasn't him. She said probably.

Callum had messaged Nina from the car. Nina had come. They'd taken Ro back to the house and sat with her until she was fully present and calm, which hadn't taken long but had taken long enough. Then Callum had gone back to the road to pack up the equipment, because leaving it out unattended wasn't something Priya would forgive, and found Priya sitting in the recording position still working, apparently undisturbed by any of this, headphones on, completely in the data.

She'd found something. Which was why she'd messaged Morganta at one seventeen. Which was why they were all here now.

Morganta sat with the account for a moment after Nina finished telling it. She looked at the table. She thought about what she'd said to Ro the previous day about the selection mechanism, about not wanting her on that road at night. She thought about Ro waking up and following a voice she knew probably wasn't her brother's and following it anyway, down a dark road toward a tree line at midnight, because probably wasn't the same as definitely and grief will take probably over nothing every single time.

"Is she alright?" Lexus said.

"She's shaken," Nina said. "She's not injured and she's not — she came back fully. There was no period of unresponsiveness, no memory gaps. She followed a sound, Callum brought her back, she's been herself since." She paused. "But it was close. If Callum hadn't seen her when he did—"

"She'd have gone into the trees," Morganta said.

"Yes," Nina said.

Morganta looked at the chair against the wall where Ro wasn't sitting. She thought about what she knew about grief, about the specific texture of a grief that doesn't have an ending because the person it belongs to didn't have a clear ending, because they're not definitively gone, just missing, just somewhere unknown, and the not knowing is its own endless open wound that never closes because closing requires accepting and accepting requires certainty and there is no certainty. She understood that grief specifically. She understood why probably wasn't good enough when you were living inside it.

She pushed her chair back. "I'm going to talk to her," she said.

Nina looked uncertain. "She's resting—"

"I'm not going to disturb her rest," Morganta said. "I'm going to knock on the door and if she doesn't answer I'll leave her alone. But if she's awake I want to talk to her."

Nina nodded.

Ro's door was the second on the left at the top of the stairs. Morganta knocked once, lightly.

A pause. Then: "Come in."

She was sitting on the bed with her back against the headboard and her knees pulled up and her phone in her hand, not looking at it, just holding it. She'd changed out of whatever she'd been wearing when Callum found her on the road and was in a hoodie now, hair down, which was the first time Morganta had seen her look less than put together. She looked younger like this and also somehow more herself, as though the put-together version was the performance and this was the actual person.

Morganta sat in the small chair near the window. The window looked out over the back garden of the rental and beyond it the edge of the Fraser tree line, visible in the morning light as a dark ridge against the grey sky.

"Callum says you heard Marcus," Morganta said.

Ro looked at her. "I know it wasn't him."

"You said probably."

Ro was quiet for a second. "I know it wasn't him," she said again, more deliberately. "I know that. But knowing something and feeling it aren't always the same thing and in that specific moment, in the dark, just woken up—" She stopped. "It sounded like him. It had the right quality. Not the words, just the—" she searched for it "—the tone of him. The way his voice sat in the air."

Morganta nodded. She didn't try to explain it away or reframe it as something purely psychological, because she didn't know with certainty that it was and because Ro didn't need that from her right now. "What did it say?" she asked.

Ro looked at the window. At the tree line. "My name," she said. "Just my name. Once. And then I was outside and walking before I'd made any decision to be."

"How far did you get?"

"The tree line," Ro said. "I was at the tree line when Callum got to me. I had my hand on the first tree." She looked at her hand briefly, as though checking it was still the same hand. "I wasn't frightened," she said. "That's the thing that frightens me now. In the moment I wasn't frightened at all. I just — wanted to go in."

Morganta looked at her steadily. "That's how it works," she said. "That's the mechanism. It doesn't frighten you. It draws you. It makes the going toward it feel like the natural thing, the right thing, the thing you've been about to do for a while." She paused. "That's why I didn't want you on that road at night. Not because I don't trust you. Because what happened to you last night can happen to anyone when the conditions are right. And for you the conditions are—"

"More right than for most people," Ro said quietly.

"Yes," Morganta said. "Because you already want something that's in there. Or something that sounds like something that's in there."

Ro was quiet for a moment. She looked at the tree line through the window. "Do you think Marcus is in there?" she asked. She asked it carefully, like she'd been holding it for a long time and was finally putting it down in front of someone who might be able to tell her something honest.

Morganta thought about how to answer that. She thought about the arm in the branches. About John's shirt. About what it meant that things belonging to the missing turned up in those trees, and what it meant that voices belonging to the missing could be heard from them, and what the true answer to Ro's question was when you took all of that seriously rather than explaining it away.

"I think something that was part of Marcus might be in there," she said. "I don't know what that means exactly. I don't know if it means him or something the place has taken from him or something else I don't have language for." She looked at Ro. "But I don't think going in to find it would give you what you're looking for. I think it would give you something that looked like it long enough to take you too."

Ro held her gaze. Her eyes were very steady, the kind of steady that takes effort. "How do you know the difference?" she said. "Between what's real and what it's showing you to draw you in?"

It was a good question. It was possibly the central question of everything they were doing and Morganta didn't have a complete answer for it, had been thinking about it since the clearing, had been thinking about it more acutely since Priya's frequency data had pointed to something further in and unknown.

"You stay outside it," Morganta said. "That's the only way I know. You don't go in and try to work it out from inside. You work it out from here." She looked at Ro. "Which means you stay out of those trees. And off that road at night. Can you do that?"

Ro looked at her for a long moment. Something was working itself out in her expression, something difficult and honest and not entirely resolved. "I want to say yes," she said. "I mean it. I want to say yes."

"But?" Morganta said.

Ro looked at the window. At the trees. "But I heard his voice," she said. "And I can't promise you that if I hear it again I'll be able to—" She stopped. Shook her head slightly. "I'm trying to be honest with you."

"I know," Morganta said. "I appreciate it."

She sat in the chair for a moment looking at this young woman on the bed, who had come here to understand the thing that had taken her brother and had spent three years being professional and competent and useful about it, and who had stood at a tree line in the dark at midnight with her hand on the bark because something had called her name in her brother's voice and probably wasn't good enough. She felt a complicated thing looking at her. Something that was partly recognition and partly protectiveness and partly a very clear understanding that Ro was a person who was going to do what she was going to do and the best Morganta could offer was proximity rather than control.

"I'm going to ask you to do one thing," Morganta said. "Not stay out of the trees, because you've just told me honestly you can't promise that and I'd rather have your honesty than a promise you're not sure you can keep." She held Ro's gaze. "If you hear his voice again, or feel pulled in any way, at any time, I want you to call me before you do anything. Not Nina. Me. My number, directly, whatever time it is."

Ro looked at her. "Why you?"

"Because I've been inside it and come back," Morganta said. "And because I'll answer."

A pause. Something settled in Ro's expression, not completely, not permanently, but enough. "Okay," she said. "I'll call you."

Morganta nodded. She stood up from the chair. "Now come downstairs," she said. "Priya has something to show us and whatever it is kept her up all night and I want to understand it."

Ro got up off the bed and pulled her hair back and became the put-together version of herself again, the version that could sit in a meeting room and take notes and process information professionally. Morganta watched her do it and understood exactly what it cost and didn't say anything about it.

They went downstairs together.

Priya had waited.

This was something Morganta appreciated, that Priya had held the finding back until everyone was in the room, because it was the kind of finding that needed to be shared once properly rather than explained and re-explained in fragments. She stood at the end of the kitchen table with her laptop open and the spectrographs printed and laid out in the sequence they'd been captured, a visual timeline of the previous night's recording running left to right across the available table space.

Everyone found a seat. Ro sat in the chair against the wall that she always sat in. Nina at the end near Priya. Callum beside her, a fresh coffee in front of him that hadn't been touched yet. Lexus beside Morganta.

"The frequency was stronger last night than in any previous session," Priya began, in the clear organised voice she used when she was presenting data. "Approximately thirty percent stronger than the previous strongest recording, which was the first morning session three days ago. The directional mapping is now precise enough to give us a location range rather than just a direction." She pointed to the map she'd pinned to the kitchen wall — the same annotated map she'd been building since arriving, now covered in markings and lines and converging arrows. "The source is here." She tapped a point on the map. "Approximately four hundred metres past the clearing. In a natural depression in the ground — I can see it on the topographic overlay, it's a low point in the terrain, surrounded by older growth." She paused. "I won't have precise confirmation until I can set up inside the tree line, but based on last night's data I'm confident to within about fifty metres."

Morganta looked at the map. At the point Priya was indicating. Four hundred metres past the clearing. Further in than anyone had documented, further in than the Dawson car, further in than the arm in the branches. A depression in the ground, surrounded by old trees. Something about the image of it sat in her chest in a particular way.

"That's not all," Priya said.

She turned back to her laptop and opened an audio file. "At approximately one in the morning," she said, "the recording captured something new." She looked around the table. "I want to be clear about what I'm presenting. This is raw audio, cleaned for ambient noise but otherwise unprocessed. What you're about to hear is what the microphone picked up. I've analysed it extensively and I have findings but I want you to listen first without my interpretation in your head."

She pressed play.

The recording started with the frequency — the low layered breathing they all recognised now, present and stronger than in the previous sessions, filling the room in a way that made the air feel slightly different. Morganta felt Lexus go still beside her. Ro, against the wall, had her hands pressed flat on her thighs.

The frequency built gradually over about forty seconds. And then, underneath it, something else emerged. Not above the frequency — underneath it, in a lower register still, something that was separate from the layered breathing but interwoven with it. Something that had a different quality from the rest of the sound. A different intentionality.

Morganta leaned forward.

It was almost words. Almost. The shape of words, the rhythm of language, without the clarity of it — like hearing someone speak through a wall, where the cadence and the intention come through and the specific sounds don't. She listened with her whole attention, every part of her reaching toward the sound trying to resolve it into something legible. She could feel everyone else in the room doing the same thing. The quality of attention in the kitchen was extraordinary, six people all simultaneously straining toward the same sounds, trying to hear the same thing.

The recording ran for another ninety seconds and then Priya stopped it.

Silence.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"What was that?" Lexus said. His voice was very calm, the particular calm he used when he was covering something more complicated.

"That's what I need to tell you," Priya said. She closed the audio file and opened her analysis. "I've run every acoustic model I have on that section of the recording. Frequency analysis, spectral decomposition, pattern recognition. I've slowed it down, isolated it, filtered everything around it." She turned the laptop toward them. "It has the acoustic properties of human speech."

The room held that.

"Not all speech," she said. "Not recognisable words, not a language I can identify. But the rhythm, the phonemic structure, the breath pattern underlying it — these are consistent with human vocal production. Whatever is making that sound has something in common with the human vocal apparatus." She paused. "Or is using recordings of the human vocal apparatus. I can't distinguish between those two possibilities from the audio alone."

"The missing people," Callum said quietly.

Priya looked at him. "It's one hypothesis."

Morganta looked at the spectrograph on Priya's screen. The visual representation of the sound, the layers of it, the thing underneath the layers that had the shape of language without the content of it. She thought about what she'd told Ro upstairs. About something that was part of Marcus possibly being in there. About things the place had taken from people.

She thought about the face in the branches.

She thought about being counted.

"Play it again," she said.

Priya played it again. They all listened again with the same total attention, and again the almost-words sat just below the threshold of resolution, just out of reach, almost there and then not. Morganta listened and tried to let go of the effort of understanding and just receive the sound as sound, the way you sometimes hear something better when you stop trying so hard to hear it.

The recording ended.

In the silence afterward, Ro said from her chair against the wall, very quietly: "That's why it sounds like him." She wasn't looking at anyone. She was looking at the speaker on Priya's laptop. "That's why it gets the voices right. That's where it's getting them from."

Nobody argued with her. Nobody confirmed it either. They sat in the kitchen of a rented house in Fraser with the morning light coming through the window and the tree line visible beyond the back garden and the recording finished and gone from the air, and they held the weight of what Priya had found and what it might mean.

After a while Nina spoke. Her voice was measured and professional and Morganta could hear what it was costing her to keep it that way. "We need to talk about next steps," she said. "Specifically about the location Priya has identified and what we do with that information." She looked at Morganta. "But first I think we should talk about safety protocols. What happened with Ro last night cannot happen again."

"Agreed," Morganta said. She looked at Ro.

Ro looked back at her. Not defensive. Not resistant. Just clear-eyed and present and carrying something enormous with a lot of practice. "Agreed," Ro said.

And Morganta believed her. She also kept her phone on and the volume up for the rest of the day, just in case.