Where the Signal Breaks

The sun cracked the edge of the horizon like an amber warning. Kai Keahikekoa stood at the base of the ridge, chest rising hard from the descent, his drone tucked under one arm like a sleeping bird. The cliff above now seemed impossibly distant—like a former self.

Sienna Rees had reached the circle first. Her boots were dusty, her journal finally open again. “It’s not just a formation,” she said, crouching low to trace the edge of one of the stones. “It’s… mapped. This whole place is humming with direction.”

Kai knelt beside her. “I thought it was just instinct. A pull. But now I think it’s been trying to speak.”

“Or remember,” Sienna offered.

A sudden gust curled through the valley, lifting their hair, tugging at Kai’s scarf. The stones responded—not with movement, but with resonance. A low, layered vibration.

They both felt it in their bones.

The drone lit up. No one had touched it.

On its tiny screen, a flickering image emerged—a pulse, a shape, something beneath. A structure woven under the surface like veins under skin.

Kai’s voice cracked with awe. “Sienna… it’s alive.”

She swallowed hard. “Or it remembers being.”

The sky above shifted—clouds folding into each other like questions. The well in the center of the circle began to shimmer, not with light, but with a kind of gravity. Drawing their focus. Drawing them.

Kai stepped forward. “What if it’s not just memory? What if it’s invitation?”

Sienna nodded, eyes wide. “Then we follow it. Carefully.”

They circled the edge of the well together, wind rising in rhythm with their heartbeat. Whatever was next wouldn’t be just a revelation.

It would be a crossing.