Ameera forced herself to smile back, but her hand clenched tighter around the wooden carving still in her pocket — Farruk’s warning, the spiral carved deep. She traced it with her thumb, grounding herself.
Inside, her thoughts were sharper, colder. Play along. Learn his plan. Then strike.
Abu turned, motioning for her to follow. “Come. I’ll show you what I found.”
He walked into the trees, the firelight fading behind him. Ameera followed, every step deliberate, her mask of loyalty hiding the storm brewing beneath.
But as the shadows closed around them, she realized something chilling: Abu wasn’t the only one watching her.
Somewhere beyond the trees, another pair of eyes tracked her every move.Abu pushed through the undergrowth ahead, muttering to himself about “the path” and “the rules,” but Ameera’s attention drifted sideways. The sensation of being watched was no longer subtle — it was sharp, pressing, undeniable.
A branch creaked overhead. She froze. Slowly, she tilted her gaze upward.
Perched among the branches of a pine was a figure cloaked in mud and leaves, almost invisible against the bark. Its face was obscured by a crude mask — wood carved into the same spiral-with-three-lines symbol she’d seen before.
Her breath caught.
The masked figure lifted a finger to where its lips should be. Silence. Then, with startling swiftness, it dropped from the tree, landing soundlessly just a few feet behind Abu.
Ameera opened her mouth — but the figure moved first. A knife glinted in its hand, not raised to strike, but held out toward her, handle first, as though offering it.
Abu hadn’t noticed. He kept walking, muttering, lost in his obsession.
The masked figure’s head tilted toward her, wordless, waiting.Ameera ’s pulse roared in her ears as she glanced at Abu’s back. He was still muttering, oblivious.
Slowly, carefully, she extended her hand. The masked figure pressed the knife into her palm — its weight solid, cold, terrifyingly real.
For a heartbeat, their fingers touched. The figure leaned close enough for her to catch a faint whisper from behind the wooden mask:
“Don’t wait too long.”
Then, as silently as it had appeared, the figure melted back into the trees, swallowed by shadow.
Ameera slid the knife into her sleeve, heart hammering. She turned just in time as Abu glanced back, suspicion flickering in his hollow eyes.
“You’re quiet,” he said, narrowing his gaze. “Thinking about your choice?”
She forced a thin smile. “Thinking about survival.”
His grin returned, sharp and approving. “Good. Then you’ll understand what has to happen next.”
He pushed aside a curtain of hanging moss, revealing the outline of a weathered cabin ahead, half-buried in vines and rot. The ranger station.
Her stomach dropped. Mariam’s words echoed in her skull: Don’t trust him.
Farruk’s spirals burned in her pocket.
And now, the knife pressed against her wrist like a promise.The cabin loomed like a skeleton, its walls sagging, its windows fogged with grime. Abu pushed the door open with a creak that seemed to echo too long in the silence.
Inside, the air was damp and heavy with mildew. Dust swirled in thin beams of fading light, falling across warped shelves and broken furniture. But it wasn’t the decay that made Ameera’s skin crawl — it was the journals scattered across a table at the center of the room.
Dozens of them. Some leather-bound, some stitched crudely together with twine. All of them filled with frantic handwriting.
Abu’s hands trembled as he picked one up, flipping it open to a page dark with smeared ink. “I’ve read them all,” he said, voice sharp with conviction. “Decades of rangers, wanderers, researchers… all trapped here. And they all came to the same conclusion.” He turned the book so she could see the words scrawled across the page in shaky letters:
“Balance demands blood.”
Aisha’s throat tightened. “What does that mean?”
Abu’s eyes gleamed with feverish light. “It means the forest doesn’t starve us by accident. It feeds. It tests. One must hunt, one must fall. The rest… they’re offerings. That’s why we’re still here. That’s why it won’t let us leave.”
He leaned across the table, his face inches from hers. “But if you and I claim the role of hunters — together — we won’t just survive. We’ll own the forest. Control it.”
Ameera’s grip tightened on the knife hidden in her sleeve. His words twisted through her like vines, cold and suffocating.
And then Abu’s smile faded, his voice dropping low. “So tell me, Ameera … are you ready to prove yourself?”
Ameera swallowed hard, forcing herself to steady her breath. The knife pressed cold against her wrist, but she didn’t draw it — not yet.
Instead, she met Abu’s fever-bright eyes and nodded slowly. “If that’s what it takes… then yes. I’m ready.”
Aksara