“You sleep in the bunks, right? Did the Guardian always stay there? Or is there somewhere else, like the cabin, that was meant for you?”
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I didn’t get a chance to learn anything from the last Guardian before Weston slaughtered him.”
Lie.
He’s still lying to me, but he doesn’t know I know the truth.
My body starts to physically react, and I tamp it down quickly, hoping my face doesn’t betray me.
“He’s a monster,” I say, looking away as if it pains me to think about Weston. It does, but not in the way Dane thinks.
“I’m sorry I brought him up,” he says, reaching out to pull me closer. “But you don’t need to worry about him any longer. He won’t do anything as long as I’m with you.”
I nod quickly. “I know.” I clear my throat and try to get us back on track. “Why don’t we try the cabin?”
Storm stayed back in camp today, standing in the same spot he was when I first arrived in Dawnlin, watching over the portal entrance to the clearing. We pass by without as much as an acknowledgement, a scowl painted on his face as he stares across camp.
“Storm doesn’t seem very friendly this morning,” I say, once we are safely in the cabin with no risk of him overhearing. Turning slowly, I survey the room, taking in the empty space where all the beds from the storm were the last time I was here. Only one remains tucked away in the corner, I assume where Mara slept last night.
“He wasn’t supposed to stay back at camp today, but with you coming back last night, we needed to make sure someone was on duty that could handle Weston if he came for you.”
“Oh.”
“He’ll be fine,” Dane says, waving it off. “He agrees we need the strength here.”
I nod and step toward the center of the room. The walls are smooth, with no doors or storage cupboards of any kind. Everything within it is part of the magic and comes and goes as needed. There’s nothing to even search, because with no need for it, the room remains empty.
Shit. Another dead end.
“This room is pointless,” I say, frustration leaking into my voice. “There’s got to be something we are missing.”
I close my eyes, and cycle through everything I’ve learned about Dawnlin. I think back to Edmond’s story, the books I found in the library, the fountain. Both sides of stories I was toldfrom Dane and Sig. The mountain. The healing waters, and the poems the mountain spoke to me.
“I don’t think there’s anything from the past Guardians anywhere,” Dane says.
“What if we’re looking for the wrong thing?” I say, throwing my eyes open and spinning around to look at him again.
His brow furrows. “What are you thinking?”
“What if we keep looking for something from the other Guardians, but what if it’s not them that would tell us? What if it’s Dawnlin itself?”
“How would the island tell us?”
“Just like,” I start, but slam my mouth shut, stopping ‘the healing waters’ from tumbling through my lips. I almost told him, and now I need to cover up for my abrupt change of pace.
Dane cannot know I found the healing waters or that the island helped me make a map that led me to the discovery. He can’t know that when I asked for help or needed something, the island helped me along, showing me things and pulling me in certain directions, even revealing the location as I gazed upon the replica of the fountain as I approached the mountain.
The fountain.
Maybe it all comes back to that, to the fountain. The biggest depiction of the island of Dawnlin there is. The fountain brought us all here, and held a clue for how to find the location of the waters, but what if we’ve all missed it before, because we didn’t know we needed to look?
“Just like when I found the fountain,” I say, covering my stumble. “Dane, how much do you know about the fountain? Can you draw it? Maybe it holds the key. It’s what brings each of us here, just like the dust does.”
A light sparks in his eyes. “I never thought to look at the fountain before.”
Excitement bubbles inside me. This could be it, the answer the Castaways have been searching for.
“What do you remember about it?” I start rattling off any details that I remember, but there was so much going on in that moment that I can’t recall too much, only the details that helped me find the waters and know that it was connected to Dawnlin.
