The green light pulses from the cave mouth, and I feel the presence inside go still. Watchful. The way I go still when I’m offering space.
I speak through the offshoot, my voice small and strange through so little mass.
“Hello.”
Silence. The green light flickers.
Something moves in the darkness, limbs unfolding slow and deliberate.A shape emerges, and I see him through the fragment’s senses. Pale green luminescence. The color of things that live without sun.
He is thin. Gaunt in the way of creatures that survive on minimum. His eyes catch what little light exists and throw it back, reflective, and the offshoot trembles at the focus of that gaze.
“You’re a piece,” he says. His voice cracks on the words, like rust flaking from old metal. “A piece of something bigger. The monster that was at my cave mouth just the other night.”
“Yes.”
“Where is the rest of you?”
“Back at the house. Holding someone while she sleeps.”
The creature goes still at that. A different kind of stillness. Something in his posture shifts.
“Holding,” he repeats.
He studies the offshoot. I study him through it. He is old. Old in the way I’m old, shaped by decades of solitude. His claws areworn. His hide scars over old wounds, healed poorly, the marks of rocks thrown and bullets that grazed.
“Why do you hide?” I ask.
He takes a long time to answer. The silence stretches between us, two old things in the dark, one speaking through a fragment and one speaking through rust.
“They fear what I am,” he says finally. “The stories they tell… They call me the Ridge Walker. They blame me for every misfortune. Missing goats and vanished hikers. They lay every unexplained thing at my feet because I’m a convenient shape to pin their fear onto.”
“Did you do those things?”
His luminescence flickers, dimmer, then brighter. A flinch, maybe. Or something closer to a sigh.
“The goats were the work of coyotes. The hiker—” He pauses. “The hiker found my cave. She was injured. I kept her warm until she could walk again. But she wasscared and told the town a monster had attacked her.”
The offshoot registers the vibration of his voice, the way it moves through the air and into my small mass. He’s telling the truth. I can feel it in the steadiness of him, the way his body does not shift or deflect.
“The cat,” I say. “Captain. You kept him.”
“I took him.” The correction comes slow, heavy. “After so long alone, I wanted to hold something soft.”
I know that wanting. The specific ache of reaching for contact and finding only air.
“Then I found him,” I say.
“I let you. I knew I was being selfish.”
I process this. The capacity to hold something then release it because you understand it belongs elsewhere. The specific pain of that choice.
“The car,” I say. “The old vehicle. Deborah Pritchett’s Chevy.”
The Ridge Walker’s stillness changes. Something shifts in his posture, a tighteningthat might be embarrassment in a creature unused to the feeling.
“That was boredom.”
“Boredom?”
