Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The boat was late. Of course, it was freaking late. Everything on this trip so far, from the missed flight out of Atlanta and having to fly standby, to having to race across Charles de Gaul airport and still miss his connecting flight to Madagascar, had sucked.
Maybe the universe is telling you to take your butt home right now.
While he had seen some unexplainable things on various digs around the globe, none of them were enough to take away his desire for more—more knowledge, more understanding, just more.
So here he was—barefoot, standing on the edge of a converted fishing boat that smelled like fish, diesel, and whatever had died in the bilge three days ago—watching an uncharted island rise out of the Indian Ocean like something out of a fever dream.
The presence of the markings he’d come to investigate suggested this island had been inhabited at some point in the past. But right now, to him, it looked too green and too still. The type of place nature had reclaimed so completely, it had forgotten humans ever existed.
Excitement bubbled in his stomach as he squinted through salt-streaked sunglasses.
Dense jungle clung to steep hillsides, broken only by streaks of black volcanic rock and the jagged silhouette of the mountain in the island’s center.
Birds wheeled overhead, and the surf crashed onto the rocks.
The water slapped over the hull in a fierce display of the ocean’s power.
It’s almost like the whole island is warning me off.
He shoved his unease aside, refusing to allow it to psych him out of being the lead archaeologist to excavate a site that could turn history in the region on its head. “You sure this is the right place?” he called loud enough to be heard over the surf.
The boat captain yelled back, “Only one island in this stretch of water that eats GPS signals like popcorn. This is Saonae. You get off here now, so I may return home to my family.”
He wondered what local legends caused the hint of fear he could hear in the captain’s voice.
“Thanks for the ride.” He waved at the captain, grabbed his rucksack, and hopped down from the gunwale into the warm, knee-deep water.
He hissed between his teeth as volcanic sand slid into his boots.
“You aren’t exactly welcoming me here, Saonae.
” Dry heat, he could handle. Arid dig sites in Jordan?
Child’s play. But this... this wet, sticky, relentless heat was horrible.
It wrapped around his ribs like a slow squeeze and hadn’t let go since they left the Mauritian coast that morning.
A man waited at the shoreline, ankle-deep in the surf, a clipboard under one arm and a no-nonsense expression that screamed European academic. “Dr. Sutherland?” he called in lightly accented English.
Ward slogged up the beach and shook his hand. “That’s me. If I die of heatstroke, I want it on record that this was your fault.”
“étienne Morel. Field coordinator with SAMF.” He gave a professional nod, then broke into a grin. “You got here fast.”
“You flagged it urgent, and the scan you sent me had pre-Ogham patterning on it, so yeah—I canceled my lectures, fought with every airport god known to man, and bribed a Mauritian fisherman with a case of Jameson and more money than I make in a month. But here I am, just as you requested.”
étienne’s brows lifted. “Was it worth it?”
An ingrained hint of skepticism rose to the surface, and he raised one eyebrow. “That depends.” He scanned the treeline with narrowed eyes. “You’re not running a hoax, are you?”
“No, Doctor. I wouldn’t waste your time—or mine.”
They shook hands once more, then headed up a narrow track into the jungle. Ward moved to walk next to the other man after ten paces, matching étienne’s stride and mentally cataloging every detail.
The flora was textbook tropical—broadleaf trees, towering ferns, and clusters of wild banana plants peeking through gaps in the canopy. Creepers hung thick over the path, and somewhere to the left, a troop of macaques screeched at each other like toddlers in a sandbox fight.
The deeper into the jungle they walked, the more the hair rose along his body. After spending some time at home, it was once again weird to hear no engines, no voices, and no signs of habitation or development. “How big is this island?”
“About twenty-two square kilometers, but most of it’s impassable.
The center is mostly volcanic slopes and collapsed lava fields.
The kind you more typically see on Mt. Etna.
The western edge where we are headed toward is the only access point that doesn’t require a machete and an unhealthy death wish. ”
“Good to know. Is this entire island really uninhabited?”
“Not just uninhabited,” étienne said. “It’s unclaimed.
At least all the records I can find on it say so.
Technically, it’s marked as French adjacent territory, but it’s not listed on any public-use maps.
” He ducked under a low-hanging vine. “There’s also a French naval exclusion zone in place to protect the reef systems—or so the documents say. ”
Ward filed that away. In his world, words like ‘unclaimed’ and ‘naval exclusion zone’ usually translated to this place being someone’s dirty little secret. “How’d you find the glyphs?”
If he hadn’t been walking next to him, he wouldn’t have noticed étienne’s expression shift.
“We didn’t. A student did. René Truong is a French-Cambodian studying marine archaeology.
He came here on a day trip with his uncle, who runs a fishing charter out of Port Louis.
They hiked inland and found the cave entrance.
Luckily, he pinpointed it on a hand-drawn map, took photos, and then emailed his supervisor.
His supervisor is a friend of mine. The minute I saw the scans, I called in some favors to allow me to call you. ”
“So you had no prior record of the site?”
“None. Not even anecdotal,” étienne admitted. “There are no oral legends or settler reports that I can find. For all intents and purposes, this place appears to be just what it seems: an amazing find in a hard-to-reach place that nobody has explored to date. It looks… um… clean.”
Ward’s instincts hummed, and his gut clenched.
“Clean is never clean,” he muttered. “It’s just undisturbed.
” They emerged into a clearing ringed with tents.
Most of them were canvas, but one was a newer modular setup with a solar array and a humming sat-com dish.
Two researchers sat at a folding table examining lithic fragments.
A tall stack of plastic storage crates waited under a tarp.
Ward counted gear for ten, but only saw four people moving.
“Where’s the rest of your team?” he asked.
étienne gestured toward the largest tent. “They are rotating out. We had a soil chemist come down with dengue last week, and we evac’d him yesterday. René’s flying out tomorrow, so if you want to talk to the student, I suggest you do it before he’s on a plane.”
Ward’s eyes locked on a narrow case marked “COMMS: SAT LINK” and another with “TOPO – DEEP SCAN” stenciled on the lid. “Did you bring the GPR to the rock wall?”
étienne shrugged. “I like being thorough.”
“God, I could kiss you.”
étienne gave him a startled glance and shook his head. “I’ll pass.”
Ward dropped his duffel beside the shaded edge of the radio tent and stripped off his boots. His socks were soaked, and his calves itched. But none of that mattered, because there was a cave somewhere nearby, and if what he thought he’d seen in that email was real… it could rewrite everything.
He had a rule: never trust anyone under thirty who said ‘you’ve got to see this.
’ It usually meant something was broken, dead, or fake.
But as René Truong paced in front of him near the edge of camp, hands flying with nervous energy, Ward revised that rule slightly.
Maybe… maybe twenty-one-year-olds who found proto-linguistic glyphs on a tropical island no one had heard of got a pass.
As long as they hadn’t drawn the damn things themselves.
“I didn’t touch anything,” René was saying. “I swear. I know better. I saw the marks and thought maybe it was cave art, but it wasn’t even close. They looked… I don’t know, modern but old? You’ll see.”
Ward sipped tepid water from a plastic bottle and nodded. “Tell me what happened. Start from when you left the beach.”
étienne stood off to the side, arms folded, watching the student like a man hoping this wasn’t going to blow back in his face.
René launched into the story. “So we came ashore—me, my cousin, and my uncle. They were fishing, and I got bored. Figured I’d walk inland, see what was up.
I followed the stream, then climbed this incline that curved around the back slope of the volcano.
There was this dip in the rock face, like an old mudslide cut through the growth. That’s where I saw it.”
“The entrance?”
René nodded. “Yeah. You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for shade or a place to piss. It’s half-covered in vines, and there’s no airflow from inside, so it doesn’t feel like a cave. It feels like a dead end until you get close.”
Ward’s brow lifted. “And the markings?”
“They’re maybe five- or six-meters in and it looks like they are carved straight into the wall.
But the lines are so faded, you can barely see them.
When you brush off the dirt, it looks like they were burned into the stone, but there’s no soot, and no charring that I could see.
I thought it was a trick of the light and shadows, you know?
Until I ran my fingers over them and realized there was depth and shape to them. ”
Ward didn’t answer. He didn’t even dare hope this trip had been worth it, because that was the exact description from the scans.
étienne gestured toward the trail. “You’ll want to see it yourself.”
Yes, yes, I do.