Second Sight - Audio

Chapter One:

The map was almost right.

Calla spread her hands flat on the drafting table and studied the contour lines of Skagit County’s eastern watershed. She noted the way the elevation shifted from valley floor to ridge, the creek tributaries fingering up into the hills like the veins on the back of an old hand.

She had been working on this section for three days, and there was a small cluster of lines in the upper left quadrant that didn’t yet say what the land actually did.

They were technically accurate, but they were not true. There was a difference, and Calla was one of the few people she knew who could feel it.

She picked up her finest pen and made a slight correction. Better. Not perfect yet, but better.

Her phone was face down on the corner of the drafting table.

She was aware of this the way she was aware of the absence of a sound she’d stopped hearing, the hum of a refrigerator that had clicked off, and the silence where a neighbor’s dog used to bark.

The phone’s face-down position sat in the room with her, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, simply present. It was a small act of discipline, like not looking at a thing you already know is there.

She had flipped it over at eleven fifty-three, in the middle of a podcast about watershed restoration she had been half-listening to through her headphones.

A news alert had broken through. A single buzz on her phone, a banner she’d caught in her peripheral vision before she could stop herself, three words that were enough.

She had turned the phone over without reading further, set it down, and returned to her contour lines.

She had gotten good at that. She had gotten good at a lot of things that were really just ways of managing what she was.

The drafting table sat in front of the north-facing window, which gave her clean, even light and a view of the cul-de-sac’s quiet curve. There were three other houses.

The Petersen family was at the near end, with their minivan slightly crooked in the driveway as it always was. The retired couple across the way whose names she knew but rarely used. Like her, they mostly kept to themselves.

There was a younger man in the corner house who worked night shifts somewhere, kept odd hours, and waved to her sometimes from his car. It was all normal and ordinary. The specific texture of a life that did not shimmer at the edges.

Behind her house, sixty feet past the back fence, Larrabee State Park began.

She couldn’t see it from where she was working, but she could feel it the way you feel a river when you’re near one: a low presence, patient, aware, and vast.

Two thousand six hundred acres of Douglas fir and cedar and sandstone trails running up the flank of Chuckanut Mountain with paths she had walked so many times they had become a kind of language she could speak without thinking.

When the inside of her head got too full, she went out there and let the trees take some of the weight.

She had not gone today.

She reached for her mug and found it empty and cold. She didn’t remember finishing her coffee.

The clock on the wall said four forty-seven. Outside the window, the October light was doing its slow collapse into amber, the shadows of the neighbor’s oak stretching long across the pavement.

Calla watched a single leaf detach and fall with the unhurried certainty of something that had always been going to happen exactly then.

She thought: I am not going to think about it.

She picked up her pen.

She thought: a seven-year-old child.

She set the pen down.

This was the problem with knowing things without being told them. She had turned the phone face down before she read the words, but she had already known from the quality of that single buzz what the words would be. Missing. Child. Local.

Her mind had assembled the facts the way it always assembled things it wasn’t supposed to have, quietly, without drama, as if it were simply doing its job.

Her job was cartography. An accurate representation of physical space. The translation of land into language a person could read and use.

Her other job—the one she had never applied for, the one she could not resign from—had its own relationship with space.

She had careful rules, developed over years, about that job. She maintained them with the kind of discipline that other people applied to diets or sobriety. The rules existed because she had learned, at significant cost, what happened without them.

Rule one: no active cases involving children.

Not because she couldn’t see when children were involved. Because, of course, she could.

But because children in danger had a particular pull on her gift that was unlike anything else. It was louder, more insistent, more costly to resist, and more costly to answer. She had learned this the hard way, and she did not intend to unlearn it.

So the phone was face down.

The map was almost right.

Calla picked up her pen and returned to the cluster of contour lines in the upper left quadrant, and she did not think about the seven-year-old girl whose name she had caught in that fraction of a second before she looked away.

Iris, just Iris, one word was enough. And she did not think about the trails she knew so well on Chuckanut Mountain, or about all the other woods in western Washington where a small child could be frightened and cold as the October light failed.

She made her corrections.

The lines said what the land did.

She sat back, and the silence of the face-down phone sat with her, and outside the window the last of the amber light dissolved into gray.

Her phone buzzed.

She didn’t reach for it.

It buzzed again.

She turned it over and looked at the screen without picking it up. Grant’s name. She looked at it for a long moment, long enough that it stopped buzzing and went still.

Then it buzzed again.

Calla closed her eyes, just for a second. Not to look. Just to breathe.

Don’t, she told herself.

She picked up the phone.