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You’ve done this a thousand times before. You’ve got this.
Swing with your strong arm, strike between the crags, scrape your fingertips across the rock face until you find purchase. They’re already worn to hell, caked in dirt and someone else’s blood, freezing on top of all that; a few more scratches won’t make a difference. Pull yourself up, ignore the strain in your shoulder. Rinse, repeat. Pull yourself up, ignore the taste of your pulse in your throat when one foot slips, nearly taking the other and all else along with it.
Just keep moving. Press yourself flat to the cliff when something falls, but don’t stop for long enough to think any of this through. Don’t look back and don’t look down; don’t listen to the wind howling beneath you, the sea churning and boiling and freezing. Keep going up and up, don’t stop until you’ve found them, don’t stop until you’ve saved her, until—
You reach the top, arms thrown over the edge, axe back at your side. In the seconds it takes to regain the ground beneath your boots, you’ve never been so certain of anything in your life as you are that the whole mountain will tip backwards and drop you onto the one that mirrors it, sea spilling out and swallowing you whole. But here you are, back on your feet, bow gripped tightly in one hand, arrow notched between two fingers. This is it, this is the end of the line, this is—
Very, very wrong. This isn’t the monastery. This isn’t where they’ve taken her for the ritual; this isn’t even the mountain village, the shanty town. There’s no sky above you. You lower your bow but keep the arrow pulled back, and even with darkness rising all around you, you don’t fumble for your torch and flint. There’s no need to: the whole of the place is adorned with red candles – the colour of this whole godforsaken island – some that can’t have been lit more than minutes ago, others slick pools of warm wax, suffocating what little light they have left.
You know this place. You know it right-way round and upside down. This is where they brought you when the Endurance first went under, bound in old rags, hung from what remained of the rafters. You’ve no idea how you got back here, no idea why it wasn’t destroyed in the cave-in, and you tell yourself you’re not looking back for the cliff edge you climbed to get here because you don’t want a knife in your back, a bullet in the back of your skull. Not because you know there’s nothing but rock encircling you.
They’ve hung another body from the rafters. This one is as well-wrapped as the first corpse you found there was, head level with your own. When you were up there it felt as if you were thirty feet from the ground. Something compels you to step forward and put your hand against its face, fabric damp while the flesh beneath remains unyielding. This person could’ve been you, once, a lone survivor from a shipwreck; you could’ve been this person, if you hadn’t learnt to pull the trigger.
Your fingers are cold, calloused and clumsy, and you still find it within yourself to gasp as the makeshift bandages fall away. And then there it is: Himiko’s face, all wood and grain, white paint cracking along the edges. You pull your hand back as though you’d thrust it into a forge, reach for the bow you no longer have, and Himiko screams. She screams and you echo it, wood splintering as it breaks from the strain, crumbling and flaking like dead skin; you stumble back, heels catching on the edge of the cliff as you reach for your gun.
But it’s not there, it’s not in its holster. There isn’t even a holster. Of course there isn’t, because why would you have a gun? You’re not the sort of person versed in taking lives. You don’t squeeze the trigger every time you turn a corner and a shadow spooks you. You wouldn’t pull a bowstring taut and send an arrow rushing through a man’s skull—a man who hasn’t done anything to you, but might.
In front of you, Himiko’s face is a horrid, exposed thing, raw muscles and eyes in all their roundness, and she breathes in the wind, blue light rushing around you. You search desperately for something, anything, to end her misery and yours, and there it is, the torch you’ve been carrying all along. You grab Himiko by her neck, pull back your strong arm, ready to swing and strike; the wind breathes life back into Himiko, life stolen from beyond these caves, skin stretching over sinew.
The torch in your hand cracks with heat, as if the whole thing’s ignited, and you feel it change as Himiko does. Even with your hands wrapped and worn bloody you know the texture of cool metal as well as you know the feel of your own bones. You lower your arm, crushing the trigger, and then there she is.
Himiko’s descendant-turned-vessel, fresh from the slaughter, rafters creaking, body swinging; motionless.
*
The sea rushes over you like the surf on the sand, sans any familiarity. You steal a breath while you can, before you’re pulled under, and lash out with your arms, fighting against the tide, against the storm. It becomes a tactile thing when you reach out, clawing at the foam-white tips of waves, pulling it to you so that you can force it away, rocking, rocking. The sea retreats but you aren’t safe yet, the waves will come again, thunder rippling through your marrow.
The lightning cracks, and a voice presses behind the storm – sweetie, Lara – but you don’t hear any of it. All you hear are the footsteps of men approaching, men with their guns and arrows and rusted blades, men with their fingers at your wrists, determined to hold you under, under.
But you bolt upright, freeing yourself.
The sea roils its way into darkness and all is quiet. There’s no thunder, no lightning; just the black of your bedroom and the rain tapping against the windowpane. Your duvet’s on the floor, creases like ripples, and there’s enough sweat on your brow to make you think that maybe you really have been held beneath the surface. You stare at nothing, shoulder blades shifting back when Sam places her hand between them, fingertips pressing against the thin fabric of the tank top you’ve been sleeping in.
Your eyes adjust a little as your heartbeat retreats, and you try taking in familiar surroundings to calm yourself, try not to blink. There’s a man who lives behind your eyelids, a man whose own eyes twitch and dilate as the hole you’ve punched through his forehead lets the last of his life escape, and if you have to see him now you might never stop shaking.
“It was just a dream,” Sam murmurs, traces of sleep still lingering in her voice, though she’s awake enough to have a better idea of what just happened than you do. Her hand moves to your shoulder, and she gently tries to ease you back. How many times have you woken her like this now? But then again, how many times have you woken to find Sam struggling against sleep, too? It’s the only reason that her words don’t come across as patronising, insensitive; she isn’t killing you with thoughtless little phrases like you’ll get over it.
What does she dream of, you wonder. More to the point, who does she dream she is when she wakes up with her hands trembling. Your shoulders go slack and you find the strength to relent, falling down next to her, one arm draping over the side to pull the duvet back up. She helps you rearrange it over you both as you cast it back over the bed, but you aren’t ready to try sleeping again, you aren’t, you aren’t.
God knows what’s lurking in the dark. It’s a mangled extension of your mind, and even Sam becomes a stranger without any light bleeding in. You rest your head on the pillow, facing her, and reach back with one arm, fumbling for your phone. You hit a button at random, and the screen lights up with a second-long reminder of the unlocking procedure.
It’s enough. With the wan light it gives you, you illuminate one side of her face; the line of her jaw, an ear. Hair mussed, eye open. All else is dark, but you don’t need to see that. That much you know already, every curve and contour, exactly where her lips are. She’s lying with her face against the pillow, and you mirror her as best you can in the dark, carelessly dropping your phone somewhere inconsequential.
You press your forehead to hers. You bump against it a little, but not enough to hurt. One of her arms wraps around your waist, draws you even closer, and you kiss her forehead, her cheek. Her lips are so close to yours that you feel her breath on them, but you don’t kiss her mouth; you just wait until your breathing syncs, and only then dare to close your eyes.
Her fingers brush beneath the hem of your shirt, thumb swiping close to your first wound, and she murmurs that it’s going to be okay, you’re safe now, as sleep claims her with more ease than it will you.
*
She makes you breakfast in the morning, wearing a pair of your shorts that were never particularly flattering and a zip-up hoodie that conceals most of them, anyway.
It’s seven-thirty and you’ve already discussed the transient nature of pancake mix and the rain that’s cleared up enough to let the promise of a spring day shine through, and not a word of nightmares have been spoken. There’s only so much you can say before you’ve said it all, and it’s been months now. Months since you returned to England, since you were done with everything: the hospital visits, the statements for the police, the memorial services. The Japanese authorities have seized Yamatai and they’re keeping it all very hush-hush, which means there’s less for you to answer to.
“You’ve been staying over a lot recently,” you idly comment, skimming over an article you’ve been chewing your way through for the better part of the morning. It can best be described as a conspiracy theory simultaneously involving the Lost Empire of Atlantis and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart—which either seems more or less absurd to you than Oni dwelling inside of Yamatai, you’re not sure yet. You make a mental note to read up on Plato later, once Sam is done with those pancakes.
“I like your place!” Sam blurts out quickly. You glance up; her hand’s wrapped tightly around the handle of the pan but she’s not moving, as if her staying very, very still will stop this conversation in its tracks.
She doesn’t like your place. She’s never done anything but tease you for it. She thinks you should dig further into your inheritance, should take up residence in one of the Croft manors. But here you are, thirty miles outside of Surrey, tucked away in your fifth-storey flat, a cosy one-bedroom deal, filled to the brim with dusty old journals and dog-eared maps. The sofa might be acting as an additional bookshelf, but your father isn’t living in the walls; ever since returning from Yamatai, the cloud of resentment you’d engulfed yourself in cleared, making it impossible to hide from all you’d done to slight him and his theories that had seemed so contrived at the time.
“We could stay at your flat,” you say, not looking for an argument.
Sam sighs, drops a pancake onto a plate, and the pan sizzles as she pours more of the mix in. “My place is full of clothes,” she says, and you don’t point out that your place is full of her clothes, too. Sam’s flat is bigger than yours, big enough for an entire store worth of clothing. Her mother purchased the place when she had a long-term modelling job in London close to a decade back, and then seemingly forgot about it until Sam needed somewhere local to stay. So, space isn’t the problem; but you’ve always known what is.
She thinks that in staying over night after night, day after day, she’s anchoring you here. She’s stopping you from searching out the next Yamatai. If you stay at her place, you can leave whenever you please, no excuses needed. When you don’t reply, she huffs and says, “Do you want me to leave?” Her voice is more shrill than suits her, and she flips another pancake, thwump.
“Not particularly,” you murmur, attention returning in earnest to the article.
The plates clatter on the tiny table before you realise that Sam’s done cooking, and with her stood before you and blocking your light, you’ve no choice but to look up at her. She’s going to such great lengths to scowl that she’s practically pouting, and you stare back neutrally for as long as you can before crumbling.
Which takes somewhere around two and a half seconds.
You splay your hands out against the backs of her thighs, just beneath the hem of the shorts that you could come to be quite fond of after all, and tug her closer, so that she’s standing between your knees. She’s intent on remaining a stubborn, scowling thing, until she realises that she’s instinctively wrapped her arms around your shoulders, and proceeds to roll her eyes at nobody but herself.
She places a hand against your cheek, slants one corner of her mouth, and you kiss the heel of her palm, making her lean all the more towards you.
“I just don’t want—” she begins at a murmur, casting her glance aside as if she’s ashamed to ask anything of you, after all that you did for her on Yamatai. “I don’t want to wake up and find that you’ve thrown yourself into—into another myth.”
“I’m not going to disappear, Sam,” you say, wanting her to know that you aren’t angry at her for suggesting it; you’re angry at yourself for having given her reason to leap to such conclusions.
She looks far from convinced, and still can’t bring herself to make eye contact. She stares down at your shoulder, brushing her thumb across the white, raised edge of one of your scars. You tense without wanting to; how strange it was to finally wash away all that dirt and blood and find your old skin underneath, scars mapping out familiar parts you’d never thought to hide away, before.
“How did you get this one?”
“Slipped on a waterfall,” you reply instantly. It might be true, it might not; the only scar you can speak of with any real certainty is the first one you claimed, the wound that ran right through you.
Her brow furrows as she runs her thumb across the length of the scar again, like it’s a stubborn crease in some fabric she can flatten out.
“Remember how you wanted to go running off as soon as Yamatai was behind us? Remember how Jonah and Reyes practically had to drag you to the hospital, just for a checkup, because you wouldn’t listen to me—remember how many broken ribs you’d been walking around with? Remember how many tests they had to run, how many antibiotics and who-knows-what they had to pump into you? Remember when you broke out into that fever, and spent a fortnight on a drip?”
She doesn’t need to ask, because she knows you do. But she wants you to know that she remembers, too, and with far more clarity than your fever afforded you. With no reply of any worth to give, you lean forward, resting your forehead against her chest. The zip of the hoodie bumps against your chin, and her hands come up, finding their way into your hair.
“We lost a lot of people on that island,” she quietly says, “I don’t know if you’ll be as lucky on your next adventure.”
“Not everywhere is going to be Yamatai,” you protest.
“We didn’t think Yamatai was going to be Yamatai.”
You lean back, hands leaving her thighs to wrap around her waist, and pull her easily into your lap. She perches on one of your knees, arms back around your shoulders, and you try supplicating her with a kiss. She returns it warmly but breaks away after only a few seconds, and doesn’t settle into a softer expression until you say “I’m not going to disappear, Sam. Trust me.”
She sighs again and then makes herself smaller, leans against you and tucks her head beneath your jaw.
“Your breakfast is getting cold.”
*
Sam’s father finds the time to visit a few days later, and you’re granted the reprieve you never really wanted. You spend much of your time texting her while she keeps her father entertained and ignores his pleas for her to return to America as best she can, and when you get a message from her at four in the morning, as innocuous as it is, you know what’s woken her. It’s the same reason you’re up to see the screen of your phone flash to life in the dark, a new message making your room dimly glow.
You’re more restless without her. Even when you’re not having nightmares you can’t get comfortable, can’t figure out which pillow you usually rest your head on, each one seems more lumpy than the last to you—so you tell her It’s fine, I was awake anyway when she texts, and she replies with oh sweetie i’ll be back in a few days, there’s chamomile tea in the cupboard x.
You pick her up from Heathrow when she sees her father off. You wait in the short-stay car park, doors locked, and when she knocks on the window you turn down the radio and lean over to open the passenger side door. She bundles in as if she’s been pushed, filling her seat and yours, arms around you, gear stick getting in the way as you lean in to kiss her back, bumping your elbow on the wheel in the process.
For a moment, it’s just like those times when you’d wait for her at arrivals, leant on the metal bar as your eyes skidded back and forth between the two doors she could’ve wandered out of—back when she used to go home over the winter and summer breaks, and once at Easter. You half expect her to shove all manner of ridiculous souvenirs and a jacket she promises is going to look great on you, just try it on, and it takes you too long to remember that she hasn’t gone far, she hasn’t been gone long.
It’s been less than a week, but she was away from you on Yamatai for less than that, and you found a new fear to be crippled by every minute of every hour you didn’t know where she was, what was happening to her; no wonder she’s been keeping so close, ever since. She’s not just trying to keep you tethered to your flat, to the comparative safety of London life. She’s been doing you a favour you didn’t even know you needed.
“Dad says I can bring you along, if it gets me to take a trip home,” she says as you wait inside the Chinese takeaway you discovered during your second year and has been your favourite ever since. She rolls her eyes, drumming her fingers on the counter to let you know how bad an idea that is. You’d happily go with her, you don’t need to tell her that, and she’d happily have you, under any other circumstances. It’s just that neither of you have found an appropriate way to articulate what happened on Yamatai yet – at the moment, people are wary of asking you too many questions, considering all the losses you’ve suffered, but that won’t last forever – and Sam doesn’t have a good way to explain to her family exactly how she managed to sink so much of their money.
You drag your usual order back to your flat and eat it in a heap on the sofa. You give up control of the remote in favour of being able to wield your chopsticks and stop your noodles from toppling over, and Sam flicks through the channels on offer at a rate of two a second. She quips that they had to teach her something in film school, claims she only needs a fraction of a second to filter out the rubbish, and settles on a documentary about penguins. She’s always found them to be suspicious creatures, but oh, look—film makers don’t often bother with that sort of thing, did you see what they just did there? Wow.
She rambles on between mouthfuls of spring roll about things you’ve never sat down and studied, terms you’ve never had classes to define for you, but somehow know inside out, just because of the time you’ve spent around her, soaking in her words. Once you’ve torn through enough of the food, for now, she leans more and more against you until you’re almost flat on your back and she’s resting across you. You smooth her hair back as she talks, running your fingertips across her hairline as the light from the television bounces off her face and pools in her eyes.
You can’t remember when the last time she touched a camera was. As much as you didn’t want to come home, she never wanted to be stuck here, either. Sam’s always been more adventurous than you, and even with your family legacy, even with all of Roth’s lessons, it wasn’t until she mentioned her supposed ancestry that something in your brain clicked, and you realised that you were going to be able live up to all those expectations, after all.
There’s still plenty you aren’t telling each other, and it’s not fair. It really isn’t. Few couples have to deal with the strain of surviving a shipwreck, fewer still come out on the other side of being hounded by a cult—and you sincerely doubt that anyone else has had to deal with the consequences of the corpse of a long-dead queen trying to pour its soul into their girlfriend.
The documentary ends, the credits roll – oh, so it was him doing the lighting – and Sam turns to you, hands folded over your collarbone, chin propped on the back of them. She looks up to you like she has something to say that has nothing to do with long shots or panning, and you wait, patient, shuffling up a little so you can rest the back of your head against the arm of the sofa.
“About what I said before, Lara…” she begins, and you run your fingers along the shell of her ear. “I don’t want you to think you’re stuck here. I definitely don’t want you to think you’re stuck here because of me. I’m just scared. Roth and Grim, they knew what they were doing. They’d been handling weapons and getting themselves out of all sorts of tough situations for longer that we’ve been alive, but still—”
Still.
Sam shrugs against you, burrows her arms between the sofa and your back, then buries her face in your neck. Are you going to tell her there’s nothing to be scared of? That no harm’s going to come to you in your line of work, that you’ve learnt your lesson from these scars and no others will follow? Of course you aren’t. You can’t lie to her. You’ve done that enough, lately. (I’m fine, Sam. Honestly.)
“I think we’re always going to be scared, unless we do something about it,” you tell her. “And I’d rather take risks than be scared forever.”
*
Sam goes to therapy; you don’t.
You go running in Hyde Park instead, and the couples walking their dogs turn into Solarii with their snarling, starving wolves. Mathias passes you in the guise of every teenager with their hood pulled up. Hours pass and you don’t feel the burn you should, though the fear’s far from lacking; you don’t bring your iPod anymore, because you were imagining a whole cacophony of Russian grunts and grumbles behind the music, and every tree is wide enough for someone to lurk behind.
You speed up whenever anyone crosses your path. It’s too warm out to wear sleeves, and whenever another runner tries to catch your eye and offer up a wave, you stare dead ahead.
Sam meets you along the Serpentine, lunch in tow. You’re five minutes early but she’s been waiting a while, and she breaks out of her tangle of thoughts and into a smile when you jog up beside her. She goes in for a hug even though there’s sweat on every inch of you and your shirt sticks to your skin, and you kiss her cheek, stretching out before you join her in the freshly cut grass.
She sips on her coffee and hands you a bottle of water, and you use one finger to open up the plastic bag she dropped on the floor between you. “I grabbed what I could. Nowhere has the best selection after the lunchtime rush, though,” she explains. Right now you’re more concerned with inhaling calories than savouring the taste, you’ve been running for that long, but she hasn’t done a terrible job: a couple of sandwiches – plenty of protein – a brownie and a pack of sliced watermelon. She grabs her sandwich first, knowing which one to leave for you, and continues. “Mom rang me halfway through my appointment. Says she has a friend of a friend who’s thinking of moving from fashion to nature and needs help from someone who knows what they’re doing.”
The plastic cover comes away from the front of your sandwich with a satisfying crrrrrck.
“You’re taking the job?” you ask flatly. Not congratulations, not well, he couldn’t ask for anyone better. Just an accusation.
She shrugs. Takes a bite of her sandwich, chews, swallows. Shrugs again.
“Can’t be stuck here forever, right?”
You put the words in her mouth. And she’s right, she can’t: she’s bounced from a student visa to an extended tourist visa, thanks to a few strings pulled by some of her parents’ contacts, but sooner or later she’s going to have to move somewhere. It might as well be a somewhere that’s offering her a job. A job that has to be fairly high profile, if her mother’s the one recommending it.
“You could come with me,” she says, far from spontaneous. She’s planned this all out. “They’re going to need an experienced tracker, right? And even if you don’t want to do that, you could just come with me. It’s a wildlife documentary, Lara. There are no myths about storm-controlling shaman queens, no blood-ties—the most dangerous thing out there is the bugs.”
You’ve devoured half a sandwich in the time it takes her to talk. You let out a hum as if you’re mulling it over, when really all you’re thinking is that it isn’t what she wants to do. It isn’t what you want to do, and it certainly isn’t how Sam wants to make a name for herself.
You answer her by falling back in the grass. You press the water bottle to your forehead but it’s already tepid, and she stays exactly where she is, hands pressed to the ground behind her as she leans back on her arms a little. She faces the lake but doesn’t really look at it, and you nearly drift off under the spell of your own thoughts, a gentle breeze that you would’ve appreciated a whole lot more during your run brushing the grass against your arms and ankles.
“How much of it do you think was real?” Sam asks, and you blink your eyes harder than you should have to, just to confirm you really are awake.
She’s still facing the lake but there’s no one else she could be talking to, and when you frown at her back, she must feel it; she turns your way, lifting her brow as she awaits your answer. You don’t know what she talks about with her therapist, exactly, that’s best kept between the two of them, but ever since leaving Yamatai, she’s stopped trying to convince acquaintances and strangers alike about the truths behind Himiko. When you don’t answer, she stresses her point.
“Look at it this way: we were scared, hurt and hungry, and there’s no way any of us had gotten enough sleep to think clearly.”
“Sam—”
“And the Solarii, there’s no doubt they were doing some really weird things. I bet half of them even believed what Mathias was preaching.”
“Sam.”
“But Himiko? The Oni? How much of that are we imagining to deal with this, to rationalise what we did?”
“I would’ve done what I did no matter who’d taken you, Sam.”
“No, I’m not—” Not blaming you for what you did. “But there has to be an explanation for all of this. The Solarii found the Stormguard’s armour in the palace, maybe even one of the tombs, and—”
“And a group of shipwrecked fishers, oil rig workers, mercenaries just happened to all be versed in bushido?”
“Stop poking holes.”
“Well, what about the storms?”
“Lara, do you really believe they were being controlled by someone? What’s wrong with it being a coincidence?”
“You felt Himiko taking you over, Sam. You felt her pushing you out. I know you did.”
She stares back at the lake, and in a small voice says “I know. I know that, I just—”
She crumples the wrapper of the brownie you saw nothing of between her hands, and with a frustrated sigh, slumps back in the grass next to you. Fingers knitted together, she rests her hands on her stomach, clouds reflecting in her eyes and skimming across their unblinking surfaces.
“The only reason you were so determined to find Yamatai was because I couldn’t shut up about it. I know you were trying to make your mark, but it felt like you were doing it for me, too. Like it was all my fault we wound up there, and maybe, if none of it was real, then…” she scrunches up her face, like she hasn’t even thought this through before. “Then it wouldn’t be my fault. It’d just be bad luck.”
Your hand snakes through the grass, seeking hers. Your fingertips bump against her knuckles before your palm covers the back of her hand; she’s already forming a fist, as though she can crush all the guilt surging through her. The both of you are so busy blaming yourselves more than the rest of the world ever could that you’ve forgotten how uncertain the expedition was to begin with. How no one knew where Yamatai even was, how you had only a hunch to go on. You hadn’t been reckless and refused to heed warnings. You’d been shipwrecked, drawn in by the island itself.
“It wasn’t your fault,” you tell her. It takes a moment, but eventually her grip loosens enough for her to turn her hand and cling to yours.
*
Sam tries freelancing, to get back into the swing of things. She takes a job filming a wedding on an unseasonably warm Saturday morning, and it’s so far from what she really needs to be doing that it makes you realise how far you’ve truly fallen. It’s not the nightmares that do it, and the paranoia doesn’t get you to the stage where you can finally do something about things, either; it’s the fact that Sam’s forcing herself to settle for something that’s so utterly banal, something that’s so unlike her, that drives you to get in your car and head for Surrey.
The M25’s a nightmare and you become less and less certain of your plan as you sit in traffic. Calling it a plan in the first place it generous: it’s better described as a spur of the moment impulse, and you feel any faith in yourself slowly dwindling as your tires slug along the tarmac. Once you escape the orbital, you pull over on a quieter road, taking your time in calling ahead. Winston was looking after the estate long before you turned your back on it, and so you’ve no reason to doubt that it’s been left in safe hands; when he picks up, he pretends not to be surprised, and only asks you which of the manors you’d like to meet him at.
You still remember exactly where your father kept his journals, where all his maps were pinned up. You tell Winston what you need and wait for him outside, sitting in your car and pretending it’s because you’re in a hurry; which is true, you are, this needs to be done before Sam gets home; and pointedly refuse to cross the threshold of the front gate.
Winston, as faithful as ever, brings you all that you’ve requested, and greets you like an old friend, like the only family you have left, and doesn’t ask you to stay. All he says is that your father would be glad to have you rummaging through his notes like this, and you feel a pang of guilt for having left Winston to these great, empty buildings, with only the dust and your parents’ memory for company. He smiles to let you know things are quite alright, looking the same to you as he always has done. Winston, it seems, ages as the manors do. Cut back the overgrown vines and everything’s good as new.
As if the traffic was compelled to exist when it could serve to prolong your dread, it’s clear northbound and southbound on the way back. You park on a meter, pray you’ve got enough change buried away in your pockets and glove compartment, and make your way through a wave of tourists and locals alike to get to the shops. Sam’s taken her heftier equipment with her to the wedding, and that little HD hand-held camera she loved so much was another victim of Yamatai. The sales assistants talk at you as if you can’t possibly know what you’re on about, and all you can think is my girlfriend is a film maker, you bastards, technical specifications are her idea of pillow talk.
Back home, you’ve got all the ingredients you need to make the world’s most bizarre apology cake spread out on your table. You fumble around your kitchen drawers to find the last of the sellotape and successfully recover masking tape, that’ll have to do, and fold out some of the maps you had recovered from your father’s study, praying they’re the right ones—you should’ve checked them when you were there, you know that, but you were in a hurry. You crack open a notebook, break the spine and try not to flinch; it’s been ten years since since you last let your eyes dart over the page and the words are as clear as ever.
You set the camera up on the worktop, between the kettle and the toaster – Sam’s right, you do need more space – letting it record while it charges for the first time.
Standing in front of the overlapping maps, notebook in hand, you hope to god that Sam’s right about you being a natural, too.
“Day zero. This is—this is Lara Croft, of the—” Fantastic, you managed to remember your own name. But where does your affiliation lie? Quick, take a look around, come up with something. “Flat.” Well, that could’ve been worse. Possibly. Is this thing even recording? You’d hate to have to put yourself through this for a second time. You should stop now and go check it. No, no, don’t, just keep on speaking. You’ve got this.
“My father, a brilliant archaeologist, who dared to believe in things others were too proud to even consider, explored this region some thirty years ago.” You pause, pick up a stray teaspoon, and point to the corresponding area on the map. “It was one of his earliest finds, and he soon moved onto bigger and better things. He made a name for himself. But he always spoke about returning to the area, certain that there was a second, grander tomb located here.”
You point to a site ringed in a faint red line, some five kilometres away from the first find. A second map next to it shows a close-up of the terrain.
“He said that it’d be my first real find. He said that no matter what he discovered, he’d always wanted to go back there; and that he was saving it for me. Look—” You’re moving your hands around an awful lot as you speak. Do you always do that? It’s a wonder you don’t knock more things over. “It’s not an island. No myths, no storm-controlling shamans. No links to Japan—or Portugal, for that matter. I think we still might have to deal with the bugs, though.”
You sigh, running a hand through your hair. You don’t know the first thing about making a video diary. Having lost your composure, you pull one of the chairs out from under the table, take a seat, and talk at the camera as clearly as if you were talking to Sam herself.
“Look, Sam. I can’t hold a camera myself and climb. We only have to take this one step at a time. We can even go stay with your parents while we’re preparing, if that makes things easier on you. But we can’t let those bastards win. We have to do this for us. We don’t have to start big; we don’t have to worry about a TV show, or a second series. We can set up a channel on YouTube and go from there.”
You don’t tell her that you’ll protect her no matter what, that you won’t let anyone take her from you ever again, because you tell her that every time she wakes in a cold sweat. She knows, she knows.
With the damage done, you stop the recording, pack up the maps and place them with the others, and leave the camera neatly in the centre of the table. The microwave tells you it’s two-thirty and Sam said she’d be back by three, and the next half an hour proceeds to be the longest part of the day, making you doubt yourself all over again. This was a terrible idea. You should throw the camera out of the window and forget about getting a refund.
You distract yourself with a world of chores, wiping down the surfaces and rearranging the appliances, hoovering all the floors and making neat piles out of the journals you’ve been reading lately, and all in all, it takes you eighteen minutes. A cup of coffee doesn’t calm you down. You don’t know why you thought it would, you don’t even like coffee.
You decide you might as well shower. You left in a hurry this morning and didn’t have time to do much more than roll out of bed and dart towards the front door, so it’s not as if you’re going to any extraordinary lengths to avoid her. Especially not when you hear that spare pair of keys you never quite learnt to regret giving her turn in the front door, causing you to fumble to get the water on and jump in before it’s had the chance to warm up.
“Lara?” she calls out, equipment thunking on the floor.
“In the shower!” you call back.
She drifts towards the bathroom, leans against the door and says, “You put cameras on peoples phones and suddenly everyone thinks they’re a director.”
Before you have the chance to think up a reply, she says that, oh, she’ll talk to you once you can actually hear her properly, and retreats to recover from the day via coffee. By the time you’ve made a grab for the shampoo, you estimate that she must’ve discovered the camera. That means you only need be in here for a few minutes more – and you were only recording for a few minutes after all, despite the lifetime it felt – in order to avoid having to hear your own voice on the playback.
Once you’ve dragged it all out for as long as you can, mirror steamed up and hair towel dried, your earlier clothes from the day pulled back on and clinging to you in spots, you find Sam in the hallway, leant against the wall. She’s got the camera in one hand, eyes on the screen, sound mercifully muted; the corner of her mouth keeps twitching into the start of a smile, but she furrows her brow in an attempt to seem serious.
Which lasts somewhere around two and a half seconds.
She steps close, burying her face in the damp hair spread like seaweed across the side of your throat. “The wedding washorrible,” she grumbles, clinging to you tighter for reasons buried beneath what she’s saying. “Nobody should let their kids have so much sugar. Nobody. Thank you, Lara.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” you tell her, arms tight around her shoulders. Beneath you, the Earth starts moving once more. It’s like you said: unless you do something, you’re going to be scared forever. And now that you’re about to cross that line back into the world of hidden relics and long forgotten tombs, you’re the most terrified you’ve ever been. Terrified enough to know that you have to do something about it. And it’s alright that you’re scared, because Sam is too; you can cling to each other until neither of you can feel the trembling.
Sam exhales, shaky, then nuzzles her nose beneath the line of your jaw, kissing the corner of your mouth.
You press your forehead to hers, and find her eyes welled up, blurring your reflection.
“We are gonna get so many subscribers,” she says, and you love her.