The grave holds no body. I dug it myself, and I have spent years pretending the ground was not calling me back.
I am more than a century old, and I have outlived most of my kin. I remember Kairo, too. Or I remember the version of him I chose to keep.
We travelled the same trails between the feeding grounds. He saw what I missed: a green shoot where no shoot should be, a seam in the lava just wide enough for a shell, prickly pear fruit already split open by something that had reached it first. He never ate the first pear on a bush. He said it belonged to whoever came next. When my shell caught on a ledge, he waited without a word. When I worked myself free, he would say, “Amara, it was only a ledge.” I never wondered why he was always there.
I believed that was friendship. I still do not know what else it might have been.
Then the dry years came. Grass browned like old paper. Pools shrank to cracked mud. We climbed toward the misty highlands and dropped back down as the seasons turned, and the lowland pears grew scarce. Kairo left marks along the way: a shallow scratch on a stone, or a notch cut into a strip of bark. His scratches were always two short strokes, never one. The marks were for the young ones, he said, so they would know which way was safe. A notch faces the way you have decided to go. That was his one rule.
One morning I woke beneath a stone overhang, and he was gone.
His tracks led toward the eastern valley. I followed them until the marks faded where the ground hardened. Then the wind rose and carried what remained away. I searched until the sun stood overhead. I did not find him.
I told myself he had gone ahead because I, Amara, was too slow. I wanted that story, because the others were too strange to carry.
I pressed a strip of bark beneath a flat stone, its notch facing the rim, the way he had taught me. It was a poor stand-in for an answer. Still, I needed somewhere to leave the question.
Years passed. I stayed away from the valley and called it caution. Each dry season I pressed my notch a little deeper into the bark, and each season I left the first pear on the bush. The truth was simpler. I was afraid of what I might find if I went back.
Then another drought arrived. I found a young tortoise named Sela beside a patch of dead grass, lost from her family’s route. At dusk, she told me she had seen a shape slip between two walls of lava in the eastern slopes. When she went after it, the ground was bare, with no tracks where she expected them.
The slopes were hard to cross. My legs ached, and the rock held the heat long after dark. Instead of continuing toward the highlands, I turned east. Sela followed.
At last, we reached the valley. The flat stone was still there.
I pushed until it rolled aside. The bark lay beneath, nearly buried. I had left its notch facing the rim. Now it pointed at the cleft in the valley wall.
I made myself think it through. Each dry season I had pressed the notch deeper, never changing its direction. The wind might have shifted the bark, but the stone had sheltered it. Someone may have moved it. I could not tell who, or why.
Beside the bark, someone had scored a second mark, fresh and pale. Two short strokes. It looked like Kairo’s.
I could not be sure. A familiar mark is not the same as a known hand.
The dust around the stone was disturbed in a wide arc, as if something had dragged across it and back. The rains had passed days ago, yet the ground had no crust.
Sela nosed the dust beside the valley wall. Her claws uncovered a narrow cleft between two slabs of lava. Cool air breathed out of it, as though the rock were exhaling.
Beneath the overhang, old, shallow impressions led into the cleft and up toward the high slopes. One track curved around a jutting rock, and I remembered that turn. Kairo always took it carefully, because his shell had once scraped the stone. One narrow track turned back toward the valley.
I stood at the mouth of the cleft and held still.
Above me, a shell scraped faintly against stone.
Then nothing.
The valley was not the end of the road. It was a crossing I had failed to see.
The old ones say men once carried our kind away across the water, and few came back. Some losses leave no body to bury.
Sela’s family had found the trail. Their shapes appeared between the cactus, shells moving slowly through the late light. I stepped aside to let them pass.
That evening I rested beneath a prickly pear and watched the light drain from the lava. The island keeps its records in ways only its own creatures notice: heat lingering in black rock after sunset, a pear split open before we arrive, tracksslowly disappearing beneath the wind.
I had spent years wishing for certainty. Instead, I had found a way forward.
Tomorrow I will lead the young ones east. At the flat stone, I will not go first. I will go through the cleft and cut two short strokes into the bark, facing the way I have chosen.
If the pale mark was Kairo’s, he will know it is me. If it was not, the notch will still point the way.
The grave holds only bark. The path holds everything after it, and the ground that once called me back now leads me on.