When she saw it, she realized she’d been waiting for it.

They had continued to make steady progress for their first day of walking — the trail got a bit steeper as they went, but they managed to continue avoiding obstacles. And then it had grown dark, and they’d stopped based on a general sense that it would be hubristic to walk up an unfamiliar mountain at night.

It had been a quiet evening — after they got a fire going, Jim went to sleep almost instantly while Alessio had started editing video and making notes on his phone (Adelaide thought he was already on his second portable battery pack of the hike, but she could have missed one). So she’d sat by the fire and looked at the island around her.

There had been some of that feeling she’d had even in the well-charted forests of her childhood: hearing something rustle or crack and feeling a fear in your gut that it was a wolf or a bear or a lion coming towards you. Back then, of course, she’d been able to tell herself that she was overreacting, that they didn’t actually have predators like that in these woods, and that she’d seen a squirrel make an extremely similar sound fifteen times that day. Here, there was no such comfort. It was only as she was sitting by the fire that she realized she hadn’t actually seen or heard animals moving during the day as far as she could remember.

If Ray had joined them, she would have asked him for his thoughts, if only for the comforting silence that would follow, the sense that it wasn’t all on her to figure everything out. But he wasn’t, so she had just tried to comfort herself with the idea that any animals they hadn’t yet seen weren’t likely to bother them and drifted off to sleep.

When morning came, she had been struck again by the remarkable variety in plant colors. They’d passed beyond the orange vines and into these sort of turquoise things that sort of looked like bamboo, and now those were starting to give way to yellow conifer-looking things. It was an amazing experience to walk through, but she was finding it harder and harder to accept.

She’d mentioned it to Alessio as they walked. “Have you been paying attention to the changes in the plant life?”

“Of course — what else is there to look at here? And they are incredible, especially in the sheet variety.”

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“Yeah. But I just can’t understand why they’d be like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, aren’t plants green because that’s a good color for photosynthesis or something? Why would that be different?”

“Hmm. Maybe there’s a chemical in the soil or something? Or some other process that they are trying to facilitate?”

“Sure, possible, but why would they all be different colors? Maybe there are a bunch of different chemicals, or they want to attract different animals or something, that seems plausible. But even if this island gave some reason for there to be all of these different plants, why wouldn’t they all mix with each other?”

Jim had apparently been listening, because he’d chimed in. “It could be that different elevations have different conditions. So there could be a nutrient in the soil at one elevation that makes it advantageous to be orange, and some animal higher up that makes it attractive to be turquoise, and so on.”

Adelaide hadn’t been able to explain why that didn’t make sense to her, so she’d let it go. And they’d continued to ascend, continued to make good progress for a few more hours, and then eventually the red ferns that had replaced the yellow conifers had started to thin out a bit, and then they were at the top. And that was when she’d realized what had been bothering her, and what she’d been waiting for.

It wasn’t just that it had been too easy a walk. And it wasn’t just that they hadn’t seen any animals or, as Alessio had noticed, even any insects. And it wasn’t even that she couldn’t understand why the plants were growing the way they were. It was all of them, together, that had formed an impression she hadn’t spelled out until it was made completely explicit by what they saw.

It was an arch, made of one rock balanced on top of the next to form two pillars with a bridge of stones that connected them. The stones themselves weren’t particularly large — she figured they were generally about the size of a large pizza and then wished she’d picked a more majestic metaphor.

It wasn’t so amazing, out of context. It was probably twenty feet tall, and not particularly refined. Back home, she would have thought that it was kind of neat and moved on. But here…

Jim was just staring at it, and Alessio was filming it, which was his version of staring at something. And no one had said anything, so Adelaide decided it was her job.

“So, does anyone have any way to convince ourselves that that wasn’t made by somebody?”