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Not footsteps.

Something lower. Something with a different rhythm, four points of contact rather than two, a weight distribution that moves differently to anything human I have encountered on this island so far. It circles wide and comes closer. I track it by sound without moving my head and the sound of it doesn’t match anything I know how to name.

Not the men.

Not an animal, exactly, or not only that.

Something in between.

I go very still in the water, every nerve lit up, every instinct the Huntsman spent two years drilling into me suddenly screaming awake.

Whatever it is, it stops.

And then, in the quiet that follows, I feel something I wasn’t prepared for.

Not a threat. Not the particular charge of danger that I’ve learned to read like a second language since arriving on this island.

Curiosity.

Whatever is watching me from the tree line is as interested in me as I am in it, and it’s patient in a way that suggests it has been watching this island and its occupants for a very long time and isn’t done yet.

I let out one slow breath and continue working through my hair.

“I know you're there,” I say quietly. Not a challenge. Just a fact, offered without performance.

The sound of movement stops.

The silence that follows is the listening kind.

I wait.

The silence stretches long enough that I begin to wonder if I imagined it.

Then a twig snaps. Deliberately, I think. Like an answer.

I turn.

She’s crouched at the edge of the tree line in a particular way of something that has never been entirely comfortable standing upright, weight distributed across her hands and feet, head low, watching me with eyes that are the most extraordinary colour I have ever seen on a human face. Violet. Not grey that reads as violet in the right light, not blue that shifts. Violet, deep and pale at the same time, the colour of something that shouldn’t exist and does anyway.

She’s young. Younger than I expected, though I don't know what I expected. Her hair is dark and tangled and her clothes are whatever survived whatever this island threw at her, and she’s watching me with an intelligence that cuts straight through the feral surface of her and lands somewhere that is entirely, unsettlingly deliberate.

I don't move.

She doesn't either.

We stay like that for long enough that I become aware of the water around my waist and the cold of it and the sound of the island doing what islands do, indifferent and continuous.

“I'm not going to chase you,” I say. Still quiet. Same tone as before, the one that isn’t a performance. “And I'm not going to pretend you're not there.” I pause. “I'm Snow.”

Nothing.

“You don't have to tell me your name,” I say. “You don't have to tell me anything.”

She tilts her head. It’s a very animal gesture and underneath it is something that isn’t animal at all.

“You different,” she says. Her voice, when she uses it, is low, careful and precise, in the specific way of someone who chooses every word before they release it. Because she’s learned that what you say cannot be unsaid and this island has taught her the cost of that.

“Different from who?” I ask.