There was no tally.
No record of arrivals. No measure of contribution. No hierarchy of presence.
The island remembered everyone the same way—by witnessing.
Kye sat near the southern grove, where children played without lines or winners, their games shaped not by competition but by rhythm. A soft drum made from stretched leaves tapped quietly beneath a tree. A young girl followed its beat, circling slowly, singing to no one and everyone.
Zeraphine had begun weaving new canopy threads. Not for shelter. For joining. Long strands of memorylight and sapline fiber stretched across branches to form soft intersections—places where people could pause, lean, breathe.
Above them, the Chronicle pulses circled slowly.
Not scanning.
Mirroring.
> ARTICLE EIGHTY-FIVE: When no one keeps score, everyone becomes the reason for staying.
Someone dropped a spoon and five others laughed—not at them, but with them. A boy accidentally stepped through a fern-bed, then spent an hour tending it. Not out of punishment. Out of care.
The island responded by blooming a second leaf on a plant no one had planted.
No one claimed it.
Everyone noticed it.
The new spiral near the listening grove had now reached seven full turns. Not concentric. Layered. Like pages of a story that hadn't been written but had already been lived.
Zeraphine walked it barefoot.
At the center, she sat and whispered the names of places she'd once thought she had to leave to be free.
Not to undo them.
To include them.
And the spiral pulsed gently.
A Chronicle drifted close and nested in a nearby branch. It glowed faintly.
No article appeared.
Only a line:
> "You were never being counted. You were being kept."
Kye returned to the cradle as dusk fell. The flame still glowed within the bloom.
He didn't touch it.
He sat beside it, like one might beside a loved one asleep.