They didn’t linger long after the food. With Kelda’s permission and a promise that someone would send word if the floating fortress reappeared, the group turned their attention back to the work they could still control.

When they went to the pile of wood, they saw Bunton had been working on it in their absence. He had already organized the logs into manageable stacks, separating heartwood from other heartwood and coding them with chalk marks in a way nobody on the team understood.

Despite having dragged most of the lumber back with them, the final stretch getting it to the shipwrights was the hardest. They maneuvered the rough planks between buildings and through the other foot traffic on the paths carefully, trying not to damage the planks, themselves, or any passersby in the process. They got them there eventually, though it took all four of them to lift the massive heartwood core Bunton had carried by himself.

The shipwrights present went a little crazy when they saw what they had been brought.

“This is top-quality stuff, son,” one shipwright said. “That big piece especially. You want my advice? Let me use half of it for the keel of the boat and the other half for the mast. The rest we’ll use to replace everything we can, plank by plank.”

Marco narrowed his eyes. “That doesn’t sound like an upgrade. It sounds like you’re trying to rebuild the ship.”

“Yes it does, because we are. I’ve been at this a long time, son. It’s going to get you the most you can out out of that material. Have you ever heard the bit about the much-repaired ship?”

Elisa had.

“This is good, actually,” she said. “It’s something you should know, Marco.”

“She’s right. The crux of the question is this. Say you repair a ship so much that none of the original parts are left. Every plank and nail of it is new in some way or another. Is it the same ship?”

It was an easy one. Marco opened his mouth to answer, then found two completely right answers were competing for space in his throat, fighting against each other to get out. It was the same ship, but it also wasn’t.

“See, that look right there, that’s the reason we ask the question. The system has the answer, at least for shipwrights. See, it wouldn’t be the same ship, except the ship remembers itself at every stage. It remembers when you replaced its mast, and that was the new it. It remembers when you changed the rigging and the sails. At every step, it was itself. Changing the last plank isn’t any more significant than changing the first one.”

“Is that really it?” Marco asked. “Seems shaky.”

“As far as the system is concerned, it is. But the beauty part for you is, we won’t get that far. We’ll replace everything we can, well over half your ship. And as soon as it reaches a certain point, it will trigger an upgrade whether we like it or not the next time you see it.”

“I don’t follow.”

“No, you don’t visit.” The shipwright motioned towards the door. “I’m doing this for the pleasure of working with that wood, but I won’t be cut off halfway. You need to stay the hell away until we send for you. After that, the system is going to involve you in what this ship becomes plenty.”

“But what do we do in the meantime?” Marco asked.

“Not my business, kid. Figure it out yourself.”

The shipwright had gone back to barking orders, and the team of classed-up laborers was already moving the wood they had just delivered to various racks and workstations. As much as Marco wanted to hang around and supervise, he could tell it wasn’t welcome or likely to be productive. They’d made the delivery, and now the project belonged to the builders. It was strange letting go. He felt like a father leaving his child with someone else for the first time.

Riv seemed to sense all this and clapped him on the back.

“Don’t worry. They’re going to make it better. Right, Elisa?” Riv winked at the girl.

“Oh, sure. These are specialists. And what he said makes sense. You’ll have input on the project as soon as they’ve done their work,” Elisa explained. “In the end, they are just adding a bunch of value to the ship before you do the real upgrade.”

“Raising the craftsmanship level?”

“Something like that. I’m sure Garrick spent some real money on the ship, but it wasn’t his main craft even before it sat for decades. There’s room for improvement and those seem like the people to find it.”

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They left the makeshift shipyard and wandered back toward the center of the settlement. Marco walked slower than the others until he realized Aethe had matched his pace. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at him with the same quiet interest she always had.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got three days. Let’s do something useful with them. What’s the plan, Elisa?”

Elisa had already been scribbling in her notebook and looked up, tapping the tip of her pencil against the paper before storing it alongside the pages.

“Well, we’ve got three major leads. First, I want to take a look at some of the other zones Bunton mentioned. Those resource-rich weird spots. Second, we could try talking to the scholars Floater mentioned and see what they’ve figured out about how this island changed.”

“How long would that take?”

“A couple of hours. We’d still have time to strike out if you wanted to after that. Maybe. Worst case scenario, we’d go tomorrow morning.”

“Then do it,” Marco said.

Searching for where the scholars actually were took longer than expected. Looking into the first few buildings mostly showed them workshops and supply houses, not anywhere they’d expect to find a couple paper-lovers of Elisa’s sort. After the first few attempts, Riv just started asking everyone he saw where the book people were. They were pointed the correct way sooner rather than later.

The scholars turned out to be a pair of older married folks named Talla and Bent, who had taken over one of the larger empty huts and turned it into a makeshift library. Riv’s tactic had turned out to be right, since they were so far off the literal beaten path that Marco’s crew would have simply never found them without hiking through the forest.

Marco had never seen a space so hectic be so well-organized. Maps were pinned to the walls everywhere there was an inch of space. Most of them looked redundant to his eyes. There were dozens of samples of plants, soil, and ores scattered haphazardly on tables, the floors, and even an unfortunate cot.

“Welcome,” Talla said. “Don’t touch anything.”

Bent was hunched over a notebook the size of a crate and waved without looking up.

“We heard you were the people to ask about the island,” Elisa said bluntly. Marco had seen this before. With other book people, she tended to jump right into the matter at hand. “Any theories?”

“About a dozen,” Talla replied. “But the short version? No idea. This island changed all the sudden. It’s still changing, in parts. There’s no real indication of why. We’ve mostly resigned ourselves to recording the changes and hoping they start showing a pattern. It’s good experience, at least.”

“Do you mind if I look over your notes and materials?” Elisa said. “Scholar class, by the way. I promise I won’t smudge anything.”

“Help yourself.

Talla waved generally towards some stacks of paper. “I’ll be here if you need me. Help yourself out when you are done.”

A scholar class was many things, but a slow reader was not one of them. Elisa sat down at the stacks and started thumbing through notebooks, loose papers, and discarded maps with alarming speed. Marco watched as the others made their way outside, aghast at how very bad at reading they were in comparison. Soon enough, he joined them. The sheer amount of eye movement Elisa was participating in was enough to give him

a headache, and he figured at least one of them needed to be aware for the rest of the day.

“I found something.” About thirty minutes later, Elisa came out. “Finally. It was basically on the bottom of the stack.”

“So they did have something useful after all?” Marco asked.

“Kind of. They really hadn’t clocked it. Still haven’t. I told them it was there and they told me every surveyor who looked at it before had just found a few uninteresting rocks.”

“It?”

“A temple. An ancient wreck of one. They are all over on these deserted islands, and almost never interesting. They’ve been looted for centuries and then left alone for centuries more after there was nothing left to loot.”

“So why is it so interesting?”

“Because it hasn’t been looked at since the island came back online. It’s annoying to reach from this side, so everyone just sort of handwaved it, then forgot.”

“Then that’s where we go next,” Marco said. “Let’s see if it’s still boring.”

The temple wasn’t far, but it was tucked into a rise behind a series of ridges that forced them to loop back and around more than once. It made progress feel slower than it was, but they were able to avoid any and all instances of fighting on the way just by referencing Elisa’s notebook and taking slight detours. Marco had not picked up anything conquestable for the ship from the trees and at first wanted to fight every battle he could on the way, but the others convinced him not to. They only had so much sunlight, and missing dinner had gone from a slight inconvenience to a major disruption in the minds of everyone involved now that they were on land.

Eventually, they found the place, or at least where the place should have been.

“There’s nothing here,” Marco stated. “Nothing at all.”

“Exactly,” Elisa said. “But there should be. Some scattered stones, crumbled insignia, that kind of thing. Where did it go?”

Riv stepped forward and kicked at the soil. “Doesn’t even look like anything was built here. No disturbed ground, no clearings, nothing that screams ‘temple ruins.’ You sure the map’s right?”

“Positive. I cross-referenced it with at least three maps from three different surveys. Something was here. And now it not. It’s like it got erased.”

Aethe crouched beside a tree near the edge of the supposed temple grounds and pointed at a smooth, faintly blackened stone. “This doesn’t belong to this forest. I’ve seen a lot of stones here, but nothing this black.”

“Good catch. It’s obsidian, maybe? But why only the one stone?”

“Could it have sunk? Or been buried somehow?” Marco toed the rock, trying to flip it over. It didn’t budge. There was too much soil holding it in place, for one, but it felt even more solid than that.

“Only one way to find out. Riv, did you bring a shovel like I asked?” Elisa asked.

“You know I did.” Riv smiled as he lowered the tool pack he had been carrying around.

“Then get to work, if you would. I’d like to see what we uncover.”