The night Marcus Clement walked home from Carnival practice, the cane fields were singing.
That was the only way to describe it — a low, rustling hymn rising off the tall grass as the trade winds moved through it, carrying with them the smell of wet earth and something else. Something older. Something his grandmother would have recognized immediately, and turned him right back around.
But Marcus was seventeen, and seventeen-year-olds don't believe in old women's stories.
He cut through the back road between Couva and his village, the way he always did when practice ran long. The moon was full and heavy-bellied, casting silver light across the road so that his shadow stretched long and thin ahead of him, a puppet of himself. His phone had died forty minutes ago. No torch, no music, just the night and the road and the singing cane.
Then he saw the light.
It appeared first at the edge of his vision — a pale orange glow low to the ground, maybe two hundred yards ahead, near the dried-up trace that the old people called the Soucouya Walk. He stopped walking. The light drifted upward. Slowly, like something waking.
His grandmother's voice came to him then, unbidden and clear: "She rolls her skin off like a stocking. Then she becomes fire."
Marcus shook his head. He kept walking.
The light was larger now, or nearer — it was hard to tell. It moved with the strange, unhurried confidence of something that had never once been chased. It pulsed orange, then deep red at its core, and he could see now that it had no smoke, no source, no shadow. Just the light itself, floating maybe four feet off the ground, moving along the trace.
His footsteps slowed without him telling them to.
There was a house at the end of the Soucouya Walk. Miss Esther's house. Nobody visited Miss Esther after dark — not because she was unkind, but because she was very, very old, and old women in these parts had a way of knowing things. She had buried three husbands. She kept no dogs. Every morning you could see her sweeping her step with a broom made of dried coconut fronds, but nobody could say they had ever seen her at the market or at church or anywhere that required her to walk through town in the daylight.
The fireball hovered at the edge of her yard.
Marcus had stopped entirely. He stood in the road with his bag slung over one shoulder, watching the light spin lazy circles in the air. It was almost beautiful, he thought distantly. Like a lantern someone had let go by accident. Like a tiny, private sun.
Then it opened.
That was the only word for what happened — the sphere of light simply opened, the way a flower opens but much faster, and for one terrible half-second he saw inside it something that was almost a person: the suggestion of limbs, the hollow caverns of eyes, a mouth stretched wide but making no sound. Then it closed again, snapping back into a tight ball of fire.
And it turned toward him.
Marcus Clement ran. He ran the way his ancestors had probably run — with everything in him, without looking back. He ran past the trace, past the abandoned rum shop, past the mango tree that marked the turn to his village. He ran until his lungs burned worse than any cane fire, until he could see the lights of his yard ahead.
He reached his front step and grabbed the rail and doubled over, gasping. His grandmother appeared in the doorway within seconds — she always knew — and she looked not at him but past him, down the road behind him, scanning the dark.
"Marcus." Her voice was quiet and serious. "Come inside."
"Granny, I saw—"
"I know what you saw." She took his arm and pulled him across the threshold. "Did it follow you?"
He looked back. The road was empty. Dark and still and ordinary, the way roads are supposed to be.
"No," he said. "No, I don't think—"
From somewhere behind the house, deep in the cane, came the sound of something rolling. Not falling. Not running. Rolling. Slow and steady and patient, the way a thing moves when it has nowhere else to be and all the time in the world.
His grandmother's grip on his arm tightened.
"Inside," she said again. "And don't open your window tonight."
He didn't ask why. He was seventeen, but he wasn't stupid.
He lay in his bed in the dark and listened to the sound outside: steady, rhythmic, circling the house. And he thought about the moment the light had opened, the shape he'd seen inside it. He thought about the hollow eyes, and the way the mouth had been stretched not in a scream, but in something that looked, horribly, like a smile.
He thought about the way it had turned.