Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women

Chapter 874: Chapter 876

He stood and turned to the others. ”We go back to camp. Now. No one splits up. We stay together.”

There were no arguments. They walked in silence, a tight group moving through the trees like a single living thing. Even the birds had gone quiet again. Not a single chirp, no rustling in the underbrush. Just the steady crunch of their footsteps on the forest floor and the low beat of something beneath it all.

Back in camp, Jude gathered them around the fire pit. The sun had risen fully now, but it felt muted, filtered through a sky that looked too pale. Like the color had been washed from it.

”I think we’ve been too quiet about this,” he said. ”We keep experiencing things we can’t explain, and we’re trying to treat them like they’ll pass if we ignore them. But they’re getting stronger. More coordinated. We need to face whatever’s happening, together.”

No one disagreed. Susan looked up from where she’d been kneeling by the fire, her voice shaking slightly. ”Do you think it’s the island?”

Jude didn’t answer immediately. Then he nodded. ”I think it’s always been the island. We’ve just... been too distracted to see it.”

Sophie, sitting cross-legged next to him, leaned in. ”Do you think it’s trying to communicate with us? Through the smoke?”

”I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s getting inside us. Literally. And then it’s making us forget.”

Zoey looked pale. ”So then how do we fight something we can’t even remember?”

Jude looked at her. ”We write it down.”

They started keeping a record. Jude found old parchment scraps from when they’d tried mapping the island in the early days. He handed them out, along with charcoal. ”If something happens to you, anything, even if you’re not sure, it goes on paper. Then hide it. Somewhere only you know. That way, if your memory’s wiped again, we still have a trail.”

It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it gave them a sense of control. Each wife wrote in her own way, symbols, drawings, words, even half-formed thoughts. It was better than nothing.

As the day wore on, things felt... steadier. They cleaned the shelters. They cooked. They worked in pairs, watched each other carefully. Jude went with Emma again to check the fish traps at the edge of the beach, trying to keep things normal. She didn’t bring up the last time they’d come here together, and neither did he. But there was a tension in her movements, a watchfulness.

After they finished pulling the nets and resetting the traps, they sat on a boulder overlooking the sea. The horizon stretched endlessly, as always, but Jude thought he saw something, flickers of light in the distance, like stars winking just beneath the waves.

”What if the island isn’t an island?” Emma asked suddenly.

Jude turned. ”What do you mean?”

She didn’t look at him. ”What if it’s a shipwreck? Not literally. But like... a piece of something bigger that broke off. Something that doesn’t belong here.”

”Like something ancient?”

”Or something sentient,” she said. ”Something pretending to be a place.”

Jude didn’t answer. Because he’d thought about that too. More than once. What if the island had intelligence? Not like a person, but like a creature dreaming of people? What if they were just parts of its dream?

They returned to camp in silence.

That evening, the firelight cast long shadows across the clearing. The wives sat closer than usual, knees touching, eyes flicking to the darkness beyond the trees more often than they liked to admit. Jude stood at the edge of the circle.

”I want to know if anyone felt anything today,” he said. ”Anything strange. Unusual.”

There was a long pause.

Scarlett raised her hand slightly. ”I heard my name whispered. From under the ground. Just once. But it was my voice saying it.”

Grace said, ”I found another fish in one of our fruit baskets. Just... lying there. Like someone, or something, put it there as a gift.”

Susan added, ”I woke up from a nap and found my hands covered in sand. But I hadn’t left the shelter.”

Lucy looked down at her hands. ”I wrote something today. On the parchment. But when I checked it again later, the words were in a different handwriting.”

One by one, they shared small things. Unexplainable things. Not terrifying on their own, but together they painted a picture, fragments of something larger pushing into their world.

Then Jude spoke. ”The smoke... it said something to me through Amelia. It said, ’You made me.’”

Gasps. Murmurs. Emma covered her mouth.

”What does it mean?” Stella asked.

”I don’t know,” Jude said. ”But it’s said it more than once. And now... I think it’s trying to show us something. Not just what it is, but what we were. Before.”

He paused, watching their faces.

”I don’t think we’re just survivors. I think we’re part of this thing. We always were. We just forgot.”

Silence. The fire cracked.

Then, very softly, Sophie whispered, ”What if we remember?”

They looked at her.

”What if we choose to remember,” she said. ”Instead of waiting for the island to show us.”

Jude’s pulse quickened. ”You mean... force it?”

She nodded. ”We’ve been avoiding the center. The mountain. The border. But maybe that’s where the answers are.”

Jude looked past the trees, toward the distant red glow of the volcano’s throat.

He didn’t speak.

But something inside him already had.

The fire had long since burned down to embers when Jude opened his eyes again. The others were asleep around the pit, curled in blankets and fur throws, a quiet tangle of limbs and slow breathing. He didn’t remember closing his eyes, and yet the last thing he recalled was watching them, watching their faces shift with the flickering light, seeing how unease still clung to them like damp air. Now the air felt colder. He sat up and looked around the camp, squinting into the dark edges of the forest. No movement. But something in him stirred, a faint thrum that vibrated not in the ground but in his chest.