The Lantern Rite

The lantern went lit at the mountain lodge at nine sharp, and Lexie Hooper was ready before the old man finished the blessing. She'd been ready for ten minutes, actually, standing at the bottom of the lodge steps in her running shoes with the brass sieve cradled in both arms like it was a sleeping cat.

"Patience, girl," said Mr. Oshiro, the lodge caretaker, who was seventy-one and had run this rite longer than anyone could remember. "The flame doesn't hurry. Neither should you."

"The flame doesn't have knees that lock up at night," Lexie said, but she smiled when she said it, and Mr. Oshiro chuckled and steadied the sieve as she took the final weight of it.

Twenty-eight years old, pole dance instructor, newly single, and holding a fire in a kitchen strainer. If somebody had told her a month ago this was where her autumn would go, she'd have laughed. But the co-op had put out the call for carriers, the pay was a voucher for the hot spring, and Lexie had never once in her life turned down a contest with a prize attached.

The path down to the pavilion was a mile of packed dirt and switchbacks, and the rule of the rite was simple. Keep the lantern lit, pass it hand to hand at the stations, and do not, under any circumstance, look back up the mountain. Lexie didn't plan on looking back. She planned on moving.

The forest at night was loud in a way mainland forests never were. Frogs going absolutely nuts, something rustling in the ferns that she chose not to investigate, the sieve flame throwing her shadow twenty feet ahead of her like a spotlight operator with a grudge. Her arms burned by the halfway mark. She was not going to complain about it. She'd been teaching grip strength to bored housewives all year and this was her chance to prove it worked.

The mid-route rest stop showed up out of the dark all at once, a separate shelter with a thatched roof and wooden beams and one window glowing amber where the receiving station waited. It was normally an outdoor pole fitness pavilion, the only one on the island, which was a sentence she'd had to explain to roughly every tourist who wandered up the trail. Tonight it was stuffed to the beams with boxes and gear from the festival preparations, and a single polished brass pole stood in the middle like it was guarding the place.

There was a man in the window. Tall, dark hair, headlamp on, holding a ledger.

Lexie stopped dead on the path.

Oh, no, she thought. Oh, absolutely not.

Because she knew that silhouette. She'd spent four years trying to forget that silhouette, back when they were both younger and dumber and stuck in a wilderness survival course on the mainland together, arguing about who could build a faster fire until the instructor told them to shut it or share a tent. She was twenty-four then. He was twenty-five. Neither of them had ever done a thing about it, thank goodness, and then life had happened to both of them in different directions.

She kept walking. What else was she going to do, stand in the dark all night?

The window opened and the headlamp swung down to find her, and there it was. Alec Holloway, twenty-nine years old, divorced a year now per the island gossip mill, currently wearing the co-op uniform like it had been issued by God.

"Lexie Hooper," he said, and his voice did the thing it always did, that dry amused thing.

"Alec Holloway." She lifted the sieve. "Take your lantern, carrier."

"You're carrying for the north route?" He came to the window ledge, and his hands closed around the sieve's handles, and for a second longer than necessary their fingers overlapped on the brass. Neither of them moved first. "I thought they'd have retired you by now."

"Retire? I'm twenty-eight, not eighty." She let go, finally. "You're receiving at station one? Don't you usually run the ridge line?"

"I requested this shift." He set the sieve down inside and checked the flame with the flat little poker they issued, and didn't look up when he said it.

Lexie raised an eyebrow. She'd been told her raised eyebrow could end arguments. "You requested station one. The easiest station on the whole route."

"Maybe I like easy."

"Maybe you heard I was carrying the north route and wanted first crack at beating my transfer time."

Alec looked up at that, and there was the smirk. The exact same smirk from the survival course, older now, more lines around the eyes, but the same. "Is that what you'd have done?"

"Absolutely."

"Then yes," he said, and wrote something in the ledger like a man recording a confession. "I heard you were carrying and I wanted the window."

"There it is." She couldn't help grinning. Four years and he was still the only person who'd admit his competitiveness out loud instead of pretending it was about teamwork. "You know what, I respect that. It's disgusting, but I respect it."

"Timed transfers matter, Hooper. The flame dips on every slow handoff."

"The flame dipped zero times tonight, and my hands are steady as a rock, and you know it because you just took it off me."

"I did notice," he said. "Your grip's better than it was."

"It should be. I teach pole fitness now. Full time. I've got forearms like bridge cable."

That actually got a laugh out of him, a real one, head back. "Pole fitness. On this island."

"It's a whole thing! There's a pavilion for it! You're standing in it!" She gestured at the room, at the brass pole standing there among the stacked boxes, at the thatch overhead. "You've been in here an hour and you haven't even asked why there's a pole."

"I assumed it was a flagpole situation."

"It is not a flagpole situation." She planted both hands on the window ledge and leaned in, mostly to be annoying. "It is a professionally installed, competition-grade, polished brass dance pole, and I could out-climb you on it inside of a minute, and that is a bet I would make right now."

"Is this how you greet everybody, or am I special?"

"You were special four years ago and you're special now, in the sense that you're the most irritating person I've ever shared a forest with."

He wrote her time in the ledger. Nine forty-one, lantern intact, carrier's hands steady. Then he looked at her over the top of the page.

"Which station are you headed to next?"

"Station two, the creek crossing. Then three, four, five, all the way down to the sea gate. It's a whole relay, Alec, it goes all night. I'll be at windows all along the route."

"I know how the rite works."

"Then you know I'll be at your window six more times before dawn."

"That's what I heard," he said, and she caught it, the pause before the word heard, the little hitch that meant he'd requested more than one shift, and Lexie felt something in her chest do a thing she decided to ignore.

"Right," she said. "Well. Keep your window clean and your poker handy."

"Lexie."

She stopped on the path. Against the rules, looking back up, but the lodge was a mile behind her and Mr. Oshiro could fine her later.

"Your hands were cold," Alec said. "There are gloves in the crate at station two. Left side. Take them."

"Are you giving me equipment advice or telling me you noticed my hands?"

"Both," he said. "Move, carrier. You're on the clock."

She moved. But she was smiling the whole first half mile, which she decided was a professional hazard and not anything else.

* * *

Station two sat at the creek crossing, which in October was more of a polite trickle and less of a hazard, and the crate was exactly where he'd said, left side, with a pair of wool gloves on top. Lexie put them on and refused to think about the fact that he'd guessed her glove size.

The station two receiver was a sleepy young-looking guy who was definitely at least twenty-one because the co-op carded everyone, and he took the sieve with both hands and said "hi" as if the entire affair were the most boring chore of his life. Lexie gave him a tip about angling the flame away from the breeze and moved on.

It went like that. Station three, a woman named Kanami who chatted about the festival food stalls. Station four, empty window, lantern passed through a slot. Station five, a guy who sneezed every time the flame got near him, poor soul. And every single window, Lexie found herself checking the ledger page taped beside it, because the co-op wrote carrier names and times on every station sheet, and every single sheet had Alec Holloway's name on the receiving line.

Six windows. Six shifts. He'd requested the whole route.

She showed up at station six with her arms aching and her eyebrows already up, and there he was, ledger open, poker ready, headlamp making him look like a very serious miner.

"Six windows," she said, shoving the sieve at him before their hands could do that lingering thing again. Not that it lingered. It lingered slightly. "Six, Alec. You requested the entire north route."

"I like routes."

"You like the north route, which happens to be my route."

"You're carrying it. I'm receiving it. This is called the rite of the single lantern, Hooper, it's a relay, relays have two ends."

"You could've taken the south route."

"The south route smells like pig farm."

She laughed so hard she had to sit down on a crate of festival decorations, which was maybe fine because her arms really were done. Alec checked the flame, wrote his time, and then, this was the part, he pulled a thermos out from under the ledger and poured something into the cap and held it out.

"Tea. You've been walking for three hours."

"You're not supposed to give the carrier refreshments, it's against the rite."

"Report me," he said, still holding the cap out.

She took it. It was good tea, hot and a little sweet, and she drank half before she remembered she was mad at him, and by then it was too late to be convincingly mad about anything.

"You remembered I like it sweet," she said.

"You complained about bitter tea for an entire survival course. Seven days. It's hard to forget."

"Well." She handed the cap back and stood up. "Your tea is acceptable and your window is clean. Station seven is mine, and then eight, and then the sea gate by dawn, and then this night is over and you never have to see me again."

"Is that the goal?"

The question sat there in the amber light between them, plain as the pole in the middle of the room, and Lexie looked at it the way you look at a move you've never tried.

"It's the plan," she said. "Plans are good."

"You never once followed a plan in the survival course. You built your shelter in a drainage gully."

"And it held, Alec. It held."

"It held because I moved it."

They looked at each other. The flame in the sieve did its little dip and recover. Somewhere out in the dark a frog went off with the suddenness of a car alarm.

"Six more stations," Alec said. "Try not to set anything on fire."

"No promises," said Lexie, and took her lantern, and walked.

The next two stations were uneventful, which was fine by her. Station seven was a quiet man who received the sieve like it was a sleeping baby, and station eight was a woman with a radio playing softly who wished her good luck in a voice like a lullaby. Lexie logged her times, kept her pace, and did not think about drainage gullies or sweet tea. Mostly.

The rest stop came up around midnight. It was the mid-route rest stop, where carriers were allowed twenty minutes and the flame was supposed to be checked and trimmed, and Mr. Oshiro had told them both, back at nine, that the receiving window for the pavilion was the small one on the east side, past the storage stacks.

Except there was a problem. The east window was blocked.

Not a little blocked. Completely blocked. Someone from the lodge had shoved a box of festival equipment right up against the outside wall, and the box had friends, three more boxes stacked on top of it, and behind that a folded tarp and what looked like an entire collapsed boom stand. Lexie stood there with her lantern and stared at it.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said out loud, to nobody, because that was the kind of night it was.

She heard boots on the packed dirt before she saw him. Alec came around the corner with his ledger and his headlamp and stopped dead when he saw the pile.

"Well," he said. "That's new."

"Don't say it like that. You say it like it's normal."

"It's a storage pavilion during festival week, Hooper. It's exactly normal." He set the ledger down on a crate and looked at the stack. "The window's behind all of it. We move it or we stand here."

"Then move it," said Lexie, and put her lantern down on the flat top of the lowest box, carefully, away from the cardboard edge, because she was a professional and professionals did not set festival decorations on fire. "I'll hold the light."

They worked fast. The top boxes came off easy, mostly paper lanterns and coils of wire, and the bottom one was heavy with folded chairs, so Alec took that one and slid it clear, breathing through his nose like the weight was a personal insult. The tarp went over the railing. The boom stand leaned against the wall. And there, wedged in the gap between the wall and where the last box had been, was a water bottle.

Not a co-op water bottle. A personal one, dented, with a purple cap and a sticker of a cartoon frog peeling half off the plastic.

Alec picked it up and turned it in the light, and Lexie watched his face do the thing where he tried not to look pleased about something and failed completely.

"This is yours," he said.

"That is absolutely not mine."

"It has a frog sticker on it."

"So? Half the island has frog stickers. It's a frog island."

"You filed the sticker down at the edge," he said, scratching at it with his thumbnail, "so it wouldn't peel in your bag. Left bottom corner, filed, smooth. I watched you do it in the survival course. Day three. You said the lamination was decorative and you were keeping it anyway."

Lexie opened her mouth. Then she closed it. Then she looked at the bottle, and the sticker was filed smooth at the left bottom corner, because of course it was, she had done that four years ago with a nail file borrowed from a woman named Krystal and she had never once thought about it since.

"Okay, first of all," she said, "why are you filing me? In your memory? With details?"

"I don't file you. I remember things. There's a difference."