Chapter 7

~Thursday 09 July, 2026~

6:09 AM

“Mm, Mike ... Mike ... Oh, Mike!”

Amber was lying in bed wearing nothing but a pair of light blue panties and a white camisole. Her large left breast was hanging out of the camisole, while her hard right nipple strained against the fabric. Sweaty brown hair clung to her face as she kept her hand in her panties and her vibrator pressed to her clit.

“Oh, oh God!” Amber gasped, her back arching as her right leg shook. “Ah, fuck!”

Biting her lower lip, Amber’s eyes closed as she released a quivering whine. Electric shocks shot from her clit, making her toes curl as her body shook. Her left hand cupped her big boob, fingers tugging on her own nipple as her vaginal muscles rippled. Amber cried out one final time before her body went limp.

Letting out a long breath, Amber switched off the toy and removed it from her pussy. Her breathing was heavy, beads of sweat dotting her body as her chest heaved. It had been a wonderful orgasm, but Amber definitely missed the real thing. She hadn’t felt a man’s touch in a long, long time.

She shakily got to her feet, her legs wobbling slightly as she made her way to the bathroom to clean the vibrator. The sex to had done a nice job, even if it wasn’t the same as being taken by a big, strong man. Amber stripped out of her clothes and took a relaxing morning shower. She sighed in relief as the warm water cascaded around her, easing her muscles and washing the sweat from her body.

After toweling off, she put on her underwear and snatched yesterday’s jeans from a chair in her bedroom before pulling them on. A light-blue blouse followed, along with a pair of warm socks. Then she made breakfast and sat at the dining table with a cup of coffee. Adjusting her rimmed glasses, Amber took out her phone and started scrolling social media.

Mike had accepted her friend request, and Amber sipped her coffee while looking through his pictures. He wasn’t particularly active on social media, but he had a few pictures of himself by the lake. Amber enjoyed looking at him with his shirt off. She felt a little guilty for her activities, but it had been a long time since a guy had flooded her bits.

They had gotten even closer over the last couple of days. She told him a little more about herself and was thrilled with the way he listened and cared. Mike told Amber a bit about the interview with Chloe. The two of them texted regularly, teasing each other and lightly flirting. It was refreshing. It was exciting.

Once Amber was done checking him out on social media, her attention turned to the clearing; the stones. They were fascinating, unlike anything Amber had ever seen. If only she had been able to go back with Mike. Downing the last of her first coffee, Amber prepared herself for a day of research.

11:24 AM

“They’re not grooves,” Amber whispered, leaning closer to her laptop screen.

Reaching for her third coffee, she took a sip of the lukewarm liquid. Amber’s dining table had practically disappeared. She could still see portions of it beneath her laptop, notebooks, books, rolled up topographical maps, a ruler, and pencils. There were also several printed photographs, as well as a yellow legal pad covered in barely-legible notes.

Amber enlarged the photograph again, causing one of the stones to fill the entire laptop screen. She’d taken forty-seven photographs of the clearing. Wide shots, close-ups, different angles. Some shots were of individual stones, while others were of multiple. She even got the surrounding vegetation and the ground between stones. Anything that might help her document the site.

She’d spent quite a bit of the last few days going through the photographs whenever her actual work failed to hold her attention. Which had been frequently. At first she’d been interested mainly in the arrangement itself. Seven upright stones in a circular placement. Similar spacing, all directed slightly inward. The smaller rock that had been next to one of them. Amber was convinced they had been placed deliberately.

The marks on the surfaces of the stones hadn’t been researched nearly as much. She’d seen groves, cracks. Markings covered in lichen and weathered by centuries of rain, snow, roots, and Adirondack winters. That morning she was starting to wonder if maybe there was more to the grooves than she first thought.

Opening another photograph, Amber compared the two side-by-side. Frowning, she zoomed in. A shallow line crossed the first stone at an angle before splitting near the bottom. On the second stone, another line did almost exactly the same thing. They weren’t identical, but they were close. They were very, very close.

Amber pushed her glasses higher up her nose. “Coincidence.”

Selecting a third photograph, Amber zoomed in on the grooves. Another branching line in a different orientation. Same general construction. Picking up a pencil, she drew out three shapes on her legal pad. They looked like nothing, but that didn’t concern Amber. Archaeology was full of things that looked like nothing until years were spent proving they were something.

“They’re natural,” she whispered, looking at the markings. “Probably. Maybe. Shit.”

The fourth stone had a curved marking. Amber leaned forward as she zoomed in so she could trace out the grooves on her legal pad. Stone five had two intersecting lines, while stone six’s markings were more curved with a short line extending from it. Amber stopped at stone seven, zooming in until the image became pixelated.

“Come on,” Amber growled in annoyance.

Backing out slightly, Amber leaned in as the image grew clear again. That’s when she noticed a faint line running across the surface beneath a patch of lichen. It turned sharply, disappeared, then reappeared several inches lower. Another photograph of the same stone showed the line from a different angle.

She froze, her coffee halfway to her mouth. “Well, shit.”

Amber opened the widest photograph she’d taken of the clearing. Seven stones stood beneath the trees, in the same position they’d been for centuries. Holding up the legal pad, Amber’s eyes flicked between the picture and the drawing. Weathering could create grooves, water could carve channels, and thawing ice could split rock. Natural processes, however, didn’t repeat themselves across separately positioned stones.

“Wait,” Amber whispered, setting down her cup and leaning toward the screen. Her eyes darted between the wide shot and the close-ups of the various stones. “No.”

Amber stood so quickly her chair skidded backward. “No, no, no.”

Grabbing the legal pad, she flipped to a fresh page. The markings weren’t simply on the stones; their placement also mattered. Amber drew a rough circle, followed by seven small rectangles around its circumference. She numbered them according to the order she’d photographed them, then added a small circle to represent the small rock.

Using the pictures, she marked her drawing where each carved surface was located. Then she drew seven separate sketches, one of each stone. Every marked surface faced the center of the clearing. Each marking had been positioned on the surface most directly oriented toward the interior of the setup. That’s when Amber knew for sure.