He winced, his smile self-deprecating. “I didn’t know! I thought I was helping to clean up. She put me outside with the chickens.”

To her complete surprise, Hlee dropped her head back and laughed.

For the next few days, Hlee and Argus took turns hacking at the sculpture in between feeding the chickens, weeding the garden, and sweeping the house. Once Niam Tais finished grinding all the herbs into a fine powder, she set Argus and Hlee to helping her partition, bag, and label them for sale. The general store set out Niam Tais’s home remedies in a cute wicker basket beside the cash register, in between the lip balms and lighters.

For the better part of her life, Hlee had done everything with her cousin. After her aunt’s family moved away, they texted and called each other on weekends, but it wasn’t the same. She hated to admit it, but having someone to hang out with again wasn’t terrible.

It helped that Argus was easy to talk to, partly because he took genuine delight in everything, even the most menial of chores, but mostly because he wasn’t one of the townsfolk. Nothing she said or did with him mattered. She could let her guard down. Plus, after that first time, he didn’t ask again for her “story” or whatever that meant. Instead, he asked for other stories.

Since topics of conversation were somewhat limited in Little Nova, she humored him. She began with the folktales her mom used to tell, like the one about the trickster god who used cunning and wit to get out of obeying the emperor’s commands, and the one about the rooster who won a crimson crown for its ability to sing back the sun every morning.

The next week, Niam Tais sent them into the woods with a pail to gather pine cones for wreaths. They hadn’t gone far before Hlee stumbled into a clearing and stopped breathing.

Silver dust blanketed the entire space, coating every inch of earth and every tree facing inward. Patches of grass glowed like mounds of jewels in the sunlight. The air shimmered.

“What . . . happened?” Hlee breathed. She brushed a fingertip against a leaf. It left a luminous sheen.

Setting down the pail, she stepped gingerly into the shining clearing. When she rubbed the silver from her finger, it disintegrated into a halo around her skin.

“Who would have done this?” she asked. “And why?”

Argus moved past her, turning in a slow circle to take it all in. Flashing a grin, he sank down and sprawled onto his back. When he spoke, his voice was hushed with awe. “It’s like being caught inside a moonbeam.”

She knelt beside him, gazing upward so that her vision became nothing but silver and light. Directly overhead, several smaller branches had snapped, dangling limply. It looked as though something had smashed into them.