“Well said.” Carnelian nodded. “Glass is my favorite form of rock. Mountains might be tall and mighty, but they’re young. Sand grains, though, they are the ancient mountains. They’ve traveled the world, the oceans, the air. They’ve taken so much but withstood so much, too. Nothing, in my opinion, holds our history better than glass. It’s fragile, yet it protects. With glass, you can even paint light …” He held a prism up to a sun shaft, and suddenly rainbows swirled around the workroom.

The class let out a collective breath of wonder, Claire among them.

“What are you waiting for?” Carnelian said, dropping the prism into his pocket. “To the front!”

Claire now knew who sang those tiny notes of welcome. They were the greetings from the millions upon millions of sand grains that floated in the sea’s endless waters. Claire was surrounded by possibility—so long as she didn’t pass out.

A jolt shot up her arm as the Lode Arrow hit the seabed, sending up a billowing cloud of sand, and with it came another memory: a family vacation, not so long ago, when Sophie had just started getting embarrassed about playing make-believe in public. But on this trip, a rare one for the Martinson family, whose vacations usually consisted of a week camping in a state park, Sophie had played make-believe with a vengeance. There had been Experience after Experience: from the secret messages in every bottle to the cracking paint in their vacation rental that Sophie claimed was actually a coded treasure map. Sophie even had, for one morning, played dolphins with Claire, and they’d spent the entire afternoon building sand châteaus and mermaid tails.

The memory gave her an idea.

With her one free hand, Claire grabbed at the sand on the seafloor. It disintegrated into a blurry cloud around her. But she kept the memory of playing in the sand with Sophie close.

Using her artist’s eye, she spotted the curve of a fin in the murky sand, the same way she would have spotted a sheep in summer clouds. She moved her hand wildly back and forth, thinking about all the times she and Sophie had scraped wet sand into a pail and turned it upside down, followed by the nervous anticipation of lifting the bucket away to reveal either a slender turret or a crumbling mess.

Sand liked to cling together. Each little grain had once been a part of something large, of something more than itself.

Whenever you feel small, Mom always used to say to her, just remember that we are all part of something much bigger, even if you can’t always see it.

Claire called to the bits of sand that had come from the coral, from the living stone, and asked them to remember what it had been like to be a part of a giant animal.