Far in the distance, where the swamp rises menacingly out of the earth and its unhappy trees swoon in the wind, a small light pierces the dark and hovers in the air orange-gold, the color of flame.

It is fox fire, I tell myself, which I know is merely a bioluminescent fungus that lives in decaying wood. But the light that I see is not bioluminescence but flame, floating on the air despite the deluge that would extinguish any normal fire.

Before I can stop myself, I am running toward the swamp, away from home, pounded incessantly by rain, my boots sticking and sucking in the marshy soil, hoping the light will not vanish or retreat deeper into the labyrinth. When I get to the first of the trees, the light is still far away, tucked deeper in the forest than I imagined it could have been, for me to have seen it all the way from the house. But I press on, sheltered from the hardest of the rain now beneath the canopy, blinded momentarily by lightning that feels too close, that makes the twisted cypress trees look like the roots of something else—some ghoulish tentacled creature that lives under the swamp and puts out its strange feelers toward the sky. My feet slosh through heavy brown water as I fight my way toward the light that grows infinitesimally closer with every laborious step.

I am far enough into the swamp now that I may have trouble finding my way out again, but I am not thinking of that. I am thinking only of reaching that light before it goes out—or lights, I should say, for now, as I approach it, the light resolves into two twin flames.

Even knowing what happened to Clementine, I want to see what she saw. I want to know how she can move through time. Maybe if I can figure it out, I can reach out to Julian somehow, talk to him—ask him why he killed those girls, if that is what he did …

The lights are close enough for me to reach out and touch, but I feel no heat emanating from them. The rain pours down around me, roiling the surface of the water in which I stand ankle-deep, making it snap savagely at my boots. Making a reflection in its surface impossible. Something grabs me around the ankle, like a claw made of tree roots, and I slip forward into the deeper water, shocked by the sudden cold as it slides up to my waist.

In my mad rush to the swamp, I’ve felt only flickers of excitement or foreboding, intangible as a shadow cast from a flash of lightning. But now as I am dragged into the water, just like Clementine, I have the opportunity to feel true panic. Where will I go? And will I come out like her? And—no, no, I don’t want to die, but the bank is muddy and slippery and my hands can’t find purchase to pull myself back up.