Anastasia gets to her feet and starts following the smell. She’s more cautious now that she’s fallen, now that she has scrapes on her knees and on the palms of her hands. They sting and ache and bleed, but they’re not as important as the possibility of candy.

She comes around a corner. There’s no candy house, and she’s briefly disappointed, but then she sees what is there, and she stops, eyes going wide with awe and delight.

It’s like a flower, if flowers were made entirely out of dragonfly wings. The insectile petals glitter in the sunlight, breaking it up into little rainbows. If she were older, she would call them “prismatic,” but she’s not older, and so all she thinks is “pretty” as she walks toward the flower, eyes still very wide.

If she were older, she might be wary of something that doesn’t look like anything else she’s seen since she stepped into the trees, of the way the curling vines around the base of the thick, fleshy stalk that supports the massive bloom—it’s almost as wide across as she is tall, and the stem is thicker than her arm—seem to twitch in anticipation as she approaches. But she’s not older. She’s just a lost little girl looking at the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen and wanting to possess it with all of her half-formed magpie heart.

All the good smells are coming from this flower. She knows it, even though it’s impossible, as impossible as the flower itself. It is miracle and living rainbow and candy house, all rolled into one, and she keeps getting closer, and the vines keep twitching, and this is inevitable. This has been inevitable for thirty years, since her grandparents bought the house on the edge of the woods, since the comet with a heart made of alien seeds turned its sightless eye toward the distant blue shadow of the Earth. Everything she has done in her short life has led her here, away from safety, away from the life she might have lived, away from home.

Look away, if you must. What comes next is part of the story, but it is not as important to witness it as it is to know that it has happened: that it was inevitable. That it could not be run from, or avoided, or escaped.

Anastasia climbs onto a fallen branch, adding a few more precious inches to her height. Even so, she has to strain to touch the tips of her fingers to the center of the flower, which is hard and bumpy and feels like the gravel-rich dirt that forms along the edges of the sidewalk. The bumps are regular, and if she were older, she would associate the feeling with sunflowers, the way they push their seeds up against the surface.