They didn’t hear her.

She continued to try to free herself. If I force it . . . No, that doesn’t work. Mina’s fingertips started to ache as she pushed at the clip. The harness wasn’t budging. She shouted for her family again: “Help!” But when no one heard her, she gave up calling for them and concentrated on wiggling the clip and squirming out of the ropes.

At last the hook snapped open. Free! Quickly she shucked off the ropes and ran into the house.

Inside, the twins were shrieking—​one of them had a spoon that the other one wanted. Papa was trying to cajole them into accepting a second spoon, but no, they both wanted that one, right now. Upstairs, Gaton was calling down that he needed his hammer—​who’d taken it? Scrubbing the oatmeal spatter off the twins’ chairs, Mother was still reminiscing about past wind days. Mina stood in the doorway, her kite clutched in her arms, and opened her mouth to say something, anything, about how they’d left her and hadn’t heard her calling for them . . .

But there was no point now. She’d freed herself, and it would only make her family feel bad. Real storm guardians solve problems, she reminded herself. They don’t cause them.

“Ah, Mina, there you are!” Mother said. “You should go bond with your egg. Remember: skin to shell.”

“Yes, Mother.” She fled past Papa and the twins, up the stairs to her room, and shut the door behind her.

In the corner of her room, tucked between her bed and the bookshelf, was her storm-beast egg. It wasn’t anything like an egg from one of the chickens in the coop. For one thing, it was enormous, larger than either Beon or Rinna. For another, it was a swirl of colors: reds and purples and golds. She’d cushioned it in its own nest of quilts.

It didn’t look any closer to hatching.

She swallowed back the taste of disappointment. She’d hoped she’d been outside long enough that when she came back in, she’d see a noticeable difference.

After dropping her kite on her bed, she examined the egg, checking for any new signs that it was about to hatch. The hairline crack she’d seen that morning was still there, no wider or longer than before.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t time for her future to begin yet.

Curling up against the cushion of quilts, Mina laid her cheek against the shell—​skin to shell, as Mother had said. Speaking softly, she told the egg all about her morning: her painted kite and how proud she was of it, seeing the wind guardians and their beasts and how glorious they were, and then struggling to free herself of the harness and how frustrating it had felt when no one had heard her.