Bay sat by the tent, smoking and boiling rice. “There you are,” he said, and I wanted to kiss him. “What’s up?”

“I got lost. I thought I’d never see you again,” I said.

“Oh, I envy you,” he said. “That’s the best place to be.”

“I didn’t like it,” I said. In my absence, Bay had gathered branches for a fire. He built a high, airy stack that lit immediately. No snow: no tent. We sat wrapped in our sleeping bags. My face and chest burned. My backside felt icy and vulnerable. I let my gaze crawl over his long ugly scars.

“How’d you get those scars?”

“From a fight with my dad.”

“Did he fight you with a knife?”

“Scissors,” he said. “Before the Ash Family, I told people I’d fought with a bear.” He’d never looked so large as in that moment. He shifted the fire with a branch, compiling the flames into an upward torrent. “What about your folks?”

I saw my mother lifting gems into my hand. “My mom is fine,” I said. It felt childish to tell Bay the details.

He nodded. “Well, little sister, you’ll fit right in,” he said.

“Little sister?” I said.

“You don’t like me calling you that.”

“I think you’re younger than me,” I said, though I was only nineteen and Bay seemed twenty-five, or twenty-eight.

“Get away from the calendar.” He breathed with a lot of movement. “None of that matters,” he said. “We’re going to a place of real love. Dice will show you. The borders between you and me?” he said. “Porous. The definite self? Doesn’t exist.”

I nodded, unsure.

“Dice will understand you like a lightning bolt understands a rod,” Bay said. And again he talked about Dice, whom I pictured as a hippie, professor, or priest. I wondered whether Dice would have anything to teach me, because I was looking for someone who could weave together all that I was with all that I wanted to be—a seeker, maybe, but uncertain about my direction, someone moving peripatetically in the direction of nature, wildness, fear, desire, like the weird crosshatch of scratches on the diffraction glasses my father may have given me—I liked to think he did, I was somewhat certain—glasses that turned all small bright lights into hearts. Isaac had told me that the degree to which you can be moved by aesthetic experience seemed, in studies, to have a genetic component. That was my principal heritage, my main virtue—whatever it was, I had so much of it: I could be moved.

After years of lying low, Bay said, Dice was ready again to take action in the world, to wage war on behalf of nature. Bay stopped talking about Dice and looked at me. The fire had calmed. I felt loose and easy, like I’d just been kissed all over the face and neck.