The blinding white retreats; the stars shrink to small holes in the hot dark, through which I catch flashes of movement, color, pale light. Moonlight, I think. So that’s what it looks like.

The world tosses like a boat on rough seas. Ted’s familiar scent fills my nose. We are being carried on his back, in a bag I think, or a sack—there are small holes stabbed in it, for air I suppose. I am too big. My skin is exposed and hairless like some kind of worm. My paws have become long fleshy spiders. My nose is not an adorable soft bump but a horrible pointy thing. Worst of all, where my tail should be there is a blank nothing.

Oh Lord. I wriggle but I can’t move. I think we’re restrained, tied up maybe. All around, there is sound. Leaves, owls, frogs. Other things I don’t know the name of. It all has a clarity I have never heard before. The air is different too. I can feel that, even through the bag. It’s cooler, sharper somehow—and it’s moving.

Lauren sobs, and I feel it burst up through my unfamiliar chest, my cavernous ribcage. I feel the tears coming from my tiny weak eyes. It’s just as horrible as I thought it would be.

I made it, I tell her silently. I’m in the body.

“Thank you, Olivia.” She squeezes me tightly, and I squeeze back.

Lauren, why is the air moving, like it’s alive?

“It’s wind,” she whispers. “That’s wind, Olivia. We’re outside.”

Oh my goodness. Oh gosh. For a moment I am too overwhelmed to think. Then I ask, Where are we?

“We’re in the woods,” she says. “Can’t you smell it?”

As she says it, the scent hits me too. It is incredible. Like minerals and beetles and fresh water and hot earth and trees—God, the scent of the trees. Up close, it’s like a symphony. I could never have dreamed it.

“He has the knife,” Lauren says. “Can you believe it? He buried it.”

Maybe he’s just taking us for a walk, I say, hopefully. Maybe he’s got the knife because he’s scared of bears.

“Kittens don’t come back from the woods,” she says.

We are quiet after that. More than anything I want to go back inside. But I can’t leave Lauren alone. I have to be brave.

He walks for an hour on rough ground. He climbs steep rock faces and wades across streams, goes through valleys and over hills. Very quickly we are in the wild.