“Not like Imogen,” I say without thinking.

“Why does it have to be a competition?” Rush asks. “Maybe we need everyone’s power, not a fight over who has the most.”

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just . . . I’ve never been around other people like me before.”

Rush isn’t letting up with the intense blue staring, so I look at the ground, but that’s no real relief because there are dead people down there. Can they feel the echoes of what’s happening above them? Does it trickle through soil and caskets? Do they remember what it’s like to be alive? To want too much?

You’re going to get hurt.

“So you still come here and play?” I ask, sitting down in the grass, sliding closer to Rush. I follow in Imogen’s footsteps. I follow my hard-beating heart.

“Yeah,” Rush says. “Secret playing.”

“The Grays have never heard you?”

“Only one of them. Once,” she says, and I don’t have to ask which Gray it was. The last of the birds above us slide away, leaving the sky empty of everything but sunset. “My music used to belong to my parents. Sometimes I want to have things that don’t belong to anyone else. Not even the Grays.”

I have two thoughts.

The first is that I’ve been working so hard to do the exact opposite of Rush, to have things that aren’t just mine.

The other is that Rush played for me. She broke her own rule. Or maybe when she lets me listen, the rule stays magically intact. Maybe the music stays hers in a way that it wouldn’t with other people.

That idea is way too tempting, so I run away from it at top speed. “But you’re sharing with all of these lovely people.” I open my arms, flourishing them at the graves. I grab Rush’s bow, spring up, and start pointing it at headstones, reciting names. Valerie Moore. Elizabeth Livingston.

At first I’m doing it to put on a show, but with every etched name, the show becomes more serious. The bow feels right in my hands, like a piece of fruit that’s reached the perfect ripeness. It tugs me over toward the little patch of graves with the stark matching headstones.

“Don’t,” Rush calls out. “Nobody goes over there.”

I spin around, drawing a circle in the air with the bow. “Why not?”

“Those are hollow graves.”

“What do you mean hollow?”

Rush gives the patch a sideways glare. “No one’s buried in those. They’re markers for people who’ve gotten lost in the woods and didn’t come back.”

I keep walking. I tell myself that it’s the bow leading me forward, pointing the way. I step over a line of stones on the ground, and the air changes. It feels dense here, colder. My skin ripples. It must be the sun going down.