“Emma.” My voice strains. Tips toward breaking. “Help me find you.”

The space around me floods with fog, white as mushrooms and rich with damp. I blink, but I can’t find any kind of balance as light swallows the darkness. I feel a strange prickle on my right arm. I look down, but I can’t see my own body past the hollow spot where my neck meets my chest.

And then the fog snatches back, leaving the world a clean, starry black.

There is a map on my forearm. A map made of simple black lines. And up near my wrist, at the end of the path, is a juicy black X.

Part Four: Before Midnight

Emma and Ada: One Hundred Years Ago

Emma was born on the rainiest Tuesday in the bounds of memory or belief. Pellets of water left dents in the earth, turned the redwoods a sullen black. It ate the banks of the Eel River, but by some grace the river didn’t flood. The town of Prospero, California, clung to life on the verge of the water.

Tiny Emma clung to life, too.

She grew into a red-faced child, prone to harsh moods as well as cyclones of glee. Her parents would come to wish, in quiet moments after she was abed and darkness had beset the world, that one of her brothers and sisters buried in the yard, marked by nameless stones, had lived in Emma’s stead.

Her mother looked for ways to put things right. She found hope at the end of the lane, in the form of Ada Moore, a girl her daughter’s age with straight pale hair and a disposition to match. She treated Ada like medicine for her sickly daughter. A dose for bad days. Two doses for impossible ones.

Emma and Ada took long walks, tracing the river from Prospero to the nearby town of Tempest. Emma wore her best shiny black shoes and her most intent frown. She handed Ada pebbles, but only the ones that glowed yellow or pink when they were wet. Like magic. She tugged the collar of her dress away from her sticky neck. She was not allowed to take her shoes off and splash in the water.

She was never, never allowed to go in the woods.

At school, Emma and Ada shared a desk, their hips fitted together snugly. When the teacher struck an iron bell and the students of Prospero carried lunch pails outside, Emma and Ada sat on the same stump in the schoolyard, their arms touching from shoulder to wrist. They spoke only to each other, always in whispers.

Emma’s mother began to worry that she’d given her daughter too much medicine. “Is this typical?” she asked the schoolteacher. “Should we be troubled?”