I’m looking for a response — for a reason — when the trees start creaking. At first it’s a relief, because I don’t have to say anything. Then all at once the morning is filled with the hard press of wind and the groan, crack, wrench of trees. That sound of doors being flung open, fast and hard, and I’m not sure I want to know what’s on the other side.

“This will pass,” Hawthorn says, but the wind doesn’t agree with her. It rages and stomps.

Lelia shakes her head. “Blowing up the coast instead of down, too cold,” she mutters. The girls bind themselves to each other with nervous stares. Hawthorn reaches out her arms, and Lelia and Rush hold on to her. June sits back, stretching out her leg, breathing hard and leaning against Lelia.

I stand up. Alone.

The wind demands that I sit down. It grabs my dress in its fists. It snarls my hair, bludgeons my skin.

“Danny,” June says, her voice half-eaten by a gust. “Where are you going?”

“Stay with us,” Hawthorn calls. Not an invitation. An order.

But I’m walking too fast for their words to snare me. I fight against the wind, throw my whole body into resisting it. It dies, and I stumble. The woods go back to normal so suddenly that I wonder if the wind was invented.

The silence of the early morning makes itself whole again, like cracked ice freezing over smooth or bones knitting clean. The trees, no longer wavering, reach up tall and straight. Fog stands around them like trapped breath.

So much fog that I am close before I see.

Lying there is a boy.

He is pinned to the ground, a sharp branch through his chest. It must have been taken by the wind, falling hard, fast. I walk closer, in a brain-fog as thick as the one swirling around me. I keep moving until the details are too much, and my feet put a stop to it. There is bark shattered at the edges of the branch where it pierced him, blood weighing down the fabric of his T-shirt.

“Sebastian.” His name comes out quick and broken. I want to be wrong. But those are his smile muscles gone slack. His long neck, thrown back, sunshine touching it softly, the way I almost did.

The way I didn’t. Because I felt something bad coming, stepping on our heels.

The Grays catch up, leaving a space between themselves and Sebastian. They rake in breath, grab for each other’s hands.

“How . . . ?” I ask, one word standing in for a hundred variations on the same question. How did this happen? Where did that branch come from? How could this be possible, when I was up a tree with him less than an hour ago?

“That wind did it,” Lelia says. “And that wind was not normal.”

Hawthorn tugs sharply at Lelia’s wrist, and Lelia shuts up.