I set the path and the pace. The farther we go, the more fallen trees we find, slashing across the woods in great, sudden lines. They look like broken statues, fractured pieces of a lost world.

“Stop here,” Lelia says when the moon is hanging straight above us, bright as a warning. “This is where the map ends. More or less.”

“More or less,” Hawthorn mutters, holding her hand out for June’s water. The Grays are starting to look exhausted, and more than a little afraid.

How far would we have to walk before we died of dehydration? Exhaustion? How far do we push before we try a new direction? How do we avoid the death sentence of going in circles? Does Emma want five more dead bodies, to match the first two?

No one in Tempest would seriously question what happened to us. The weirdos wandered into the woods, thinking they could do magic, and never came out.

I hold the dowsing rod straight in front of me, locking my elbows. It droops and weaves. I stutter in one direction, then another, and the Grays try to follow me, but there’s nowhere obvious to go. I stop in front of tree after tree after tree, watching each one like it might swing open a secret door. But the trees are silent, their faces blank. This feels like the night of the fog dance, when Imogen was nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

I grab Hawthorn’s wrist. “You can scry trees, right?”

“Anything with a pattern in it,” she says, looking excited to be doing something other than hiking.

I point at the newest tree the dowsing rod has picked, and the three before that. “Do they have anything in common?”

Hawthorn draws a line with her fingers. Her breath comes harder as she studies the trees.

One of them has bark that shoots straight upward. Another’s bark is more cracked and crumbled, like the face of someone who has been alive too long and seen too much. The bark of the third spirals around the trunk. The fourth is softer, with deeper grooves, enough room for shadows to collect like rainwater. I’ve never noticed how different all of the redwoods are until this moment. I’ve seen them as part of a group. Like the way I saw the Grays when I first met them.

But they’re each as different as they are the same.

“Birds,” Hawthorn says, touching the bark of the final tree. “I see a flock of huge, dark birds with their beaks open.”

Lelia’s posture, which has been slouching lower and lower inside her thin jacket, shoots up tall. She runs behind June and without saying a word, unzips her backpack with a low metal growl.

She grabs a compact and flashes the mirror at the sky.

The Ravens: Now