I try to turn around, but I can’t. The needles on all sides are dark as inkblots. The sky is suffocating, the moon crouched low.

“Find the ravens and come back,” Rush says. But backward is a different sort of magic than forward.

I know how to find people, how to leave people, not how to come back safely.

So I do the one thing that feels right. I cling to the little piece of Rush that I have — I hold on to her voice like a rope.

“Danny, come back,” she says. “Danny!” And then I’m crashing through the air, blurring breathless past the trees. I come back into myself hard, and there is a moment when I’m so sickeningly solid, I think that gravity is about to claim me, that falling is inevitable.

Rush grabs my arms. She holds on to the branch with her legs. We’re holding each other up. Our weight balanced. Our bodies keeping each other from falling. Our foreheads pressed together, gently.

The cold droplets I felt weren’t just fear. Rain is hitting my skin, icing me through, attacking me in tiny cold bursts, and then the sky opens.

The Grays: Now

The storm comes on so fast, it gives the Grays whiplash.

Hawthorn looks up at the sky, her glasses freckled with water, then streaming. June’s eyes catch the sickly light of a storm. Lightning fills the clouds, brilliant through the gray. It rips out and strikes at the world.

Rush and Danny are tiny in the face of it. They are so far away, and the Grays can’t do anything. It’s the same helplessness they’ve been battling since the minute Imogen left. They can’t lose anyone else. They can’t walk back to Tempest with a smaller number of weirdos than when they left.

“They have to climb down,” Lelia says. “Before . . .”

Thunder cracks the quiet night to pieces, shaking the ground so hard that the whole tree sways.

The Grays grab for one another, Lelia and June and Hawthorn holding on tight even though they’re not the ones who need the safety net. June pours out the contents of her flowered backpack, but nothing in its depths can help them now. The wind is so spiteful that they can’t even light candles to help draw Danny and Rush down safely. Hawthorn hands out luck crystals: the jagged citrine points shading from clear to yellow to purple, the smooth tree rings of tiger’s eye. The Grays palm them with sweating hands.