Imogen comes into sight from behind the monstrous redwood, ringing toward us on her endless loop. Haven grabs her sister around her waist, hugs her tight.

“Tell her to come back,” I say. “She’ll listen to you.”

“You’re fucking wrong,” Haven says, swearing in a way that reveals how little practice she has, the word exploding from her as if it’s been waiting forever. She hardens her hold on Imogen, pale fingernails digging at her. “She ran away from me.” Then she whispers in her sister’s ear.

The ground that is supposed to stay under my feet rises up, inch by inch, a dark tide crawling up my legs. It froths like the edge of a wave, delicate-looking, but when I try to walk, to break away, the earth wraps tight. It holds me in place.

Haven takes a step back from Imogen. She walks around me in the same direction that the earth is wrapping me like dark, smothering cloth. “You were nice to me. No one is ever nice to me. I don’t want this to happen.”

“Then stop,” I say as the earth grabs for my waist.

“It’s too late,” Haven says. “I can’t stop it.” As if she isn’t the one who made this happen. As if she has no power at all.

I’m up to my chest already, being buried standing up. When I fight back, the dirt just crumbles toward me and fills in faster. It edges up to my chin. I have thirty seconds, maybe, before I can’t speak. The dowsing rod is buried at my side, but I can still feel its power humming.

I look at Haven and I dowse, searching for the hidden words that will keep her from hurting me, but I can’t find them. All I see is her paleness, her pain.

The dirt reaches my bottom lip. The smell of rich, potent soil fills my nose, drowning out the salt of the far-off sea. I’ve only seen the Pacific once, the day I got to California, when Mom and I walked all the way down to Ocean Beach.

Mom. She’ll never know what happened to me.

The Grays will split apart, one of them gone and three people dead in their wake.

These aren’t hard truths to find.

I can’t talk now, can barely breathe through my nose, pulling in the last of the air as everything fills in, dark. This is the last thing I’ll ever see, a tiny girl with red hair staring death at me. Dirt bricks over my eyes. Everything in me wants to scream, but I fight to keep myself silent. To control it. Keeping it in is almost as hard as dying.

The Grays: Now