“We’ve been friends for the longest time,” Imogen says, glowing at Emma. “She’s like us.”

I try to smile at Emma, but guilt smothers it. I don’t know how much she knows about me — but she knew enough to lead me here. “I’m sorry I thought you were trying to hurt Imogen. Or the Grays.”

Emma nods and closes her eyes with a calm smile, as though she’s absorbing my apology.

But Imogen looks troubled. A memory is working its way into her, one painful breath at a time. “Emma wasn’t hurting people. Haven was hurting people. The last time I saw you . . .” She gasps like I pricked all of her fingers at once. “What happened to my sister?”

I wince. “She’s gone.”

Imogen hangs her head, and her edges blur. I’m afraid she’ll disappear back into the fog. “Imogen!” I cry. “Imogen, I tried to stop her. The Grays tried. They wanted to help her, but she was . . .”

There is a sound around us, like great bones breaking. Imogen takes my hand, and her memories of Haven slide into me. She was so small, so contained, so angry and sad. “I ran away so she wouldn’t be able to hurt the Grays,” Imogen said. “It was all I could do. It wasn’t enough. People are dead, aren’t they?”

I nod.

“Tell me,” Imogen says.

I realize that I left out all those bits of the story, the truly bad ones. I push my hand through Imogen’s, and I push the story at her. I feel it pass into her like a river flowing into an ocean.

“Your wards protected the Grays until we found your message in the hermit’s tree. And then . . . and then we tried to protect each other.”

“Your friends,” Emma says, smiling at the thought. “I never had those. I had . . . someone I cared for . . . but I didn’t have friends.”

I didn’t have friends either, before the Grays. That word was an empty outline until they filled it in. “I’m sorry,” I say, and it feels like I’m crying, even though there are no tears in this place. If there were, it might be an ocean.

Emma purses her lips and steps into me, overlapping me, so I can see her truth without anything standing between us. Two girls, holding hands along the banks of the Eel River, wearing high-buttoned dresses and crow-black shoes, everything about them proper except the look they are passing back and forth.

One girl, about to be married off. When she looks at the man she’s meant to love, nothing happens in her heart. Our heart. We’re overlapped, every emotion doubled. It’s overwhelming, but I don’t step away.

A flood.

The memories come faster, harder, sweeping me under. I am drowned in her past, years and years of pain.