I check her notebooks. Western History. Geometry Two. Beneath the class title, I see a name carved into the hard plastic, an imprint that she’s worked in, one point at a time, no lines to connect them.

Imogen Lilly.

I drop her books, and they hit the concrete with a hard slap. When I scrape them up again, the girl doesn’t move to help, doesn’t ask me what’s wrong with me or roll her sea-glass eyes. She’s still looking at the hole where I used to be.

I slide her books back into her empty arms and run.

The Ravens: The Past Ten Years

The birds fly over the knot of people and their possessions called Tempest. They pick at it. They collect, gather, sort.

Known, unknown.

Shiny, dull.

Good, bad.

Help, hurt.

Lelia has eyes green as late-spring grass. Yellow hair with colorful strings in it. Watches the birds, neck back, chin poking the air. Pins a name to each one of them. The birds like being noticed. It gives a shine to the sliced black marbles of their eyes.

They bring presents.

Buttons first: a round red cranberry, a beveled jade, a wart of gold plastic. They drop the buttons where they know Lelia will walk. They follow with slick wingbeats. They cut the sky above Tempest with their bodies and scream when it heals over.

Lelia loves the buttons. Sews them onto a favorite jacket, wears it everywhere. They bring more. Scraps of people’s lives. Paper and ribbons. Metal and porcelain.

Lelia gives back what she can. Not the pretties in the glass house. Nothing in that house ever comes outside, except for Lelia. So Lelia feeds them stories, and they stuff themselves full on the misery of what it means to be so human, so young. They might not be able to pick apart the words, but they know the song of sorrow. It is sharp in the throat.

They fly in and out of years.

Lelia. The birds.

And then, after years of walking alone, Lelia collects friends. Brings them to the birds like presents.

Shiny, shiny, shiny.

There is one in particular. Copper from above. Dark flash in her eyes. Water glitters when she walks near, turns to diamond. She talks to the birds as if they speak the same language. She keeps watch over her flock.

They fly in and out of years together.

The birds. The witches.

Danny: Now

The Grays are waiting for me around the corner. Lelia and June stand back to back so they’re holding each other’s weight. Hawthorn looks down at her knuckles, working a bit of sharply scented balm into her skin, and Rush is staring at me like she never stopped. There’s hope and fear in it. There’s something bigger, older, deeper than whatever she thinks about me.

I spin around. Imogen must have gone back the way she came, because she’s already gone.