And then the question marks fall off a cliff, and it’s just

Come home soon

“I can’t stay out here forever,” I admit.

The Grays look at one another with a sort of tremble. I feel my guts tighten, as if their collective worry has reached into me and taken hold.

“All right,” Hawthorn says. “We’ll have to do this fast. We can’t wait weeks or months for your power to show itself. There’s a ritual,” she tells me, and I already don’t like it.

“The fog dance is a rite we came up with a long time ago. We’ve all done it,” June reassures me.

“So what’s the problem?” I ask, because they’re all looking cagey.

Lelia steps up. She is, among other things, the bad-news bearer of the group. She doesn’t seem to take any glee in it — it’s more like it’s a chore that she’s the best at. She claps a hand on my shoulder. “There’s a small chance that you’ll get lost in the woods and you won’t find your way out.”

I think about the slippery spaces between redwoods, how they all start to look the same. The miles and miles of nameless streams and endless groves. “Don’t they have rangers to keep people safe?”

“The Lost Coast covers hundreds of square miles,” Lelia says. “Even with a few rangers, it’s mostly non-human territory.”

I think about what it would mean to get lost in a place like that. Freedom, at first. Then a slow trickle of fear.

Hawthorn slips a notebook out of her dress pocket. I didn’t even know her dress had pockets. The leather looks so soft that it reminds me what leather really is: skin. There are stones sewn into the cover, worked into braided leather inlays.

“What’s that?” I ask. “A . . . ?”

“Don’t you dare say spellbook,” Hawthorn says with a pen in her mouth. She’s talking around it as she whips the cap off. “This is our chronicle.” In handwriting as spiky as thornbushes, she writes Danny’s Fog Dance.

“Spellbooks tell you how people have done magic in the past,” June explains. “They’re . . . pre-made. Magic is like love. You see how other people do it, you have the stories and instructions they leave behind, but then you have to figure out how you do it. It’s not one-size-fits-all.”

“We won’t be far,” Hawthorn says, scrawling as she speaks. “Just stay with the fog until it spits you out.”

I don’t ask what to do if something goes wrong, because I want to be braver than I am. I want to be whatever Imogen was to them before she got lost. The kind of person they’d go to any lengths to get back.