That last one sends a swarm of imaginary spiders over me.

June touches my arm lightly. “What’s the thing you’ve been looking for?”

In Michigan, it was girls to kiss. Then I started going farther, searching harder. Looking for something that I’ve only caught in gasps: the first time I said Tempest, when I tipped my neck back to take in the redwoods, when the Grays stare at me like I am something they need. When Rush stares at me like I am something she needs, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

The feeling of Imogen in the fog, so close.

“Dowser,” I say.

And the word shakes.

And the world shifts.

Part Two: Daylight

Imogen and June: Eighteen Months Ago

They were the climbers, always headed up, bark under their bare feet, a not-falling prayer on their lips.

June knew that she had to look carefully if she wanted to find the right trees. Most redwoods resisted the idea, their branches starting a third of the way up massively tall bodies. She and Imogen made a map of beginner climbs, trunks with low access and evenly spaced branches. Soon they were testing much larger trees. “Way out of our league,” as Imogen liked to describe them. June loved that moment when her toes reached a branch they had no business reaching. Most days, that was enough. Most days, they didn’t believe they were going to make it to the sky.

But every time June came back to the ground, it got harder to stay. She didn’t really fit there. Not with her family, even though she loved them. Not with her girlfriend, who started their relationship with a flood of all-night kissing sessions before her interests narrowed to one thing: a move to San Francisco, where they could find a cramped apartment and live on the glory of takeout and parties. Not even with the Grays, who seemed deeper into their magic than June was, wading around in power while she played with a very cool-looking but essentially useless black knife that she’d found at a tea-and-tarot shop in Santa Cruz and picked up like it was a missing piece of her body.

She tried to carve sigils with it, but that felt like passing notes to the universe and hoping it paid attention. June wanted magic to tease the universe apart, to show her the parts of it she didn’t already know. She wanted to cut and see the muscle and blood, the slippery organs, the parts that most people wouldn’t look at.

Maybe June insisted on looking deeper because she’d been sick when she was younger, the kind of sick that required long hospital stays. A rare West Coast case of Lyme disease had taken two things: the concept that June’s immune system would fully recover, and her patience for everything but the most honest parts of life.