The climb down feels longer than the one that took us up. The ground is much harder than the spongy redwood bark. I wiggle my feet back into my shoes. They’re damp. My feet are damp. Everything is covered in a grainy coating of bark, like the trees have been shedding their skin.

Sebastian offers to walk me home, but I say that I’m headed in the other direction, which is true, and that my mom needs me back right away, which is also true and probably has been for hours. Sebastian gives me a last wobble of a stare and starts to walk away. Immediately, relief settles over me like the first of the tree-filtered sunlight.

I walk softly. Trees creak. Doors open.

The Grays: Now

The mother tree is covered in mosses and ferns and saplings so bright green that it feels like defiance. The downed redwood would be beautiful on its own, but the four figures gathered around it turn it into the center of a scene painted in lace and jeans and silver jewelry, nervous breath and soft skin.

June ragdolls with her back against the trunk, legs stretched out, toes pointing. Flexing. Lelia nuzzles June’s shoulder, drawing swirls that might be shells or galaxies on June’s thigh with a wisp of a paintbrush, adding silver highlights to her warm brown skin, switching without a missed brushstroke to her own peachy-white ankle.

Their softness matches the morning, while Hawthorn stands at a spiky angle to it, pacing through the clearing, worrying a smoky quartz crystal in one hand. She touches the frames of her silver full-moon glasses as she stares into the stone’s heart. Then she crouches and slides one finger through a swirl of pine needles. It looks like she’s switching between books, unable to find the story she wants to read.

Rush stands on one end of the mother tree, bare feet nesting in moss. She turns the tree into a ship, her body a figurehead, as carved as any sea-girl who parts the waves, with swirls of dark hair reaching to the backs of her thighs. She keeps her body still and lets her voice do the roving, chasing down a song. Notes slip away from her, and she lets them go. The right ones will stick. The right ones will stay.

She sings toward the sea, because of Imogen.

This is more or less a normal dawn for the Grays, the splitting open of a new day. But without Imogen, it feels hollow and rotted inside.

Until they see another girl wafting through the forest.

Hawthorn stops moving. June and Lelia stop whispering paint over each other’s skin and secrets in each other’s ears. Rush stops singing.

They trade looks.