Water rises past my feet, swallows my waist. This is not just rain. There are panels of darkness on both sides of my vision, and in the center, a view of the woods, a single long splinter of daylight and trees. I’ve seen this view before. I’m inside a redwood. And the space is flooding.

I try to leave, but I can’t move.

And then I feel hands all over me, pulling me back into my own body. Lelia and Rush and Hawthorn and June.

I grab on to their names, hold them like lifelines.

They drag me away from a sharp, broken shard of the past. Their hands are warm and everywhere. My arms, my back, my legs. They give me a quick review, a reminder of what is me and what is not.

My eyes snap open, and I hack the air into pieces with coughing. Water comes out of my lungs.

The Grays step back.

I roll onto my knees and cough until there’s nothing but salty strings of spit that I have to wipe away, my back caving as my lungs empty. I look up at the Grays, my body still twisted around someone else’s pain.

“Who’s Neil?” I ask. “And how did he drown in the woods?”

The Grays: One Year Ago

The first time the Grays met the hermit, he was still called Neil.

He was exactly the kind of tourist that seemed to be magnetized to Tempest. June noticed him first, biking down the highway, sweating enough to fill a small lake. He wore a bandanna, ragged shorts that looked like they’d been bitten by a wild animal at the bottoms, and the kind of backpack that probably cost four hundred dollars when it was new.

“Oh, look,” June said, pointing as if she’d noticed an interesting cloud formation. “A boy.”

Imogen turned, and the Grays followed the line of her eyes. Everything they lit on become important, even if it was only for that second. “Yours,” Imogen said to Hawthorn, waving a hand and dismissing the whole thing.

The Grays lingered at the side of the highway. Tourists were busy cranking their necks to take in the view. Motorcycle packs flocked from the Bay Area like this was a natural migration route. The Grays had seen at least four since that morning, including a beautifully weathered all-lady group. They had talked about how that could be them in fifty years.

“No motorcycles,” June had said with her nose scrunched.

“I’ll get you a sidecar, baby,” Lelia said, wrapping her arm around June’s shoulder, melting her back into a happy state.

They talked about what their motorcycle gang should be named as they walked in a slow trickle toward the diner. Hawthorn and June were both set on Bel’s Hells.

“Okay, but not enough people know that Bel is a Celtic god,” Lelia said. “They won’t know how good that is.”