“We’ll know,” June argued.

Now that Imogen had stopped looking at the boy, he was just scenery. But he skidded to a halt right next to them and drawled in an unexpectedly southern way, “Hey, there. Can you point me to the nearest campground?”

“You can’t really camp in the redwoods, except in a few special places,” Lelia said. “They’re protected.” The Grays heard the rest of the sentence, the part that was too heavily implied to even bother saying: They’re protected from tourists and fancy backpacks and people like you.

Imogen twisted her lips, considering something that the rest of them couldn’t even see.

“Okay, so you don’t have a campground,” the boy said, singling her out. “But you know something I can do.”

Imogen peaked her eyebrows. She wasn’t used to people noticing as much as she did. “There was a hermit who lived in a burned-out tree for about a thousand years. But she died two months ago, and nobody’s taken her place.”

“Because it’s sacred,” Hawthorn hissed.

“Because it’s filled with spiders,” Lelia added.

“Same thing,” Imogen said, using her midnight-colored nails to flutter away any other arguments before they even formed.

“Sounds perfect,” the boy concluded with a smile.

Imogen took a Sharpie out of June’s flowered backpack and drew a map on his arm. She gave the hermit’s tree a nice, juicy X.

The boy nodded thanks at all of them, spending an extra second on Hawthorn. She frowned at him in a way that made him smile again, his dimples pricking their way into the hearts of the Grays, even if they weren’t interested in that way. He told them, “You should come by. I’m staying for at least three days.” And then he stayed forever.

As far as the Grays were concerned, they had made a hermit.

Danny: Now

The Grays walk me back down to Hawthorn’s farm. It looked wild an hour ago. Now it’s a tame bed of flowers and a gently rotting old barn.

Hawthorn is strangely quiet. She disappears into the farmhouse and comes back a minute later with a set of keys dangling from her palm. A substantial chunk of smoky quartz on the end of the key chain catches the dying light.

She presses the stone into my palm. “Hold this. It should ground you.”

I form a fist around the hard lines of unfinished crystal. The angles of the quartz press into my skin as hard as someone shoving their body against mine while we kiss, the pressure like a point on a map, telling me, You are here, you are here, you are here.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“The stone is . . .”