“Pacific Ocean,” Rush says. She doesn’t need to check the labels. She probably helped Imogen bottle most of these herself. I picture it quickly, two girls at the shore, red hair dipping toward waves, Rush kneeling in the surf. I feel like I’m there with them for a second — and then remember that I wasn’t, and I could drown in the shallow water of my jealousy.

Hawthorn nods, approving my choice. “Now we have to make a likeness of each of us.”

“You mean like a doll?” I ask, deeply creeped out.

Hawthorn lets out a long breath. “Just . . . something that stands for each of us. It helps if you add a piece of yourself.”

I look down at myself and scowl. “What kind of piece?”

“A symbolic one,” Lelia says. “When are you going to get the fact that we don’t do blood and body parts? This is magic, not a horror movie.”

“Blood is powerful,” Hawthorn admits. “It’s just not very creative.”

“Watch,” June says. She cuts off a swatch from the end of her hair and lays it in the dirt, combining it with silver string from Imogen’s bag, setting down the shape of her body. Rush takes a small round cake of amber from her pocket. It takes me a second to figure out what it is — rosin from this cello she plays, even though I’ve never seen her with one. She borrows the small wood-handled knife from Imogen’s collection and carves the rosin, one sharp nick at a time, until there’s a crude version of her curves worked in it.

Hawthorn takes the flowers out of the spread of her hair, picking them carefully so the delicate pieces stay intact. She lays them down, constructing a person, all petals and sepals and circles of grass around her eyes to stand for the glasses. Then she adds mica-flecked rocks as her hair.

Lelia spits in her hands and combines it with the crumbly dark dirt under her feet and some wax from a black votive in Imogen’s pile, working it until it is a kind of dark clay. She makes a mound at the far end of the mother tree, shaping it into a tiny Lelia.

I could stay here for days watching them work magic like this — like a dance they know by heart — but when it’s my turn, I freeze. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask, feeling more lost than the morning they first saw me.

The Grays look at me. They look at the pile of spell bits Imogen left behind. Rush picks out a set of rubbed-down oil pastels in forest colors. They immediately leave their mark on her hands. She sits down at my feet, staring up at me. The world narrows, until all I see are her Pacific-blue eyes.

“How much do you care about these shoes?” she asks. “Would you call them a piece of you?”