Why? a voice inside me insisted. What are you looking for, Kira? What could you possibly hope to find?

I thought back to my dream, to the claustrophobic panic of being pinned to the ground and watching the dark-haired woman bury rock after rock, feeling like she was burying me.

I don’t know.

The only thing that I knew was that I couldn’t turn back. I’d brought a map with me, but even when I twisted away from the rushing river, unfolding the map and shielding it from the wind, it couldn’t tell me what I wanted to know.

What happened to those people in 1922? Where did they disappear to? Where did they go?

Maybe Gabriel—or Bales or the librarian who’d given me the book in the first place—could have told me if local legend held the answer. Maybe it didn’t matter—maybe none of this mattered. But there was nothing left to do but push on.

Saskia darted in and out of the forest. The longer we forged on—the farther from civilization we went—the faster my K9 ran, her movements liquid-smooth and wild, like the day’s events had unleashed in her the opposite of what they’d loosed in me.

No doubt. No hesitation. No pain.

As if summoned by my thoughts, Sass barreled back out of the forest. I willed her to bark. I willed her to signal that she’d found something.

But there was nothing to find.

I’m not going to find Bella or her kidnapper. I was never going to find them. I tried to fight that admission, but lost. I’d wanted so badly to do something, to believe that I could do something, to make it so that doing something would somehow fix everything I’d broken.

I was so caught up in wanting that—mourning even the possibility of it—that I almost missed the small stone circle. The landscape of the riverbank had changed since 1922. Time and nature had worn away at the rocks. Only the very edges stuck out of the dirt. I stepped into the Circle and turned, 360 degrees. Nearly a century before, someone in Hunter’s Point had erected this memorial.

I’d expected that to mean something.

I’d expected that to matter.

But the Circle I’d found was barely a Circle at all.

A wave of emotion rising up inside me, I squatted down, my fingernails digging at the dirt around the nearest stone. It’s not fair, I thought. Pain shot up through my hands as I dug faster and harder, one nail snapping and then another.

Saskia barked. She didn’t like seeing me like this.

I couldn’t stop.

When the rock came free, I lifted it with two hands and stared at it, then hurled it into the river with everything I had.