He zips back a few times, but then he doesn’t come back at all.

And then the sky begins to get light. We realize we are not going to see Ebb again this night, and keep exchanging worried glances.

Finally, legs aching, feet sore, exhausted from walking more than we’ve ever walked in our lives—we nervously go to sleep and hope he’ll come back at nightfall.

We wake well past dark. Ebb is there waiting for us, perched on a rock and staring into the distance ahead. He turns as I rustle awake, and his face is hard to read. Something has happened.

“What is it?” I ask, sitting up and rubbing my eyes, the cold outside of my sleeping bag a rude awakening. Beside me, Germ stirs too.

Ebb looks at me a long time, and then says, “I found something last night, just before I vanished.”

“What?”

“Better if I just show you, I think.”

We follow Ebb through the woods. At his urging, I leave my flashlight off, so we only have the moon and the stars and moths and Ebb as light. Finally he leads us into a thick scrub of bushes and thorns. On and on we go, picking our way slowly through the dense, forbidding undergrowth, through ravines and crags filled with thorns. I wonder if maybe he’s forgotten we can’t float through obstacles like he can. My hands, even through my mittens, are pricked, my clothes torn.

But then, pushing prickers and scrubby bushes aside, I see that he’s come to a stop—and that he’s staring at something ahead of him that’s hard to make sense of. It looks like a big glowing, fluttering mouth looming up from the dark ground, its lips squirming with glowing light, purple, yellow, deep pinks, blues.

A few steps closer, and I see that it’s not a mouth at all—but an opening into a rocky outcropping, every inch covered in moths. It’s a cave.

Moths are crawling in and out of it. It’s covered in a kind of strange material, and I realize it is the gray, silky fabric of a cocoon. The silk is so thick that, if it weren’t for the illumination of the memory moths, it would blend in and just appear to be more rock.

Nobody has to tell me that the Memory Thief has been here.

“But how… so close?” I wonder out loud. Not three nights’ walk away from my house, and we’re at the entrance to her hiding place? It’s too much of a coincidence.

Ebb already has this figured out, however.

“She must have these entryways all over the world,” he says. “Hidden where no one ever finds them. This must be how she comes and goes. I’ll bet there are thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. I bet they all lead to one place.”