She shifts in her chair, looking out at the dark, a hummingbird darting behind her and hovering above her shoulder. The clouds are still covering the half-moon, but the breeze is blowing them. “Well, I’d better be going,” the witch says, though she makes no move to leave.

“Maybe I’ll see you again sometime. It would be… interesting. I long to be interested in something. There’s nothing new under the sun these days, it seems to me. But maybe you could prove me wrong.”

And then she lazily waves a hand, and the hummingbird at her shoulder darts toward me, circling me. I blink, batting it away, and when I open my eyes, the clock has jumped forward a minute or two and ticked back to life. The witch is gone.

Germ starts snoring again.

And I’m left standing in the corner of the room, watching the spot she occupied a moment before. After a second’s hesitation, I make my way to the table by the chair. I pick up the tiny square of paper she left, and squint at it in the dark, then turn on my flashlight to study it further.

It’s a wrinkled photo of someone I don’t know, who must have lived a couple hundred years ago or more. A boy my age in an old-timey hat. The photo has got that brown tint of very old images, the kind from the Wild West and Victorian parlors, and it’s marked on the bottom: San Francisco, 1855. The boy is small like me, brown-haired like me. He looks vulnerable, and scared, like whatever he is looking at beyond the camera scares him to death.

And my legs go weak as I realize who he is. And who the witch wants me to come for.

My brother. Alive. Or at least, he was alive when this picture was taken.

I turn it over, and on the back, in a scrawled hand, it says, You have one month.

I look outside at the dark grass, the dark sky.

And then I pull on my robe and slip silently out of the room. I know what I need to do.

I tiptoe out into the backyard, and walk all the way down the ocean-side trail to where the half-moon rises above the rocky outcrop of the far cliffs. There I find the bottom of the ladder dangling, an arm’s length out over the sea, as if waiting just for me. At least, I have to hope that’s true. If it’s not…

I look up toward the moon and take a deep, ragged breath. I make my mind go blank to forget my fear. I reach for the ladder, grab tight, and—with a small, breathless jump—I begin to climb.

Don’t disappear, I think with every breath. Please don’t disappear.