I stood in the doorway and watched him head to the corner of Mom and Dad’s bedroom, the place where Dad’s safe was. I knew Dad had guns because he would sometimes go hunting on the weekends with his friends, but he had never talked to me about where he stored them.

Parker fumbled with the safe’s lock. It wasn’t until the door to the safe swung open that I realized what was happening. That those were Dad’s guns.

I let out an audible gasp, and Parker spun around to face me. His eyes sparked with anger, and—

“It’s not working, is it?” Cora’s voice pulls me back into the present.

Wait! I was there. I traveled there. I did it. Did I? My heart races. I grip the rough bark of the branch, and a splinter of wood cuts into my fingernail bed. I slowly open my eyes. The forest comes back into view. The bumpy moss-covered bark of the giant oak tree, the ground full of rust-colored leaves. The gurgle of the creek.

I didn’t. I’m here. I can feel Cora’s back rise and fall slowly with her breaths.

“It didn’t work,” Cora says, and the disappointment in her voice hurts so much that I pick at the wood splinter, looking for another kind of pain to distract me.

Guilt sloshes around inside of me. Maybe it didn’t work because I didn’t picture the right moment. Maybe instead of picturing the science classroom, Cora also should’ve been visualizing the moment that I was. The moment when I knew something was really wrong. The moment when I could’ve stopped my brother.

But she doesn’t know to try to picture that because I haven’t told her about it. I haven’t told anyone.

I open my mouth to tell her, to tell her the truth. But I can’t find the words. They slip away from me like smoke ribboning from an extinguished candle. Every time I reach for them, they disappear.

Cora’s spine pulls away from mine. The branch we’re sitting on bobs up and down as she turns around. I turn around, too, slowly. She looks unsteady, and I instinctively reach my arm out and put it on her knee. I won’t let her fall.

Her eyes are darting all around. I want her to look at me. I’m hoping she’ll see the guilt that I’m drowning in, and she’ll know. She’ll force me to tell her. But she keeps looking past me.

“We must be missing something,” she says.

I follow her eyes. They’re staring at The Eyeball. The glimmer of sunlight is gone. The sky is a gray that is as heavy as cement. It doesn’t look like it holds even a pinch of magic.

“Yeah,” I say, my voice low and tangled.

“I just don’t know what it could be.”

I squirm a little.

“Do you have any ideas?”

Yes, my brain thinks. “No,” my mouth says.

Cora’s face is like a crumpled-up piece of paper, all of her features squeezing together. “I’ll have to do more research tonight. There has to be something we’re missing. There has to be.”