“What are we supposed to do?” Nora says. “Close the door?”

It’s too late to close the door.

“Then what do we do?”

We do what you do.

“What do I do?”

When bad things happen, you stop them. You’re a hunter. Let’s hunt.

“Okay,” Nora says. “Let’s hunt.”

They know where they need to go. Nora and Jack had figured this out before they heard the news of Mia, and they reach McNeil Island in the gloom of dawn. The clouds are so low that a gray wispy ceiling presses down on them, tighter and tighter with every mile they travel, as if the world has run out of room.

At first they cannot distinguish the island from what they initially believe is fog. But the fog has a shape. A border. Miles wide. If they refocus their perspective, they can see the island as it rounds out of the water and domes into the sky, connected to the cloud cover by trembling vaporous threads.

Jack powers down the engine. “It’s not an island,” he says. “It’s a biome.”

The border isn’t a perfect delineation, like a wall, but it’s close. They sink into the haze. The engine idles and he allows them to drift, not knowing how far they are from land. They first see the basalt cluttering the shore. Then the bony manzanita thickets. Then the black jawline of evergreens. The air is so thick with spores that a greasy film instantly clings to their skin.

“Who knows what we’re breathing in,” Nora says.

Mia takes her hand. It’s okay. I’ll protect you.

Jack knows there are several docks, including one for the ferry at the Black Creek Correctional Facility, but it seems better in a case like this to take an indirect approach. A rock jetty curves like a tongue off the shore, and Jack steers toward it and reverses the throttle. Their momentum slows and they putter close enough to drop anchor, tie the boat up, and clamber over the railing onto the algae-slick rock.

With every step they travel, the air grows murkier, and sound warps as it does underwater. A twig might snap twenty yards away, but it sounds close enough to snatch. A bird cries out a warning, and there might as well be a flock of them all around. The trees crowd around them. Their trunks are slick and their branches weighed down by a fungal coating. The ferns don’t swish so much as slap at their legs. Mia wears nothing but a hospital gown. Jack offers her his jacket but she shakes her head no. She’s not cold. And her feet pad along quickly, not at all tender to the forest floor.