She inhaled—the air smelled acrid—and as she exhaled, she cast out her mind-net and waited for a memory to come along, poised like a spider on the edge of a web. Any minute now, she coaxed herself.

Several minutes passed and the web didn’t so much as tremble. The mountainside felt empty, a story waiting to be written rather than read. Maybe the last eruption burned away all the memories, she thought. Defeated, Finn trudged back to the others. “How was your meditation?” Zadie asked.

“Uneventful.”

Zadie nodded slowly. Was it just Finn’s imagination or did she look disappointed, too?

“I mean, isn’t that kind of the point?” Joel asked. “With meditation?”

Finn shrugged.

“You know what else is relaxing and way more fun?” Joel waggled his eyebrows and reached into the pockets of his shorts. “Shit!” He patted down his legs and pulled both pockets inside out. A gum wrapper and several pennies fell to the ground. “I must have left my stash at the motel.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Zadie said, patting him on the arm as she passed. “Let’s go.”

“But what about your mom?” he asked as he bent over to pick up the change he’d dropped. “You said you thought she might be here.”

“She’s not,” Finn said, then turned and started back down the trail from which they’d come. If not here, then where? She still had the painted rock in her hand. It was probably useless now. They couldn’t visit every volcano in the country in hopes that their mom had once been there. That could take months. There was no way Steve and Kathy would let her be gone for that long. Finn considered tossing the rock into the volcanic wasteland to be consumed by the next lava flow, but she didn’t. She dropped it into the pocket of her hiking pants and zipped it closed. It was still a piece of her mom’s story, one she couldn’t let go of just yet.

If Mount Ire was a memory desert, then the American Robin Diner was a rainforest. The moment they stepped through the door, Finn could hardly think as her brain cleaned up decades-old coffee spills, thumbed through sticky menus, and picked up crayons that had been tossed on the floor by bored toddlers. Gravy that was too runny, eggs that had been overcooked, ketchup that needed to be bludgeoned before it could be dispensed onto a basket of fries: all these things had been experienced within the walls of this greasy spoon.

Finn, Zadie, and Joel were seated in a booth in the former smoking section of the restaurant. Finn deduced this from a particularly aggressive echo that smelled like a cigarette had been put out inside her nostril. She kept all of this to herself, of course, until Joel left the table to use the restroom and she finally let herself sneeze.