Joel fell in step beside Zadie as they followed the deer trail past misty knolls covered in wagging wildflowers and tender-leaved saplings, before being swallowed by a grove of mature pine trees pressed into the ground like unlit birthday candles. Their stubby branches radiated out like spokes on a wheel, sky-high trunks moaning like old doors being opened. A carpet of bronzed needles, molted bark, and moon-shaped pinecones baffled the search party’s footfalls. They like quiet, Zadie thought, allowing herself to indulge in the possibility that the trees were in fact listening.

Eventually Myron slowed to a stop. “Trail’s gone,” he said, surveying the forest floor.

He was right. The deer path was now a fork in the road with at least five branches that split off in different directions. Zadie looked from one identical path to the next. “What do we do now?”

“Well, we could try going downhill. If she was trying to find her way back to the house, she’d probably assume that was the right direction.”

But what if she wasn’t trying to find the house? If Finn had had an echo like Zadie suspected, she could have taken any one of these routes. Whatever world she was navigating in her head didn’t have north, south, east, and west. It didn’t have uphill or downhill. It only had forward. If Zadie was going to find her sister, she had to think like her echoes. She had to think like Nora.

Myron looked down at the illuminated shapes on his GPS screen. “If we keep heading straight, we’ll hit the creek we were fishing at yesterday.”

Zadie couldn’t see the creek—it was somewhere deep in the veil of drizzle and ferric green shadows—but if she listened closely, she could hear its faint hiss. Devoid of a better idea, she said, “Let’s try there.”

“Why don’t we split up?” Joel suggested. “We’ll cover more ground.”

Myron shook his head emphatically. “Because then I’d have three missing people instead of one.”

Joel’s eyes widened slightly and he said nothing more. Myron peered back down at his GPS and pivoted until his directional arrow was facing the thin blue line on the screen. “This way.”

Because of the rain, the creek was much higher than it had been the day before. Then, it had come up to Zadie’s knees, but now it appeared to be chest deep. It was much faster, too. Water churned over rock-shaped moss, throwing foamy spittle into the air. Whole tree branches were being whisked downstream, only to then get lodged in a dam that had been started by beavers but would likely be finished by mother nature.

“Creek’s high.” Myron may have been stating the obvious, but the subtext of what he was saying made Zadie’s pulse climb. The creek was high; therefore it was dangerous.