As if being pulled by the current themselves, they began walking downstream. The rain picked up, pockmarking the water’s surface. Exposed tree roots dangled from cut banks that had receded like swollen gums. Joel dropped to his knees and leaned over one such ledge. “Joel? What are you doing?” Zadie was about to pull him back by his pack when he sat up and pointed to something on the bank below. “Look! Down there!”

Zadie peered over the edge, and there in the backwater-soaked mud was an imprint. Not of a shoe, but of a human foot with five distinct toes.

“The rain hasn’t washed it away yet,” Myron observed as droplets fell from the brim of his hood. “It must have been made pretty recently.”

“So we’re going the right way, then?” Zadie silently admonished herself for the hope that crept into her voice.

“It’s a good sign, at least.” Myron didn’t offer any more reassurance, and Zadie didn’t ask for it.

But why was there only one set of footprints? Had Finn fallen in the water? Had she been carried away by the swift current only to end up as just another log in the dam downstream? Zadie left the two men behind and hurried along the bank, squinting through the curtain of rain at every human-size log, root, and rock. Then something ahead of her caused her to stop abruptly.

Someone appeared to have climbed up the creek bank. There were skid marks in the mud and clods of torn grass that had probably been used as handholds. If Finn had fallen in the creek, at least she’d made it out alive.

Thunder echoed through the valley like it was the inside of a drum. “Storm’s here,” Myron said as he caught up with her. Zadie’s eyes flitted to the gathering clouds above. Behind one of them was a ghost sun wrapped in gauze. “We better get moving,” he said, taking the lead once more.

Zadie could hear the downpour coming before she felt it. She pulled her hood up just in time to deflect the worst of the cloudburst, but the percussion on the fabric was deafening. Myron was moving his lips. She had to pull the hood back from her ears to hear him. “I said we should find shelter. Wait this out,” he shouted over the rain.

“You want to stop? What about Finn?” Zadie shouted back, tasting rainwater on her lips.

“She probably stopped, too. See that tree?” Myron pointed toward a Douglas fir with great boughs that sagged under the weight of their own needles. The earth beneath the tree appeared mostly dry. “You guys take cover. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I want to check that rocky overhang. Make sure Finn didn’t hide out there.”