Zadie nodded and stepped out of the forest onto a rocky outcropping. If Myron hadn’t told her otherwise, she would have assumed she was wading through another branch of the creek. The water wasn’t stagnant here, but flowed steadily across the smooth sheets of shale down a nearly imperceptible hill to the lip of a cliff. Where the water went after that, Zadie couldn’t see, but what she could see through the rain was the thin frame of her sister silhouetted by an expanse of ashen sky. She was wearing a bright yellow raincoat, hood down. Her normally buoyant black curls hung in sad wet clumps like kelp washed up on the sand after a storm. She didn’t move, but the wind moved her, the same gentle swaying motion that tricks birds into thinking scarecrows are alive.

Instinctively, Zadie took a hurried step forward and felt the ground slip underneath her. Her heart leaped, and she took a moment to steady herself before calling out, “Finn!”

Finn didn’t give any sign of having heard her, just like her mom hadn’t heard her when she’d found her teetering on the edge of another precarious drop-off six years earlier. That cliff, however, had been still and dry. This cliff had a current.

Zadie looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with Joel, who was following a few steps behind. He looked frightened. “Do you want me to grab her?”

“No,” Zadie replied, trying to keep her voice steady. She caught Myron’s eye, too. “I don’t want to spook her. Let me try and talk to her before we try anything else.”

Joel was about to respond, but Myron beat him to it. “We’ll be right behind you.”

Zadie turned back around and began inching forward. If she startled her sister on the slick rocks, Finn might vanish over the edge of the cliff with the floodwater. From their back porch, the Van Houten girls might see her fall, a drop of yellow amidst the shower of blues and grays. If they blinked, they would miss her.

Panic had Zadie by the throat. She could feel it tighten the closer she got to the edge of the bluff. Zadie tried talking to Finn again, hoping that maybe she hadn’t heard her the first time she’d spoken. “Finn, it’s Zadie. Are you okay?” she said. She tried to sound calm, but her voice wavered.

No answer. The rain was falling sideways now. Mist rose from the exposed shale that had spent the previous day baking in the sun. To Zadie, it both looked and felt like a bad dream.

“Look. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m just going to start talking.” Zadie swallowed. “Wherever you think you are, you’re not. Whatever you do, do not take another step. I want you to turn around very slowly. Turn toward the sound of my voice.”