“Me?” Zadie pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders. “She was trying to give me a message?”

“I think so. There were other letters, words maybe, but they were smudged. Nest was all I could make out.” Nest. The word meant nothing to Finn. What could her mother have possibly been trying to tell them?

“What happened next?”

“I don’t know. I just kept running.” Suddenly an echo crashed into Finn’s field of vision. It was so brief that she hardly knew it was happening, but the image lingered.

She wades into the ocean, the fog

Hair wet

Arms at her sides

Black waves crash around her

But she doesn’t waver

She needs the sea to come and take her

Zadie must have seen it in her face. “What’s wrong?”

“I think it was Mom … She was in the water.” She looked out at the whitecapped tide barreling down the black sand. “The waves looked like they were made of smoke.”

Zadie followed her gaze. “Are you feeling up for a walk?”

Finn nodded. How she was “feeling” was irrelevant, and both of them knew it.

As Zadie and Finn made their way slowly down the volcanic beach, the air cooled and more fog rolled in. The sea stacks now seemed to float on the mist like a cloud city. Waves would burst from the fog, then retreat back to it, hissing like injured sea creatures. It was the kind of dreamlike place that should have been full of memories, but either they had all been carried away by the fog or Finn just couldn’t sense them.

“Getting anything?” Zadie asked.

“No. It’s like this place has no memory, like we’re the first people ever to come here.” She knew this couldn’t be true, of course, but the quiet and stillness were unnerving and a bad explanation was better than none at all. A place without memory was a place without life. Had they unwittingly stumbled into some kind of underworld? Finn pulled the reins on her imagination. They weren’t dead. They were on a beach—a dark, lonely, unsettlingly quiet beach.

A small colony of sandpipers appeared on the sand in front of them, then scuttled out of the way. As Finn watched them run, her attention was brought suddenly back to the stinging in her feet. “So you were the one that found me? In the woods?”

The question was so out of the blue, it seemed to catch Zadie off guard. She looked at Finn questioningly.

“I heard you and Joel fighting,” Finn clarified.

“Oh. How much did you hear?”

“Not a lot. Is that why he left?”

“He was scared you were going to get hurt.” Zadie tucked her hands into her jacket pockets, then continued. “He thought we should quit.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him you had it under control.”

Finn swallowed. Not even she believed that anymore.