The starlings overhead continued to cry, giving voice to her pain. Zadie gazed up into the shape-shifting cloud of birds and wished they would carry her far away from this place. Tears sprang to her eyes. The sky blurred.

Then as she was turning her back on the ocean, she heard a chime. A soft tinkling sound barely audible above the ocean’s roar. Some feet behind Zadie, Nora, leaning on her sister’s arm, was staring intently at a stand of trees to her right. The sound seemed to be coming from them.

“Do you hear that?” Zadie asked.

Jenna shook her head. “Hear what?”

“Music!” she called back and vanished into the knot of fir trees.

The sound grew louder as Zadie stumbled through the dark thicket. It reminded her of Ursula’s star song: seemingly random notes that together told a story. This one was about a woman looking for her missing sister. She feared the worst, this woman, because she was always fearing the worst. It was how she protected herself. But now that she’d thought the worst had come to pass, she had nothing left to lose.

Zadie broke through a curtain of low-hanging bows into a small clearing, the sight of which made her gasp. Branches and long grasses had been lashed together with vine to form a ten-foot-high asymmetrical dome. Woven through the gaps in the branches and draped in a crisscross pattern overhead were colorful strips of torn fabric—likely old bedsheets and curtains—and artfully daubed onto the walls with mud and clay were all of nature’s finest treasures: fragments of stone, shells, feathers, seedpods, and sea glass that shimmered in the sunlight pouring in from the hole in the dome’s ceiling. From that hole hung a dozen or more wind chimes. Each one was playing a different melody, and yet together they created music so beautiful it rivaled any star in the sky.

It’s a nest, she thought, awestruck.

She almost didn’t notice it. From where she was standing, it just looked like a pile of grasses and leaves in the center of the nest, but as she drew closer, she saw one glossy black coil of hair peeking out from the debris.

“Finn!” When she reached her sister’s limp body, she flipped her over and found her eyes open but lifeless.

“Finn, it’s me.” Zadie’s voice shook. “Finn, wake up. I found Mom.” When her sister did not respond, Zadie gently squeezed her shoulders. “Finn, we did it. We found her.”

But Finn’s face was blank. She seemed to stare over her sister’s shoulder through the hole in the dome. Zadie could even see the murmuration above them reflected in her glassy eyes, like black ink was swirling inside them.

Jenna appeared by Zadie’s side and placed two fingers on Finn’s wrist. “I’ve got a pulse,” she said.