The sky is full of birds.

She looked up, but all she saw were stars.

The sky is full of birds.

Then the keyboard music began again. While the woman’s eyes were on her fingers, Zadie slipped back into the night.

When Zadie returned to camp, she saw a tent, but no Finn. “Dude, this place just keeps getting weirder—” she started, then parted the tent flap and found her sister passed out on top of her sleeping bag, The Fisherman’s Desire fanned open on her chest. Zadie gingerly lifted the book, set it on the tent floor, then grabbed the wool blanket that was bunched up at Finn’s feet and pulled it over her. Her sister grunted softly and nuzzled into the blanket.

Exhaustion tugged at Zadie’s eyelids. Ignoring the hollowness in her belly, she crawled into her own bag and sank into a cavernous sleep.

Finn could have slept in. She hadn’t set an alarm, trusting her body to wake when it felt ready. As it turned out, ready meant six A.M.

Finn crawled out of the tent carefully so as not to wake her sister, then stretched her limbs like a cat, digging her toes into the sand. It was a gorgeous day. The burnished cliffs glowed in the early morning sun, and the air was cool and smelled like smoke from neighboring campsites. It was a contradictory landscape. On the one hand, it was arid and severe, the color of heat. On the other, it was veined with verdant gullies that sang with insects and bloomed like moss at the feet of the hills. Finn let the vastness of it all sink in. Having lived her entire life in the largely flat state of Texas, she felt overwhelmed that there were things in the world that existed at such heights. She trembled with excitement at the prospect that she could see more: more mountains, more world. It made her feel like her vision was widening, becoming a panorama. Eventually she just stopped turning her head. She could see everything.

This is the place, Finn thought, surer than ever that her mom had passed through here five years earlier. If she had to, she would overturn every rock, climb every butte until she found where her memories were hiding.

Finn walked to the outskirts of their campsite and climbed onto a boulder that had been sheared flat on top. It was warm and gritty against her thighs. She pressed her palms into the warm stone and felt a scar. Someone named Alison had carved her name into the rock. A few other names were etched into the surface, too—Michelle, Tim, Alberto—but no Nora. When Finn was young, her mom had carved their initials, NZF, into everything: rocks, trees, restaurant booths, bathroom stalls. “How else will people know we exist?” she’d said. Finn didn’t care how many people knew she existed. The only people that mattered already knew.