Mikki drops her voice to a whisper again. “Listen, you seem nice. If you’re okay with weirder stuff—you know, unofficial, off-book—” She hesitates.

“Oh, I’m all about that weird life,” I say.

“You could go see Baba Yuki,” she whispers.

“Who?”

“Baba Yuki,” she repeats, pulling a map out from behind the desk and tracing a route from the visitors’ center with a highlighter. “She’s a weird character, a town legend. She dresses up like famous people and sings, too.”

“Sorry,” Noni says, while I sniff the highlighter fumes. “You said Yuki?”

“She lives just about a fifteen-minute walk from here, in the woods. She’s the only person who will talk about the past. My friend Taxo told me that she sells Delirium Forest maps to tourists and star maps with Morel—”

“Mireille.”

“Yeah, her. Maps with her favorite places on them. Baba Yuki’s pretty old, so she probably knows a lot about what the town used to look like, too. She might even know about lumberjacks or whatever,” she adds, to Nons, who was flipping through pamphlets to look blasé.

Mikki peers outside the window. “By the way, is that your fancy car out there?” she asks, as Nons goes stiff, and I shake my head, opening my mouth to say—

But Mikki sighs. “I’ve always wanted to ride in one of those. I want to work for Clouded Cage, but I know my mama would never let me. Taxo said he’d let me play one of their games at his house, this new haunted-house one, and he said it’s kind of like what living in Mitella must be like.” She glances at us. “Seriously, you look kind of familiar. When were you here before?”

The walk to Baba Yuki’s draws us toward the dampest edges of the forest, where chestnut trees cut massive figures and block out the light. We pass a group of backpackers in their twenties trading plastic baggies of rainbow tablets under a sign reading, LOSE YOUR WAY, LOSE YOUR LIFE! STAY SAFE AND KEEP THE VILOKI DREAM ALIVE. I forgot the woods were the reason people called this Dreamland, once upon a time.

We reach the parking lot Mikki showed us on the map, and I try to make out which of the unmarked trails leads to Baba Yuki’s house. We slow by a group of teenaged boys crowded around a car—they look local, and I might as well ask for directions before they catch us loitering all sketchily—but Noni holds me back with a hand. I can tell she’s been eavesdropping.

“The parking ticket says it’s been here one month,” one says.

“Why haven’t they towed it yet?” asks another.

“Their loss,” says the tallest, taking a crowbar from his back pocket—one I’m just noticing. “Look, there’s a pink phone under the seat.”