“This place looks abandoned,” Tai says, hanging back, her belt bag sagging on her hips. Maybe a cat once ate from the empty, rusted, overturned metal bowls collecting grit and dust on the slanting, unpainted porch. Or maybe they were just trash. But she’s right: Only wild creatures have roamed the overgrown lawn in some time, tangled as it is with thorny bushes and nettles and poison ivy.

The house learned over time how best to keep people out, and it’s silent now, anxious to be ignored. Only a small wood-cut sign squeaks on its old hinge above us. I squint: THE WOODCUTTER, it reads, in old-fashioned Viloki script used by great-grandmothers.

Tai shivers and sneaks a look back at the self-driving car, which idles silently down the road. She tucks her hands into her jacket pockets self-protectively. “Screw this place. We don’t have to do this.”

I rub my chapped lips together. They feel sore to the touch. “We do.”

She looks up at the house, wind dragging strands of black hair over her face like the seaweed that decays in hanks by the bay. Her eyes still catch mine. It’s getting darker, and they look deep-lake blue. “If the lumberjack really lives here, Manon, Mama wouldn’t send us here.”

She’s said it before, and she was right. If Mama wanted us to discover this place, she wouldn’t have given that message to someone we were unlikely to ever meet.

But then again, who knows what was safe for her to reveal, and what wasn’t?

Maybe there’s a reason we needed to come here.

There’s so much we don’t know about her, and that knowledge sits like a giant, smooth stone at the base of my stomach, lending me this strange new center of gravity.

“Is that really going to stop you from seeing what’s inside?” I ask Tai, adjusting the straps on my backpack.

She tucks loose hair behind her ears. “What has gotten into you?”

“I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t follow every lead.” I look up at the ruffling netting, strung like cobwebs over the house. “I need to know what’s inside.”

We push through the gate, and I knock on the door, my nerves only perceptible in the blue tinge of my nails and the warble in my throat. Tai’s trying to peek into the ground-floor window with crossed arms when a light clicks on on the second floor, and the crickets around us go quiet.

“What the fuck,” Tai murmurs, stumbling back into me. She grabs me so tightly I can feel the blood moving through her. But when I lean back, I can’t see into the window: It’s covered with grimy mesh.