Amy was calling for her. She thought Nora was running away, but she wasn’t. She was running toward.
Nora would have stopped and said goodbye, but stopping was impossible. All she needed was a running start—like the early flying machines—then her wings would do the rest. Any moment now, they would unfurl.
Any moment now.
Amy’s voice was getting smaller and the water was getting louder.
Any moment now.
Rocks stamped themselves into the flesh of her bare feet. There must have been blood.
Any moment…
If she couldn’t fly, she would have to swim. Some birds could do both.
Cool water, ankle-deep. Then knees. Waist.
Puffins could dive to depths of two hundred feet. Nora just had to make it to the other side of the creek.
The other side of the creek. Then the ocean. She had to make it to the ocean before…
Nora’s thoughts were dropped stitches. Her feet, bloody. Amy’s voice had been swallowed up by the forest and now she was alone.
Zadie, Joel, and Myron hiked back up the hill to Amy’s tree and followed Finn’s prints into the woods. A few minutes of walking led them to what would, on a normal day, be a spectacular view of the valley—vast evergreen forests shrouded in drizzle and fog—but under the current circumstances, it was more daunting than it was beautiful. Without any more footprints to follow, Zadie froze. “So, where do we go now?”
Myron wiped raindrops off his GPS. “Well, usually, when people get lost in the wilderness, they take the path of least resistance.”
“You don’t know Finn.”
“I mean that they let the terrain lead them. Rivers, ridges, anything flat that gives the appearance of a way forward. If I had to guess, I’d say she most likely went that way.” Myron pointed to what appeared to be a path that had been combed over with wild grasses. “It’s not a man-made trail. Probably deer.”
Zadie imagined her sister charging down the foot-wide path, kicking up rocks that skittered down the hillside, miniature previews of what could happen to her if she lost her footing. Supposing she did. Would self-preservation kick in, or would her body fall while her mind was somewhere—someone—else? She pushed the thought away.It’s going to be fine,she told herself. Finn was lost, not dead. They were going to find her, and then they were going to find their mom. That was the plan.
Joel fell in step beside Zadie as they followed the deer trail past misty knolls covered in wagging wildflowers and tender-leaved saplings, before being swallowed by a grove of mature pine trees pressed into the ground like unlit birthday candles. Their stubby branches radiated out like spokes on a wheel, sky-high trunks moaning like old doors being opened. A carpet of bronzed needles, molted bark,and moon-shaped pinecones baffled the search party’s footfalls.They like quiet,Zadie thought, allowing herself to indulge in the possibility that the trees were in fact listening.
Eventually Myron slowed to a stop. “Trail’s gone,” he said, surveying the forest floor.
He was right. The deer path was now a fork in the road with at least five branches that split off in different directions. Zadie looked from one identical path to the next. “What do we do now?”
“Well, we could try going downhill. If she was trying to find her way back to the house, she’d probably assume that was the right direction.”
But what if shewasn’ttrying to find the house?If Finn had had an echo like Zadie suspected, she could have taken any one of these routes. Whatever world she was navigating in her head didn’t have north, south, east, and west. It didn’t have uphill or downhill. It only had forward. If Zadie was going to find her sister, she had to think like her echoes. She had to think like Nora.
Myron looked down at the illuminated shapes on his GPS screen. “If we keep heading straight, we’ll hit the creek we were fishing at yesterday.”
Zadie couldn’t see the creek—it was somewhere deep in the veil of drizzle and ferric green shadows—but if she listened closely, she could hear its faint hiss. Devoid of a better idea, she said, “Let’s try there.”
“Why don’t we split up?” Joel suggested. “We’ll cover more ground.”
Myron shook his head emphatically. “Because then I’d have three missing people instead of one.”
Joel’s eyes widened slightly and he said nothing more. Myron peered back down at his GPS and pivoted until his directional arrow was facing the thin blue line on the screen. “This way.”
Because of the rain, the creek was much higher than it had been the day before. Then, it had come up to Zadie’s knees, but now it appeared to be chest deep. It was much faster, too. Water churned over rock-shaped moss, throwing foamy spittle into the air. Whole tree branches were being whisked downstream, only to then get lodged in a dam that had been started by beavers but would likely be finished by mother nature.
“Creek’s high.” Myron may have been stating the obvious, but the subtext of what he was saying made Zadie’s pulse climb. The creek was high; therefore it was dangerous.
As if being pulled by the current themselves, they began walking downstream. The rain picked up, pockmarking the water’s surface. Exposed tree roots dangled from cut banks that had receded like swollen gums. Joel dropped to his knees and leaned over one such ledge. “Joel? What are you doing?” Zadie was about to pull him back by his pack when he sat up and pointed to something on the bank below. “Look! Down there!”