Emerging from an elevator a few dozen floors down, I filed in behind a couple of salarymen and was briefly distracted by glimpses of ads for watches, investment counsellors, and canned coffee ahead of me on the skywalk. I wanted to see the coffee ad—it featured a famous American actor—but as soon as I got an unobstructed view of the screen, the ad abruptly changed to one for female hygiene products.

Annoyed, I looked away, then caught sight of something that made me stop in my tracks. Two students from my school were in a skypark halfway to Junco Tower, and they were smoking cigarettes. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I recognized the distinct teal of the girl’s sailor suit. Our school was strict about smoking; getting caught usually led to expulsion. Who would have the guts, or stupidity, to smoke in public, and in uniform?

Before I could think of likely candidates, they put out their cigarettes and left the park, returning to the main skywalk via the single narrow one attached to the park. Now I recognized them. It was Arisa, the infamously pretty-but-weird president of the Noh club, and Hirota, who was in my own homeroom, though we’d never talked much. He was also in the Noh club. Huh.

To avoid running into them, I slipped around the salarymen to enter the skypark they had just vacated. It was tiny and unremarkable with a few vending machines, a smoker’s corner with a large ashtray, a few benches and trees, and a flowerbed. One of the vending machines was for cigarettes. A sudden, reckless urge struck me. I wanted to smoke too. I wasn’t the meek goody two-shoes my mom was trying to mold me into. I could break the law and smoke cigarettes like a delinquent. I’d even do it by myself, for my own satisfaction, not due to peer pressure.

After glancing back to make sure no one was heading my way, I fished out a five-hundred-yen coin and put it into the coin slot. I was glad for Japan’s obstinate liking for hard currency; mom routinely checked the contents of my card statements, and the cigarettes were sure to have been labelled as such.

I picked a brand at random and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

I pushed the button again.

Clink. A single coin fell to the change tray, and the tiny screen next to the coin slot flashed. Purchase denied — purchaser underage. After a moment, the message disappeared, replaced by an advertisement for anti-breakout facial cleanser, a smiling school girl patting her clear face.

Annoyed, I took the coin from the slot. There must’ve been a camera I hadn’t noticed with some age estimation algorithm. I supposed the Noh club members had gotten someone else to buy their cigarettes for them, or gone to a convenience store—did convenience store workers check age? Well, I couldn’t try it now, at any rate, since I was in my uniform.

Nevertheless, even the attempt had been exciting. It was a tiny, tiny rebellion that I’d be able to remember when my mom got on my nerves.

I resumed my walk, stopping at a bookstore to browse for a bit, then arrived home at dinner time. Tadaima, I called out as I slipped off my black loafers. I’m home.

The okaeri I had expected to hear shouted in response never came. Through a doorway, I glimpsed my dad in the living room, on the couch with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He said nothing but gave me an odd, hard-to-interpret smile. In retrospect, I think it was meant as encouragement.

The next moment, my mom appeared before me, like a blonde storm cloud wielding a soup ladle, clutched so tight her knuckles were white. “Exactly what do you think you’ve been up to?”

Confused, I glanced at my watch, confirming it really was just eight o’clock. “I… went to Book-Off after cram school and read some manga. Were we supposed to eat early today? If so, I missed that—sorry.”

Mom inhaled sharply. “No, I mean the cigarettes.” She pronounced the word as if she was detonating a bomb in the hallway.

My jaw dropped. “How… how did you know?”

“So you did try to buy cigarettes. Marie, why would you…”

I interrupted. “Really, how did you know?”

She looked annoyed at the interruption, then took out her phone, swiping a couple of times and then holding out the screen to me.

This is an automated message to inform you that Tanimura Marie attempted to buy a pack of Mevius Light at Skypark 714 at 19:12 this evening. The identification certainty level is 97.6% and based on facial recognition confirmed for feasibility with Tanimura’s latest location records.

I stared at the message, incredulous. “That… that is such a violation of privacy!” I stuttered finally. “Is that even legal?”

“Marie,” mom hissed, “you are the one who tried to break the law! And you’re underage—it’s perfectly normal that we were informed. Now, the bigger question is, why would you do such a stupid thing? Who put you up to this?”

“No one,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I just felt like it.” Normally, my mother’s anger would’ve immediately reduced me to contrite apologies, but now I was too shocked, and too angry myself, to be cowed. I wasn’t angry with her, though, but with the vending machine, with that surveillance system that had sold me out. I felt violated, as if discovering I had been watched while undressing.

“That’s hardly likely, now, is it? Out with it. Was it one of the girls in your homeroom? I could see Rie having some harebrained idea like this. Or did someone bully you into it?”

 “I said, no one.” Losing my patience, I raised my voice. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I swept past her and into my room, slamming the door behind me, surprised at my own courage in the face of my mom’s anger.

“Marie, we’re not done talking,” she yelled through the door. She began to turn the doorknob, but before she had opened the door, my dad’s calm voice sounded from further away. “Leave her be for now, Hanna. Now’s not the time.”

Mom didn’t say a word about the cigarettes at breakfast the next morning—nor anything else, for that matter. Either dad had persuaded her to cut me some slack, or she was brooding over what new, draconian rules to impose as punishment.

My resolve had hardened, though. At lunch break that day, I headed upstairs to where the gym and club rooms were located. I walked down the corridor outside the club rooms, reading the lettered signs on each door. Baseball club. Judo club. Karuta club.

Noh club.

I knocked on the door before I had a chance to get anxious and change my mind. After a moment, someone called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door and almost jumped. A hundred faces were staring at me. Then I saw they were masks: countless Noh masks of men, women, and demons, mounted all over the walls. There were only four human faces. Hirota sat by a small table, a convenience-store lunch spread out in front of him, and on the floor sat Arisa, plus a boy sipping chocolate milk and a girl with a scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Yes?” scarf girl said.

“Sorry to disturb you guys,” I said. “I was just wondering… Wait.” I pushed the door shut behind me, then looked at Arisa and Hirota in turn. “I saw you guys smoking cigarettes in a park yesterday.”

The three sitting on the floor exchanged a glance. Hirota had been about to take a bite from a custard bread, but froze.

“And, I wanted to know how you went about buying them,” I continued.

“Why?” Hirota asked, frowning.

“Because I want to buy cigarettes, too.”

Hirota had resumed eating. “You want to buy cigarettes?” he asked between mouthfuls of bread.

I nodded. “I tried to yesterday evening, from a vending machine in that park, but it didn’t work, and apparently, it sent an alert to my parents, so I got totally chewed out. I hadn’t known it could do that. So now I really want to buy cigarettes.” I laughed.

The three on the floor exchanged glances again, then Arisa looked at me, a little too long and a little too intensely.

Scarf girl piped up. “Sorry, but we can’t help you. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

Before I could decide on what to say, Arisa spoke. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t tell her.”

Scarf girl and chocolate milk boy protested indignantly. “But Arisa, she isn’t even…”, “Prez, we don’t know if we can trust her…”

What was this big secret to buying cigarettes? They were acting like it was some sort of arcane, privileged information, so clearly, they hadn’t just asked someone’s big sister to do it.

I waited while a staring contest continued between the three club members on the floor, as if they were attempting a telepathic debate about the merits of telling me.

 “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” I said, finally. “Thanks anyways.” I opened the door, then glanced at the walls again. “Also, your masks are really cool.”

The next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the vending machine that had sold me out, about what the great cigarette-buying secret might be, and about the Noh club. I was no longer thinking about what club to join; the Noh club was the only one that intrigued me now, but I hadn’t gotten the impression they were looking for new members.

The following Tuesday, my cram school class got rescheduled to the last slot of the evening. It was past ten and dark above the skywalks when I finally headed home, and the bars I passed in Junco Tower were lively with businesspeople from the nearby office floors.

At a corner after the last izakaya on the floor, I saw Arisa.

She was dressed in jeans, a hoodie, and a baseball cap, a large shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She was looking down at her phone, and I was debating whether to stop and say hi when she suddenly put it away, turned, and disappeared into a door that I had never noticed before.

Without thinking, I followed her.

The door led to a stairwell. Arisa climbed the stairs, exiting again two floors up. I kept my distance and exited a few moments after her. I emerged into a floor of offices, empty and dimly lit; only the corridors had the lights on, while the offices were pitch black. I looked around for Arisa, then heard a rustling sound from around a corner.

I padded quietly in the direction of the sound and spotted her again, now standing in front of a large door in glass and stainless steel; it must’ve been the entrance to some swanky corporation. She rummaged through the shopping bag, then pulled out something I couldn’t identify, a shapeless mass of beige and gray and pink. Then, she removed her baseball cap and pulled the thing over her head.

I gasped.

Arisa’s face was now that of a man in his fifties. The shapeless thing had been a mask. Not a stylized Noh mask or one of those jokey rubber masks caricaturing famous people, but an incredibly lifelike one; it looked as if the head of a man had been transplanted onto the body of a teenage girl. The effect was so uncanny, I felt like I was going to be sick.

Arisa tilted her neck backwards, looking up. I followed her gaze—or the gaze of the middle-aged man, rather—and noticed a camera mounted above the door. Then she lowered her head and stepped forward.

Nothing happened.

She waved a hand, as if to activate a motion sensor, then mumbled something I couldn’t make out. She stepped back, tugged at the mask, and looked up at the camera again. Then she stepped forward once more, and again, nothing happened. Now, she cursed audibly.

I was watching this, fascinated, when I heard a noise from the other side. A security guard had just entered the floor: a gray-haired man wielding a flashlight, probably a part-time retiree on his standard patrol route.

I looked back at Arisa. She didn’t seem to have noticed. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but I suspected she wouldn’t want to get caught doing it. I dashed out from my hiding place.

“There’s a security guard just around the corner,” I hissed at her. “Take off the mask.”

She stood frozen for a moment, then removed the mask. The middle-aged man’s face seemed to crumple and collapse, and had I not been so nervous and high on adrenaline, I would’ve felt nauseated again. Then her own face was revealed, and she had just stuffed the mask back into the shopping bag when the guard turned the corner and saw us.

“Ora! What are you misses doing here?” he asked, walking up to us. “Everything on this floor is closed for the night, you know.”

“We were going to surprise her dad with an evening snack delivery to the office,” I said, letting my gaze flicker to the big paper shopping bag Arisa was holding. “But it turns out he’d already finished for the night.” I laughed as if this was a big joke.

“Aw, that’s sweet of you girls.” Then his tone turned mock-gruff. “But you ought to be in bed at this time. There; off you go.”

He shooed us away and I acquiesced, grabbing Arisa by the elbow and steering her towards the door to the stairwell. She didn’t say a word until we emerged among the bars and crowds two floors down. “Let’s go over there,” she said, nodding toward a skypark.

It was empty save for a salaryman tapping away on a smartphone in a corner, oblivious to the world. We headed for the opposite corner.

Arisa turned to me. “Thanks for that. It would’ve been bad if I’d gotten caught.” She didn’t ask why I had been there.

I nodded.

“I should’ve paid more attention myself, but I was so frustrated that the damn thing wouldn’t work.” She plopped down on a bench and rummaged in the shopping bag. Eventually she fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you want one?” she asked suddenly.

“No, thank you,” I said automatically. “But… what were you doing back there with that terrifyingly real middle-aged dudeface? And where did you get that?”

Arisa looked pleased. “I made it. It’s modelled after an employee there. I was testing it to see if it was good enough to fool those ID cameras and unlock the door. The answer is no, unfortunately.”

“But… what is that place, and why do you want to get in there?”

“It’s just some real estate company, and I don’t.” She lit her cigarette. “But their facial recognition algorithm is really good, and making a mask that can fool it would be a big achievement.”

“Don’t all the ID cameras work the same way?”

“No, no, not at all!” She stood up and waved her cigarette, excited. “There’s a whole range. Like, some really old beer and cigarette vending machines are so shitty you can literally take an eyeliner and draw lines on your face in a certain pattern, like wrinkles, and it’ll trick them into thinking you’re an adult. And on the other extreme, some corporations have ones that are practically like retinal scans. That place,” she nodded toward Junco Tower, “is fairly advanced. We use it for testing purposes. So far, none of us have succeeded in making a mask that’s good enough, though. Except granny, of course.”

Granny? I had so many new questions, I barely knew where to start. “Who’s ‘we’?” I finally decided on the question that was bothering me the most.

“Why, The Noh club, of course.” She smiled. “The name is a bit misleading. It’s more like the Noh-and-privacy-protection club. Most of us are privacy rights activists. Ogura is the only one who’s hardcore Noh-only. Do you want to join?”

Noh and privacy protection. I hadn’t expected that. “Privacy rights activist” had a punky, rebellious ring to it, but Noh was ultra-high culture. “That is so cool,” I said, then it hit me that she had asked if I wanted to join. “But… I don’t know anything about Noh. Or about privacy.”

“You can learn.”

My phone vibrated audibly, and I recalled how late it was. “I have to go; that’s probably my mom, wondering why I’m not home yet.”

Arisa nodded, then stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll show you the workshop after school tomorrow.”

“Good evening, sensei,” Hirota and Nanami—that was scarf girl’s name—called out as we emerged from a staircase into the workshop. The workshop covered most of the second floor of Arisa’s house. Yes—a house, like in the remotest of suburbs, except this one was squeezed in between Junco Tower and another high-rise; they must’ve been under siege with developers and yakuza wanting to buy the plot.

The workshop was divided in two. Half had tatami mats and antique furniture and Noh masks covering the walls. It was in this half that sensei, an old woman, sat working by a low table. The other half had laminate flooring and furniture in bright white, lifelike latex masks mounted on stands.

Hirota plopped down on the tatami floor, relaxing, while Nanami beelined for a worktable on the other side. Arisa knelt down next to the old woman, motioning for me to follow. The woman was working on a Noh mask, carving the corners of its eyes with a fine scalpel.

“Granny, this is Marie. Marie, this is my grandma. She’s a Noh mask artisan. And she pioneered the latex painting techniques we use for the other masks.”

The woman looked up from her work. “Are you a new member?” Before I could answer, she continued, “Our family has been Noh mask carvers for four generations. Arisa here will be next; her father didn’t have any talent for mask-carving.” She put down her scalpel to pat Arisa on the shoulder.

“Arisa’s parents are both big digital rights activists,” Hirota said, leaning back on his elbows. “Like, super big. That’s another of the reasons we hang out here: my parents would be totally freaking out that we were doing something illegal.”

“Is this illegal?” I asked, nervously.

Arisa’s granny chuckled, then returned her attention to the mask.

“Depends,” Arisa said, getting up. I followed her to the modern side of the workshop, where Nanami had gotten to work on a lifelike mask, a superfine brush in her hand. The mask depicted an older Western woman, but it was nowhere near as realistic as the one Arisa had worn the day before.

Arisa looked over Nanami’s shoulder as she spoke. “There’s nothing illegal about making a mask. It is sometimes—but not always—illegal to use a mask to trick a facial recognition algorithm. Let’s say now that you’re impersonating a specific person and entering a place using their face as credentials. If you don’t actually enter the place, it’s a bit more of a gray zone. And if you’re not impersonating a specific person but just happen to like wearing masks that make you look like a different gender, or perhaps thirty years older, that’s usually—but not always—legal.”

I nodded, watching Nanami make the tiniest brush strokes along the nostrils of the mask. Then she paused, resting her wrist against the table. I wanted her to know I didn’t hold any grudges for her refusal to share the big cigarette secret with me a few days earlier, so I asked politely, “Nanami-san, what’s the reason you decided to join the Noh club?”

She turned to me. “Because of Arisa. And because I don’t like personalized advertising. I had never really thought about it much, but after Arisa told me how face-based advertising worked, it really upset me. Like, we go about our lives boxed in by our own faces, constantly having the world tell us who we’re supposed to be, where we can go and what we should buy and do and watch. I hate it.” She paused, looking down at the mask. “So it feels good to use another face once in a while. And I like the artistic aspects of mask-making, too, though my own masks are still not very good.”

That was exactly it, I thought, as Nanami resumed her painting. I didn’t want to be told who I was supposed to be any more either.

So I joined the Noh club, and I couldn’t say what I loved the most: learning about privacy laws with Arisa’s parents and our adrenaline-fueled outings to test masks in the night-time, or our monthly outings to the National Noh Theater, where the actors transformed into demons or courtiers with the help of finely carved, stylized masks, like those made by Arisa’s grandmother.

At the dinner table at home, I gushed about how Noh masks can appear to change expression based on the angle of the light or the stage presence of Noh actors I had seen. Mom was both out of her depth and fundamentally in awe of anything “traditionally Japanese,” so she never pried, and the Noh club became my sphere of freedom.

A few weeks before the end of the school year, I completed my first realistic mask, and Arisa and Hirota joined me late in the evening at Skypark 714 to try it out. They kept a lookout over the skywalk adjoining the park, and once they had assured me that the coast was clear, I pulled the mask out of my bag. It depicted an elegant older woman; I had modelled it on the old folk singer Misora Hibari in full stage makeup.

I tugged it over my head, then approached the cigarette vending machine warily. It was the same one where I had obliviously tried to buy cigarettes almost a year earlier. Rather than the glamorous Hibari, it would’ve been more fitting had I worn a Noh mask of the vengeful samurai Soga Tokimune.

I put a five-hundred-yen coin into the coin slot, then hesitated over what to pick.

“Get the regular Mevius,” Hirota shouted. “If you don’t like them, I’ll take them.”

I pushed the button for a pack of Mevius, then tilted my head to look directly into where I now knew the facial recognition camera was mounted. We waited in expectant silence.

Thump.

I bent down to fish out a pack of cigarettes from the slot and held it out toward Arisa and Hirota. “Look,” I said, as amazed and proud as a new parent. “It worked!”

“Good,” Arisa said, giving one of her rare smiles, while Hirota let out a whoop and pumped his fist in the air. “Well done, Marie!”

We bought ourselves cans of hot coffee from another of the vending machines and sat down. I unwrapped the pack of cigarettes reverently and extracted one. I had never held a cigarette before.

Arisa handed me a lighter, and I attempted to light the cigarette without much success.

Hirota laughed. “You have to inhale while you light it, you know.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly. I succeeded on the next attempt and inhaled deeply, then began to cough. It tasted disgusting, and I felt weirdly nauseated. Hirota laughed again, while Arisa moved closer to pat me on the back. Once I stopped coughing, I got up and put the cigarette out in the ashtray. Then, I handed Hirota the pack. “Well, that was a lot of trouble for something I will never do again. Gross!” Arisa and Hirota both laughed this time. I sat down to sip my coffee, and despite the exhaust-fume taste in my mouth, I felt happy and free.

— Peter Longerich, Goebbels: A Biography, Random House, 2015, page 409.

Berlin, April 1945

Until now, Reichminister Goebbels could still hope.

The Führer retired to his study with his bride of one day, directing the onlookers to wait ten minutes, clicking the door shut. From that moment, reality ceased to be something Goebbels could accept or comprehend. He stared at the door, numb, the room silent except for artillery rumbles somewhere overhead… until the shot banged.

A secretary gasped. Goebbels shuddered, collapsing inside, like Hitler’s own body. For all intents and purposes, he had died with his idol of the past nineteen years.

Because all other feeling had ceased, he became aware of something large and flat in the inner breast pocket of his suit. Absently, he reached in and drew it out:

Drei Geschichten der— a head floating in a jar—

What? Snapped back to awareness, he squinted at the magazine in his hand. The final word of the title, after der, was missing, a charred hole in its place.

Where had he gotten this? Think…

Goebbels welcomed the distraction. Retreating into the passageway that smelled of damp concrete and faintly of sewage, he sank into one of the chairs. He flipped through the pages and saw the story titles. Iron Sky. They Saved Hitler’s Brain. The Frozen Dead.

Yes. It was coming back to him now…

Berlin, 1933

The Propaganda Minister fidgeted at his desk, waiting for noon. Known as the Mouse-General behind his back, but second only to Hitler in hypnotizing crowds, he kept his nails immaculate, emphasizing his prominent head with dark hair combed tightly back, hard eyes, and a mouth he used like a club. (Speaking of which, he and Magda had fought again last night, and he wanted to get the bad taste out of his mouth.)

One of his secretaries appeared in the office doorway, eyes magnified behind her glasses, wringing her hands. “He’s here.”

The minister’s ears pricked up. “He” could only be one person, and early, thank God! This was one offender Goebbels wanted to deal with personally.

He hurried back around his desk, half-dragging his club foot, and pulled a drawer open. Out came a modest-sized magazine. Its cover featured a head floating in a jar, and the title Drei Geschichten der Zukunft blazed in yellow across the top. Goebbels placed it face-up on the desktop.

“Send him in.”

A bespectacled man with long legs strode in. Too long; he reminded Goebbels of an entertainer on stilts. In three steps, the visitor reached the center of the office, where he stopped. He wore a gray suit a little cheaper, a little shabbier than the Propaganda Minister’s, and held his hat before him with both hands like a shield. His dark hair was thinning and he needed a shave.

Goebbels sat with arms folded on his desk, sizing the fellow up. So this was Steiger, the publisher, calm on the outside, but with a blanched face and twitching fingers betraying his true feelings. Perhaps he had heard of that youngster who’d boasted of how he would assassinate the Führer? Goebbels had summoned the brat, had torn him up one side and down the other, and had then turned him over to the Gestapo to determine what other mischief he was up to.

Rising from his chair, Goebbels limped around his desk, picking up the little magazine, and shoved it in the man’s face.

“What is the meaning of this?”

The visitor flinched for an instant. “Short stories, Herr Reich Minister.” Then, as if it might help: “Science fiction stories.”

Goebbels saw the reaction and felt taller, but not tall enough. That this man stood a good five centimeters above him did not help, but never mind.

“You’ve published Christoff Bowes, Zeitpiraten-Abenteurer since 1926. I’ve had the last several issues reviewed, and I see you’ve resisted calls to more accurately reflect the times and our national way of life. And now I hear you’re about to print these ‘Three Stories of the Future?'” He held up the publication and shook it. “We’re fortunate someone brought this to our attention before you dumped it on the public. Did you write them all yourself?”

Steiger paused before answering. “To be frank, sir, neither I nor my writers came up with any of them.”

Goebbels made a show of flipping through the magazine. Fifty-three pages, ads for Coca Cola and pulp paper, even the cheap kind the Americans used. “Is that why they’re all by ‘an unknown storyteller’, as you note in the introduction?” He waited till a bead of sweat trickled down Steiger’s brow, then said: “You understand, of course, that you will have to give me all three names.”

“Ah. Well, you see, sir… that would be… ” Steiger tugged his collar. “Difficult. No, impossible.”

Goebbels looked up. “And why is that?”

“It’s true that we wrote the words ourselves, but—”

“Herr Steiger, you have five seconds to start making sense.”

“We received them from an unknown sender, and not as print stories. They were films.”

Goebbels kept the man pinned under his gaze. “Go on.”

“Someone left them on my doorstep, wrapped in a package. Reels of celluloid. Curiously, when we were able to rent a projector and run them, they were quite short. Evidently parts had been edited out that we weren’t meant to see. Only the bare stories.”

“And this filmmaker included no name, no return address?”

“There was only a typewritten note from a ‘representative of future generations.’ We wondered what to make of it. In one of the films—if you could have seen it—the way the moon appeared, the future Earth, the realism—”

“You fool!” Goebbels shouted in Steiger’s face. Steiger grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t you realize why he sent them to you? It was so you would answer for them instead of he himself. He’s probably somewhere laughing at you as we speak. Where are these films now?”

“We don’t have them anymore; they were confiscated.”

“When?”

“I can tell you the exact day. May, the tenth.”

Goebbels knew that day, of course: the day of the book burning. “Are you saying—”

“One of my writers… His son is in the Sturmabteilung. He unfortunately let the boy hear him say too much. The whole detachment of brownshirts stormed the apartment, and the box was sitting open in a corner. They took it, every reel, the box itself, and the paper it had been wrapped in, and they ran to the Opernplatz and took turns throwing reels into the flames. The son had the honor of burning the last item, the box. Or so he informed his father afterwards.”

Goebbels frowned. He himself had spoken to the crowd that night, whipping them up as they put books to the torch: No to decadence and moral corruption! “That should tell you something about those kinds of stories, Herr Steiger.”

“We had written them down by that time. You must admit, sir, they are imaginative.”

The minister’s frown hardened into a scowl. “Imaginative? I have read them, and that is not the word they brought to mind.” He flipped through the magazine. “For example, this…” He looked up. “‘They Saved Hitler’s Brain?'”

Steiger only waited, keeping his face blank. Goebbels sauntered up and around him, speaking over his shoulder.

“From 1968?”

“That… that was when the film is supposed to have been made.”

“Is that so? Set in South America? Our soldiers living in a cave, and our Führer reduced to…” He shuddered. He wasn’t sure he could go on. “To a head? Kept alive in a jar?”

Steiger merely said, “Yes.”

“And as if that weren’t indignity enough, he goes up in flames at the end.”

Steiger kept his eyes fixed on the wall and said nothing.

Goebbels slapped the magazine against his palm, slap, slap, slap. “For this alone,” he said in a low voice, “for this alone, I could have you sent to Sachsenhausen. But it seems this is only the start. ‘The Frozen Dead’, from 1966?” Slap went the magazine against his palm. “Once again, you take pains to remind us of our defeat in war.”

“Herr Reich Minister, if you’ve read the story—”

“Every word of it, I assure you.”

“—we have been on a war footing since this new regime began. Everyone sees it. From school on up, everyone’s given uniforms, ranks, badges. It is a concern. I think the story is about where it could lead—”

Goebbels threw down the magazine. “I told you I read every word. The scientists’ plan, which might I add is disgusting, is thwarted at the end. I was even glad to see it!”

“So is it not wiser to pursue peace? Germany can rise again, without any need for retribution…”

“Germany has risen again, and I would expect you to remember that. And… My God, man! Arms hanging from a wall? And another disembodied head? What accounts for this apparent fixation you have with heads in jars?”

“It’s what was in the films, sir.”

“The films, the films.” Goebbels paced the floor. “So help me I will have that man found, whoever sent them to you, if it’s my final act on Earth.”

“The British, the Americans, they have such tales. Should we not surpass them in all things, including such imagination?”

Goebbels stroked his chin. Perhaps… perhaps. He had one more story to address, though. Without taking his eyes from Steiger, he bent down, picked up the offending publication, found the page he was looking for and held it open before him.

“And what am I to make of this ‘Iron Sky’ from the year 2012? We quit this world altogether, and retreat all the way… to the moon?”

“I rather liked that, being the first nation to colonize it.”

“We build a gigantic space-warship? We convert a negro into a stormtrooper, and dress him in the uniform like a doll? What the devil, man? Do you think those races can somehow be redeemed?”

Steiger knitted his brow, mouth tight, no doubt pondering how far he should stick his neck out. He cleared his throat. “Sir, before this regime, no one talked of race like they do now. Perhaps it’s because, well, no one really needs to be redeemed. In the story they try to change the man, but it doesn’t work so well. He was clearly meant to be the way he was and it was a mistake to try to force it, so I believe the idea’s fitting.”

Goebbels tossed the magazine aside. “I’m not sure I would want to see inside your head, Herr Steiger, or everything you think is ‘fitting.'”

For a long moment, he appraised his prisoner, standing and watching. Inside, his heart raced. His cylinders were all firing now, and the monotony of the day was far away. When it came time to write in his diary this evening, he might well give this fellow a whole page. When Steiger had squirmed enough, Goebbels spoke.

“Steiger, understand one thing. Any chance you have depends on what you tell me now. You must answer, and answer quickly. You mentioned that a note came with these films?”

“Oh yes. From—”

“I remember who the sender claimed to be. But what else did it say?”

Steiger glanced out the window, down at his shoes.

Goebbels stepped in front of the man, cigarette in hand. He blew a long exhale of blue smoke. “What are you not telling me?”

“Well—”

“Did it also mention the Führer?”

Steiger’s face told all. The man’s lower lip quivered, he tightened his mouth and nodded. “It also mentioned—”

“Himmler? Goering?”

“It mentioned you, Herr Reichminister.”

Goebbels took another drag, exhaled. “Did it now. And what did it say about me?”

A long pause. “It said only that… you would do your part to burn out our future. Those exact words. You would burn out our future.”

The Reichminister stood with one hand in his pocket. “The event of May tenth, is that what he meant? Steiger, look around you. Think. You can see the state of our nation for yourself. Are we not the prouder, the stronger for it? The very purpose of burning all that trash was for our future.”

“I’m only relating what the note said.”

Goebbels positioned himself in front of the publisher, the tall man who seemed to shrink smaller every minute. “From the moment you started talking,” he said, “I knew the Jews had set you up.” He limped to his desk, dropped the magazine on his desktop, and ground out his cigarette on it. “What do they hope to gain with this? Are they getting desperate, perhaps?”

Steiger shrugged.

The Reichminister did not stop. He continued to the door, took hold of the knob and pulled it open. Two men in black uniforms waited on the other side. The color drained from Steiger’s face.

“When you get to the camp at Sachsenhausen,” Goebbels said, “you can tell your Jewish bosses I won’t be tricked so easily.”

Steiger did not move, but hung his head, biting his lip. The men came in, each taking an arm, and led him out. The door clicked shut behind them.

Goebbels edged around his desk and sank into the chair. Reaching for the publication, he saw its cover and, for an instant, stiffened. Then he followed through with seizing and dropping it into his wastebasket, clunk. He sat back as his eyes found the wall clock. Five minutes till noon.

Well. Curious now, what he had just seen. The magazine’s title. Drei Geschichten der Zukunft, Three Stories of the Future, except Zukunft, the word for Future, was gone, burned through by his cigarette.

Goebbels looked up in his chair. Bormann and the SS men were hauling the corpses into the passageway, toward the emergency exit. He rose and followed, still holding the magazine. In a few minutes he stood in the Chancellery garden with Hitler’s SS adjutant Günsche, the valet Linge, and Bormann. They faced an artillery crater brimming with petrol, two dark shapes lying with the stillness of death in that oily pool. When Günsche lit the fire and jumped back, it wooshed up in a yellow fireball, the heat stinging Goebbels’ skin, and the magazine slipped from the former Reichminister’s fingers.

Beypore, India, 1866

On the morning of her fiftieth birthday, Bibi woke to the sound of her husband chewing loudly next to her in bed. Neither of them knew it was Bibi’s birthday, born as she was without a birth certificate, but it was to be a special day anyway because for the first time since their wedding, they would be receiving guests.

Bibi soaked basmati rice and orange lentils in copper bowls, stacked sweet samosas crammed with shredded coconut onto her best platters, and chilled glass jugs in cold water before filling them with green, salty lassi. Special silver plates had been purchased from a widow in the next village. Bibi’s husband had transported them back to their home.

Their pistachio-green bungalow sat at the edge of a mango orchard. Bright-orange garlands of marigold hung near the entrances. Bibi had woven the flowers herself; such was the occasion. Two more garlands waited on the dining table, ready to adorn the necks of the couple who would be arriving by train from Tirur later that afternoon. Bibi’s husband would meet them at the station with a wagon to bring them and their suitcases to the bungalow.

The guests were two of her childhood friends from the village by the sea. Bibi had moved up in the world: now she lived even closer to the ocean, next to a less seaweed-strewn stretch of beach. Bibi rubbed her round cheeks with freshly ground turmeric root and oil, as she had done the day before her wedding. She admired the henna patterns she had drawn on the palm of her right hand. But her fingers tingled with such excitement that the pallu of her green and pink sari escaped her grip over and over again as she tried to arrange the pleats neatly around her waist.

Amina and Arif had married around the time of Bibi’s first wedding. They still lived in the village that Bibi had fled after her first husband’s funeral. Bibi had found love and a new life in a different fishing village. She had met her new husband one early spring evening while bathing in the ocean. She had shrieked when she had first seen him. He had been sniffing around the pile of clothes she had piled neatly next to a coconut tree, sifting through her garments.

“Hey, you! Leave my things alone,” she had wailed from between the waves. But the mysterious creature had run away with her sari blouse, and a naked Bibi had staggered onto the beach, arms clamped across her chest, knees awkwardly knocking as she had tried to conceal her womanhood. The creature had scampered between the coconut trees, dragging her blouse and frolicking, pleading with her to give chase. So she had. It was the very first day that she had emerged from the house after four months of ritual mourning. And this—this felt like destiny. A dark and playful stranger had chosen her, and she could have sworn that she had been too busy praying for the repentance of her deceased husband to even think about asking Allah for a new man.

Bibi had skipped after the creature as he had dragged her sari blouse through the sand. She had chased him between thick tree trunks and jumped over vines that had scratched her smooth, brown skin. Bibi hadn’t cared. She had been lost in the moment, giggling like a schoolgirl. The pair had collapsed on the sand and lain cheek to cheek, huffing and puffing and laughing. The sky had turned black. Bibi had pulled the first brightly colored sari she had worn in months over their bodies.

Bibi told anyone who would listen, “It was love at first sight. When you know, you know.” To the young women who sold marigolds by the temple, she would say, “When you put aside expectations of how you think your perfect spouse will look, smell, and act, that’s when you’ll find true happiness.”

Her second wedding had been a small affair, as was the custom for a widow: only two fisherwomen to bear witness, and an imam to officiate the union. Her first husband’s death, caused by choking on a fish bone, had rattled her. She was relieved that her second husband refused to eat spined creatures of any kind.

By the time the guests pulled up to the house in the wagon, it was filled with the aroma of Bibi’s cooking. Biryani, idli, masala dosa, and three kinds of daal were arranged on the table. Bibi pushed a serving spoon into a platter of pilau rice scattered with strands of saffron and topped with flaked almonds and plump raisins.

“Come in, come in!” Bibi said, standing at the entrance, two garlands bouncing in her hands. “You made such a long journey. I’m so glad you found Babu. I was worried you would walk past him at the train station. He can be too quiet for his own good.”

“But where was he… we weren’t sure?” said Arif.

“Well, you got here, so everything worked out perfectly,” replied a grinning Bibi. She laughed and ushered her guests over the threshold. They ducked to receive the floral necklaces. “Now be careful and don’t bend over,” Bibi said, patting the marigolds against Amina’s bosom. “Sometimes Babu gets carried away and likes to nibble.”

She showed the silent couple to the table, where she lifted cloths and plates to reveal the fragrant feast. She had expected at least a few compliments about her house and her cooking. But when she turned back to look at the pair, their eyes were as white as coconuts and as wide as tea plates. “Yes, yes,” said Bibi, “I made all this food for you!” She watched their eyes grow wider as Babu trotted into the house and sat by the door to catch his breath. “Very special guests have come to meet my very special husband. Now please, won’t you sit?”

Bibi stroked her husband’s hair and picked strands of hay from his beard, flicking them into the air. “I should have made a garland for you,” she said, and gave him a peck on the cheek. She picked up a cloth sack that sat near the entrance, hoisted the burlap over her shoulder, and walked to the table with Babu at her heels.

Babu settled into his usual position at the head of the table. Bibi emptied the cloth sack directly onto the tablecloth in front of him and poured him a glass of green lassi. Arif stared at the food. Amina shook her head. “I’m sorry, but we won’t be able to stay tonight,” she said.

“Arre, what talk is this?” said Bibi. “Chup karo! You only just got here. Babu helped me prepare the guest room for you. How many husbands help their wives with such chores, eh?” She dished out a puddle of orange daal onto Arif’s plate.

He looked at Amina, who was mouthing something slowly. “This is enough!” he said. The pair turned their heads and rudely stared at Babu. Babu looked up from his hay pile and let out a faint baaah.

“What do you think, Amina? I did good, eh?” Bibi said, and giggled. “For an old woman like me, I am so lucky.” Amina coughed. Bibi handed her a cup of lassi to clear her throat.

Babu didn’t speak. He chewed and grunted and eventually spit brownish wads onto the floor. A long silence followed the expulsion of the last chunk of cud, and then a burp, for extra flourish. “Oh ho, Babu!” Bibi sighed. “This is why I gave you the big napkin.” She shook her head and looked at Amina. “I never understood how husbands are always so disgusting. How do we cope, eh?”

Amina and Arif moved food around their plates. “Eat, Arif. Eat,” Bibi insisted. Arif scooped fingerfuls of daal into his mouth and talked with his mouth full, the lentils muffling his voice as he said, “We have to go.” He glared at his wife, and Amina stood and walked toward the shoes she had left by the front door. Babu had nibbled on the leather soles on his way in.

“Oh bhai! But I haven’t given you masala tea and samosas yet!” Bibi cried, clutching her dupatta to her chest. “You must stay. Babu, take them to the divan. What’s that? Yes, I can see it, too. They are very tired.”

Babu excused himself from the table and began to clear up the spit wads from the floor. He cocked his head and looked at the guests through long, curved eyelashes. Bibi nudged him in the direction of the divan and their guests followed. Arif sat on the small chair closest to the door. “Not there, Arif,” Bibi said. “That’s Babu’s chair.”

In the kitchen, ginger-scented puffs of steam condensed on Bibi’s round face as she stewed black tea in a steel pot with cardamom and slivers of unpeeled ginger root. She arranged sweet samosas on a silver plate and carried the treats to the guests, who were sitting in silence.

Babu was still chewing. “I feel so lucky,” Bibi said. She handed the samosas to Amina and Arif and placed cups of hot tea on the table. “I never thought I could have a husband who is so quiet, so loving.”

Bibi poured tea into a silver bowl and held it to Babu’s mouth. He puckered his lips, unfurled a thick tongue, and slurped the tea. Bibi stroked her husband’s head. “Tell him about your business, Arif,” Bibi said, nodding her head. “Babu is very interested in the import-export trade.”

“Really? I mean, I really think we should be going,” Arif said. He placed his teacup on the table and stood. Bibi walked over and gently pushed him back down into the chair. “Babu can take you to the station anytime, but there is no train until tomorrow,” she said quietly.

What did it matter what her husband looked like? So what if he didn’t speak the same tongue? So what if he didn’t eat the same food? Could they not see that she was happy? Did a woman’s contentment mean nothing? Bibi crossed and uncrossed her arms. She stood to refill Arif’s teacup, pouring from the pot until it reached the brim and spilled into the trembling man’s saucer. “I said, tell him about your business.”

Arif explained to Bibi that he bought long-grain rice from a distant village, transported it by donkey to Tirur, and sold it at twice the price. “No, tell him,” Bibi said, pointing her chin in Babu’s direction. Arif turned to Babu, opened his mouth, and closed it.

Babu scratched his face. “That means he is very impressed,” Bibi said. She turned to Amina. “But with all that hard work your husband does, I bet he doesn’t have much time for you, not the way my husband has time to cuddle and play with me.” Amina nodded silently.

Bibi sipped her tea and told them about the beginnings of her love affair. The night of the beach encounter, after Babu had licked her cheek and disappeared into the bush, Bibi had knelt on the sand and prayed to Allah that she be blessed with a spouse as playful and affectionate as the creature she had danced with at sunset. Her first husband had been a debt collector with a capricious demeanor and chronic bowel troubles. Sometimes the gas escaped from his mouth, other times it emerged from the rear end. Either way, Bibi said, she felt that her life had been engulfed in a constant miasma of stink.

The very next day, Bibi’s prayers had been answered. She had spotted Babu at the grain market. Her hair had still been dripping wet from that morning’s ablutions—an indecent, besharam way in which to leave the house, she knew. Mother had warned against it ever since Bibi was a young girl. “Wet hair attracts djinn,” Amma had said. “If a girl walks outside with wet hair, especially beneath trees and especially at Maghreb, the djinn will sniff you out and follow you home.”

At the market, Bibi had let the thin pink dupatta slip from her head to reveal the glistening locks beneath. She had wandered through the bazaar in her rose-pink kameez and had spotted Babu’s head peering at her from between two burlap sacks. His nostrils had quivered as he caught Bibi’s scent. His eyes had tracked her as she moved between mountains of powdered spices. She had known it was him instantly: that solid frame, those long, thick eyelashes. He had been excited to see her again.

“Two pounds of chapati flour,” she had said to the old man sitting at Babu’s side. She had eyed Babu as the man poured flour into a cloth bag and held the bag out for Bibi to take. “You want him?” he had said, looking from Bibi to Babu and back to Bibi again. “If you want him, you can have him.” The man had jiggled the bag and pointed to the coins in Bibi’s hand.

“Sometimes love really is that simple,” Bibi sighed. “You wouldn’t believe how easily true love can fall into your lap.” Amina listened with parted lips. “The very next week, we were married in that mango orchard,” Bibi said, pointing out beyond the open door, where a golden sun was melting into the mango trees. “We built this house with money my first husband had stashed. Sorry I couldn’t invite you to the wedding, but you understand these things. That is the custom for a widow. Small wedding. No fuss.”

Arif nodded his head. Amina stared at the floor.

It would be dark soon, and Babu liked to take a leisurely stroll before bedtime. “Helps him digest,” Bibi explained, patting her belly. She stacked the teacups on a tray, carried them to the kitchen, and returned with her hands dripping water. Bibi crouched in front of Babu and gently combed her fingers through the wiry hairs sprouting from his chin. When his beard was clean, she lay her warm, damp hands over his hooves and picked at the fibers jammed between his toes. She pecked her husband on the snout and stroked his cheeks until he sighed.

My office is on the corner of North Hampton and 56th, what some people might call Hampton Heights, and others consider a slice of urban decay. I call it cheap rent, and I share the building with shadows and silence. The neighborhood thrives on secrets, its inhabitants and the patrolling cops alike keeping their business to themselves. Not a place a young girl should loiter in the small hours of morning. Which is why I was more than a little surprised to find a 14-year-old Asian girl sitting outside my office one chilly Friday morning.

“A little early for a visit,” I said.

“It’s 10,” she said. She was a slight girl, a hair over five feet with long black hair and the ramrod straight back of a teen trying to make a good impression on an adult.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I slid the key into the lock and opened my office door.

“Winter break.”

“Huh.” I walked inside. “Come on, it’s freezing.” I waved her to follow me. She did.

I’m pretty sure my office was zoned as a studio apartment, but the owners had been too excited about having a tenant to put up much of a fuss about how I used the place. It smelled as musty and old as it looked. I put my coffee on the walk-through kitchen counter, hung my coat on the rack, and crossed uneven hardwood to sit at my desk. She was still standing near the doorway.

I wondered what I must look like to her. I was stocky, shorter than average, but still a head over her, with the wide-shouldered build of a linebacker. My hair and beard were long, tangled messes because I had skipped the morning shower. I would have smiled at her, but I’ve been told by more than one woman that my smile is more off-putting than my stern face. I had no clue how to put her at ease. For someone whose job it is to find kids, I’m pretty damn bad at talking to them when they find me.

“Do you want a coffee or something?” I asked. “I don’t have any of that Monster or whatever you kids are drinking these days.”

She smirked. “It’s Celsius now. But no, thanks.”

I nodded. “Take a seat. Might as well tell me why you’re here.”

She took a seat in the padded accent chair in the corner. It was an awkward several feet from my desk, but it was the only chair in the room. I’d meant to purchase actual office chairs but hadn’t gotten around to it in the last few years.

The girl sat primly in the chair, like something might jump out of it and eat her. She was trying her hardest to give an impression of someone professional and unbothered, as if any teenager ever could. There was desperation in those eyes. If she had a hat, it would be in her hand. The poor girl was terrified.

“Let’s start with your name,” I said.

“Chee.”

“Hmong?” I asked.

She nodded, surprised.

“I have a doctor colleague who helps me out on occasion. He’s Hmong.” Truth was, Fong was a good friend. He was also my cultural bridge to the neighborhood Hmong community. Being white had its advantages in many areas; communicating with minority community in-groups was not one of them. He helped me pick up a few words and understand the culture where I wouldn’t otherwise. That being said, after doing this for a few years, I had picked up a few things myself. Like common names.

I rummaged through my desk drawers for a fresh notepad, settled for a half-used one, and wrote Chee at the top.

“Okay, Chee,” I said. “Tell me why you’re here.”

“My sister’s missing and no one is looking for her.”

Chee laid it all out for me, and I scribbled the pertinent bits on my notepad: 16-year-old older sister named Bao, went out after dark two nights ago, hasn’t come home.

“What about the cops?”

“We tried. They say she is probably a runaway. But she’s not.” There was more desperate fear in her eyes than before. Maybe Chee was better at staying proper than I gave her credit for.

“I believe you.” I did, for the most part. At least, I didn’t take what the cops had to say as proof of anything. It was a rare day the boys in blue made an appearance here. Even rarer was the day they would help find a near-grown Hmong girl. “What about your parents?”

She shook her head. “My mom is too old to do anything to help. And my dad… Well, he’s gone.” She said it with the uncertainty of someone still trying to figure out how to tell people. “I don’t know where else to go.”

“Nobody else in your family will help?”

“My dad was the clan leader. Without him, no one has any obligation to me or to Bao.” She paused.

A teenage girl whose dad recently died loses her sister and has nowhere else to turn. Call me a sucker, but how could I say no?

“Any idea where to start?”

She beamed. It might have been the first genuine smile I’d seen on her. “My uncle. My mom and I live with him. I overheard him saying he saw something to the police, but I couldn’t hear what. They didn’t let me out of my room.”

“Your mom’s then.” I stood up. “You coming?”

She blanched, started to say something, stopped, and finally said, “Yeah.”

I grabbed my coffee and coat.

“I can’t pay…” she said, then added, “much, yet.”

Of course not.

Chee’s mother’s house was a few blocks away, but we still drove. The sky was a clear blue and the sun hung up there like a big lie. Not a single ray of heat reached the earth today. It was early enough in the morning that the temperatures hadn’t climbed above single digits. They likely wouldn’t all day. Even with the heater blasting, my fingers were numb on the steering wheel.

I stepped out of the car and the air bit at my cheeks. Why did I live where the air hurt my face?

There were no cars in the driveway, and the garage door was open to an empty workshop. Did she walk to school every day?

Chee’s mother was a stout woman who appeared to have had Chee later in life. She wore her age with the bearing of someone who had earned every wrinkle and spot. She greeted us at the door and, with a fuse equal in length to her height, began yelling at Chee in Hmong.

The conversation flew past me like I had front row seats at the racetrack: loud and fast. I tried to keep up, but the few words I recognized were “Bao” and “meeka”, which had something to do with being white. Hang around enough Hmong folks and you’re bound to be talked about.

After a while, I started to shiver, the cold creeping into my bones. The mother-daughter yelling match was oblivious to the cold, however, and blocked me from entering the door. I considered returning to my car and wiping my hands off the whole business. But I’d already promised Chee I’d help. Damn principles. I really needed to work on those.

A stooped, elderly man appeared in the doorway, appeared to scold Chee and her mother, then turned to me.

“Come in before you freeze your asses off,” he said. That I understood.

The inside of the house was bare, save for a large and comfortable couch. There was a large empty space on the other side of it, as though the room was meant for hosting many guests who hadn’t been seen for some time. Once we settled in, and my teeth had stopped chattering, the old man, who Chee explained was her uncle, spoke again.

“You’re supposed to be in school.” He was a tall man, bent under the weight of his age. Still, he commanded a presence of authority in the room that the women deferred to.

“It’s winter break,” she said under her breath.

The old man scoffed. “It’s January. I’m not that old.” Boy, did I feel dumb. He turned to me. “We’re very sorry for the trouble our niece has caused you. Thank you for returning her to us. However, I have to ask you to leave so we can address this family matter as a family.”

“Wait…”

The old man stood up. “To your room Chee. Sir, I can escort you out.”

Chee stood. “He’s here to find Bao.”

Her sister’s name blanketed the room. Everyone fell to silence. Chee’s uncle flushed. That interested me. It was one thing to be shocked by the mention of your missing niece, another to get angry.

“The police are looking for her,” Chee’s uncle said.

“The police are doing nothing,” Chee pleaded. “No one is doing anything.”

Her uncle snapped at her in Hmong.

“He will help,” Chee said. “He finds people. That’s his job.”

“It’s also the police’s job,” her uncle said. “Go get ready for school.”

Chee opened her mouth to protest some more and looked at me. I nodded my head towards the hallway that I assumed her room was down. Finding no allies, Chee stormed away. I felt a little bad for the kid, but I needed her uncle alone.

“If you’d please leave now, sir,” her uncle said. “I have to call the school to see if someone can pick her up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that quite yet.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chee’s a child, you’re right about that. But she’s right about something else.”

His eyes narrowed.

“I told her I’d help. As far as I’m concerned, she’s a client and I don’t abandon clients until I’ve done my part. Right now, that means trying to find Bao. Chee doesn’t know much, but something tells me you know more. So you’re going to spill and then I’ll save you a call to the school and drop her off myself. Fair trade?”

The man studied me for a long moment, features hard. Maybe bursting into someone’s house with their teenage niece and yelling at them wasn’t the best for building rapport.

“Thov, kuj xav pab koj.” My Hmong was not perfect, but even the attempt softened his features. He continued his study of me. Whatever he found, he appeared satisfied with.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Owen. Owen Ashton.”

“You’re Fong’s friend. He talks about you. Says you found his cat.”

I sighed. “A long time ago, yes.”

He nodded. “Do you have a business card?”

I paused.

“I’d rather not send my niece off with a stranger. I’m sure you understand, given everything.”

“Sure.” I reached into my pocket and produced a business card. It was plain beige with my name and contact info under the words Private Investigator in bold lettering.

He took it and sat down.

“What do you know?” he asked.

“Bao was out late two nights ago. She never came back. That’s about all Chee told me.”

He scoffed. “Of course it is. Did Chee tell you Bao was a little whore?”

“No, she didn’t.” I held my poker face.

“She was all around town with these boys. Not Hmong. Not even Asian. Whites, Blacks, Mexicans. Everything but Hmong. She was trying to shame our family. Mao and I,” he gestured to Chee’s mother, “we tried to stop it. Scolded her. Grounded her. Forbid her from seeing them. But she was so determined to ruin us.” He spat the words like rotten milk. I got his meaning.

“I get your meaning,” I said. “What happened to her?”

“What do you think?” he said. “A damn boy. I went to check on her one night and she was gone, her window open. It was two days ago now. First night of this cold. I couldn’t let her be alone out there, so I went looking for her and found her. Then, I saw her.”

“Bao?”

“No,” he whispered and leaned in. “Poj Ntxoog.”

I didn’t recognize the name.

“A little ghost girl,” he added.

“How did you know?”

“Her clothes. She was wearing rags, almost nothing, but she didn’t look cold. It was below zero, but she wasn’t shivering at all. And she wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet were bare and they were…” He choked up. There was honest terror in his eyes. “They were backwards,” he said when he had gathered himself. “There wasn’t anything else it could be.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran. I didn’t know which way I was going but I just ran.”

“And what about Bao?”

He shook her head. “Bao isn’t the first girl to go missing around here. There’s been five children in the last three years who haven’t come home. All girls. All around Bao’s age.” He looked up at me, his eyes red and watery. “All of them turn up dead sooner or later. And the Poj Ntxoog is there every single time.”

I drove Chee to school. When I parked out front, she paused and looked thoughtful.

“Not embarrassed by your old private detective, are you?”

She looked at me, uncomprehending. No one gets good humor these days.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“Uncle was wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“The first girl, Mai Neng. I didn’t know her that well, but I know people who did.” She looked at me. “No one saw a Poj Ntxoog around her.”

After I’d dropped Chee off at school, I made a phone call. Fong was a doctor, which meant there was as much a chance of him being on rotation as not when you called. Thankfully, he picked up.

“What can you tell me about Poj Ntxoog?” I said.

“Hello to you too, Owen. I’m well, thanks for asking.”

“Hi, sorry. I’m on the job and need some quick info.”

He sighed from the other side of the line. “We have to work on your people skills.”

“After I find the missing girl.”

“There’s always a missing girl.”

“Fong…”

“I know.” I pictured him raising his hands in defeat. Fong and I had been friends since middle school when we bonded over our love of detective stories. We were cool, okay. Though only one of us ended up following the path. “What was it you needed?”

I let out a strained breath. “Poj Ntxoog?”

He laughed. “I just like making you pronounce it.”

“Fong!”

“Yeah, yeah. Poj Ntxoog. It’s like a little girl ghost. Long hair, bad clothes, whole Asian ghost girl nine yards.”

I scribbled some notes.

“Supposed to have backwards feet,” he continued. “Can I ask why you’re asking?”

“Missing girl,” I said. “Hmong. Uncle who saw her last says he saw Poj Ntxoog there too. Says a bunch of girls have gone missing and this thing is there every time.”

“Weird.”

“Why weird?”

“I mean, Poj Ntxoog is sort of a trickster. Like in the stories, men will be walking alone in the forest, run into one, and fall victim to her. She’s not usually associated with missing kids.”

“That is odd.”

There was a long pause as I wrote some notes. Then Fong spoke up.

“Owen, you don’t think there’s a serial killer or something going around, do you?”

“I can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. But it’s too early to say. Could just be coincidence.”

“You don’t believe in coincidence”

“I don’t believe in ghosts either, but I know better than to rule them out.”

Milwaukee Public Library’s Capitol Branch is a small, one-story brick building across from a McDonald’s that gets a lot more traffic. I was never much of a library guy myself; I sourced most of my cheap romances online, but this particular branch was home to one of the best resources in this part of town I had — Doug Shirley.

Doug was a middle-aged black schizophrenic. Which meant he was also homeless, on and off medications, and in and out of jail. He never kept a phone number for more than a month. When he’s not in cuffs or a locked unit of one of Milwaukee’s hospitals, Doug can most consistently be found at the library.

When I walked into Capitol Branch, Doug was in his normal corner chair by a window with a large stack of books beside him.

On his meds, Doug was one of the most articulate, well-read, and well-informed people I knew and trusted. He read everything, talked to everyone, and heard every bit of gossip the Hampton Heights homeless community had to offer. And he liked me, which was a plus.

Days he was off his meds, though, Doug was as unpredictable and scatterbrained as his criminal record would suggest.

He was bald up top except for the sides. When he’s in bad places, he keeps his hair about as well as a bird’s nest. Today, the sides of his head were cropped short, the white-gray hair almost a layer of dust. A thick five-o’clock shadow was apparent even though it was noon.

I sat in the chair beside Doug and plucked a book from the pile: Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

“What’s the theme this week, Doug?” Doug’s reading spells always had a theme, though they could range from as simple as dinosaurs to as esoteric as written by a Sagittarius.

He grunted a greeting but didn’t look up from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon to answer. I hazarded my own guess.

“Missing girls?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. I was close. I took a peak at a third title. The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly.

“Missing kids.”

Doug smiled. “How you doing, Mr. Ashton?”

“I’m great, Doug. How are you?”

“Perfect. Weather couldn’t be better for some mysteries.” The wind was howling. Goosebumps rose on my skin. Sometimes cold was a mindset.

“Speaking of,” I leaned in. “I’ve got one I could use some help on. In fact,” I tapped the top book on his pile, “I think it fits your theme.”

“For real?”

I nodded. “What have you heard about a little Hmong girl? Went missing maybe 3 days ago, lives on 54th.”

“Hmong?”

“Asian.”

“Oh.” He thought about it for a moment. I let him. “I don’t know nothing about Asian, but I know a girl was supposed to have been out too late by the creek a few nights ago. Damn cold.”

“Lincoln Creek?”

He nodded. “Richie saw her. Said it was damn cold out. Too damn cold for a little girl. Said he wanted to help her, get her home, or warm or something. Tried to go up to her, but…”

“But what?”

“But Richie got spooked.”

“Spooked?”

Doug shook his head. “Says he saw a ghost.” Then he shrugged. “I figured he was off his meds.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“Don’t know. Richie says he got so scared he ran off and forgot all about her ‘till he was at the tent.”

“Thanks, Doug. I’ll let you read some.” I slipped a ten into the book I was holding and put it back on top of the pile. “That’s a good one.”

I got up to leave. “Oh, Doug.”

“Yeah?”

“How’d Richie know it was a ghost?”

Doug shook his head. “Said something about long black hair and dirty clothes. Sounds like he’s watched too much J-horror to me.”

Sometimes being a detective is about following people, sometimes it’s about talking to people, and other times it’s walking through the freezing cold along 21 square miles of urban watershed looking for clues.

From where Chee’s uncle and Richie had seen the girl, I managed to narrow my search to the few miles near Hampton Heights. In the hours it took me to search, the sun descended below the horizon. As soon as it did, the cold crept deep into my bones. I was wearing a heavy wool overcoat and a sweater underneath. Even still, I could not stop my teeth from chattering. My nose stung as if the cold was its own scent.

Without the sun, a few streetlights lit the neighborhood in a dull fluorescent glow. It was not the best to search for clues under, so I pulled out my phone’s flashlight. My fingers, numb even through my gloves, struggled to keep the light stable.

The ground was a frozen block of snow. Nothing fresh had fallen in the last few days and, even with the wind, the snow was too frozen to have shifted much. Which meant, after a few hours of looking, I noticed what I would not have been able to if there had been fresh snowfall or even low enough temperatures to melt: two sets of footprints headed into a dense cluster of trees at the water’s edge.

That’s where I found the body.

I was far from the streetlights, so I only had my phone light to see by, but I could tell he was not Bao.

He was a young man, maybe mid-twenties, white, slight of frame, with large eyes. He had been dead for a few days. How many was hard to say. The temperature had preserved him and his wide-eyed, mouth-agape expression. His pants were down to his knees. A set of frozen imprints in the ground suggested he had been kneeling when he pulled them down.

A girl goes missing three days ago. She’s last seen near a park. A boy, dead for about that many days, is found in the same park. There was a chance this dead boy had nothing to do with Bao; that he was a coincidence. But Fong was right. I didn’t believe in coincidences.

I wasn’t a woodsman by any means. I wasn’t about to track a deer through the forest by tracks and tufts of fur. But what even I could do was see there were three sets of footprints here: two sets of boots walking into the trees, one set of boots walking out the other way and ending by the road. Beside it, another set of bare feet walking towards the trees. Three people here? The wind rattled the branches above me.

I looked back at the boy and grimaced. A dead body is a little above my paygrade. With a surge of good decision-making that often eludes me, I took out my phone and dialed the number of Sergeant Laity, my usual source of insight into Milwaukee PD. He picked up on the 5th ring.

“What do you want, Ashton?”

“Nice to hear from you too, Laity. I’m doing swell by the way.”

“It’s fucking 11 at night. I left my pleasantries in my dreams.”

“Old man much?”

“I work odd hours. Look. Why are you calling?”

“Dead body in the woods by Lincoln Creek. Looks like it might have been here a while.”

“Jesus Christ, Ashton. Call 911 with that stuff, not me.” He was awake now.

I shrugged, even if he couldn’t see me. “He’s dead, Ashton, and not going anywhere. Didn’t seem like much of an emergency.”

“For fuck’s sake, stay put. I’m calling it in.”

“No can do.”

“What do you mean no can do? You found a dead body, Ashton. Stay by it.”

“Can’t. Missing kid might not have the time.”

“God Damn it, Ashton…”

I hung up the phone. I’d already started to follow the boot prints out of the trees and towards the road. The bare footprints stayed beside them the entire way.

The footprints faded away much before they neared the road, but I followed the direction they pointed me towards: to an old, single-story apartment building with boarded windows. It looked how I imagined my own office building would once I left.

One window was shattered inwards into a pile of glass and snow. I glanced around. No one was out—too cold and late—and slipped through the open window.

Inside was not much warmer than out as the wind howled in behind me. My breath still puffed out in front of me. The tips of my ears burned, and I wondered if I was dumb enough to have given myself frostbite. I pulled my jacket tighter and walked deeper into the building.

Whatever the layout had been before, the building was now stripped to its skeleton. Gapped hardwood floors groaned under my weight. Beams and the remaining dry wall shrieked in protest as the wind outside threatened to rip the building apart. The boarded windows offered little light. I pulled out my phone’s flashlight again. It cast dark shadows that moved as I walked like the figures at the edges of my vision. The moist scent of mildew itched at my nose. The air was heavy with dust and who knew what else. My skin crawled with the imagined grime.

Maybe I should have waited for Laity. Hell, I’d settle for Doug right now.

I turned one corner, holding my breath, praying not to see a dead little girl, and found empty space. It happened again and again as I moved through the labyrinth of indiscernible rooms until I was sure I had been mistaken and the girl was not here.

I came to a wide, high-ceilinged room that I figured was the lobby. Where there should have been a staircase down was a gaping, black hole in the floor. I stepped away from it.

I passed my light over the room one more time and froze. A dozen feet away, in a shadowed corner of the room that still managed to elude the light, a figure was curled into a ball. A young girl. It was hard to tell from where I stood, but I thought there was a faint rise and fall of her chest. I let out a sigh I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

I took a step forward, but stopped.

At the edge of my phone’s light, a length of black hair shuddered as if blown by the wind, and vanished back into the darkness. My mouth went dry. Blood thundered through my ears. My breath came short and shallow. My legs tensed like springs ready to burst at the slightest movement.

Whatever it was remained cloaked in blackness an inch out of sight. I crept the phone light over, unable to keep it from shaking, to reveal another figure. Another girl. Short. She stood still and silent. Her features were indistinct under a blind of long, black hair. Her arms hung limp at her sides. She wore clothes so filthy, they may as well have been wrapped in rags. Pale skin betrayed scars and bruises over most of her body.

I told myself this was a normal girl, a scared girl, maybe even an abused girl. She was probably just as scared at that moment as I was.

I almost believed it.

“Are you alright?” I took a step forward. The girl did too, her backward feet landing toe first before flopping onto her heels. Nope, not normal.

Bao was still in the corner, shivering and taking shallow breaths.

“I’m not going to hurt her.” I said. “I’m here to help.” I took another step towards Bao. The Poj Ntxoog took another step to stay between us. It was silent the whole time, save for the sick slap of sole against floor.

Whatever it was, it did not look strong. I thought I could take it in a fair fight. But I also remembered the boy, dead in the park. Frozen in place mid-movement. I had never put too much stock in ghost stories, but I wasn’t an idiot either. Still, Bao was in the corner, shivering and presumably starving. For all I knew, she had moments left.

I began to take another step forward.

“Wait!” a girl’s voice said from behind me. Chee’s voice.

I didn’t take my eyes off the Poj Ntxoog. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

“It’s almost midnight,” she said. “I saw you outside and…” She trailed off, her eyes wandering towards the Poj Ntxoog.

“Looking for your sister? Didn’t you hire me for that?”

“Is now the time?” she said and walked forward toward Bao.

“Wait.”

She didn’t. “Mai Neng?” She whispered. The ghost girl said nothing. Chee advanced. “It is you.” Chee spoke to the Poj Ntxoog in Hmong. Though the ghost didn’t speak, it relaxed. Chee walked past it to her sister and shook her awake. Bao stumbled to her feet and put her full weight on Chee’s shoulder. They staggered towards me. I didn’t dare move until they were past the Poj Ntxoog and had reached me. I put my coat over Bao.

“Can you make it outside?” I asked.

“I think so,” Chee said.

“Good. Go. The police should be here soon. There’s something I have to check.”

Chee gave me a questioning look. Her sister moaned and shifted on her shoulder. “Be careful,” Chee said, and she half-carried Bao out of the room.

I looked at the hole in the floor where the stairs should have been. It held wide like a gaping maw eager to consume. I felt eyes staring back at me from within. The Poj Ntxoog still stood where Chee had spoken to her. I couldn’t see any eyes under the mop of hair, but I felt her regarding me.

I didn’t believe in coincidences.

The Poj Ntxoog did not move to stop me when I approached the hole. Within the hole, I made out the tops of washers and dryers against the wall. This must have been the laundry room. I could fall on top of them without too much trouble. Probably. I gripped the edge, slid over, and toppled onto machine tops.

What I found there was a matter for the next day’s paper.

I stood outside, coatless, and shivering after I had given my statement. A lanky cop strode over to me from the abandoned apartment complex. He was about a foot taller than me and, even with being rail-thin, cut an imposing figure.

“Laity,” I said. It was all I could do to keep the shivering out of my voice.

The sergeant nodded. “Ashton.”

“And didn’t make a single dime on it.”

“Another pro bono?”

“What can I say? I’m a bleeding heart.”

Laity looked over to the ambulance where Chee and Bao huddled together under a paramedic’s blanket and my coat. Chee was crying. He sighed.

“I don’t think I can give you shit for it this time,” he said. “But keep it up and we’ll see.”

“I’m not in any danger of getting evicted,” I said.

He nodded. We stood in the cold for a long time.

“They called the cops, Laity.”

He grimaced. “I know.”

“They talked to the same Uncle I did. The footprints were right there for everyone to see for days. All they had to do was look. And now five dead girls, going back who knows how long.”

Laity’s wide, mustached face was set in deep thought. He was silent for a long time. “The guys did what they thought was best with the information they had.”

“When the hell did you get so political with me? It’s Owen. Don’t bullshit me.”

Laity went stern. Anger flashed through his eyes. For a moment, I wondered if my friend was going to hit me, or worse, arrest me for condemning cops. My chest tightened.

I was saved by another cop I didn’t recognize approaching us. “Sarge,” she said to Laity. “Kid’s mom is here. She won’t let us take her to the hospital.”

“God damn it.” Laity made to storm away.

“Wait,” I said. “I might have a way to help with this.”

When Fong had finished examining Bao, we stopped by my place for a nightcap. Or a morning cap. It was nearly six by then. My place was small and a mess, but Fong didn’t say anything. He was short, bald, and had gained a lot of weight since graduating from medical school, but Fong was good people.

“How was she, if I may ask?” My curiosity was burning.

Normally, I would expect my friend to stonewall me with some spiel about doctor-patient confidentiality. Today, however, he sighed. “She’ll be fine. Malnourished and dehydrated, obviously. Some bruises on her wrists. But other than that, she’ll live.”

“Nothing else?”

“No sign of other injury. She wasn’t raped, Owen.”

I let out a tense breath.

“Cops figure out who the dead boy was?” he asked.

I nodded. “Boyfriend. Ran off one night for a romantic evening, only he wanted it a little more romantic than her. Things got rough. Report will say Bao defended herself, knocked him out, and he froze to death by the creek.”

“And what do you say?”

I thought about it. “Boy didn’t have any bruising to suggest how he was knocked out. He was bigger and stronger than her. She was too disoriented to even make it home. Something else knocked him out.”

“Poj Ntxoog.”

“I don’t think it was that either.”

“Come on, Owen. You’re telling me you don’t believe? After all this?” He gestured around the room with his whiskey glass.

“It’s not that. I don’t think it was a Poj Ntxoog. I think it looked like one. You said Poj Ntxoog isn’t associated with missing kids, right? They’re tricksters. Which goes to reason they wouldn’t be protectors either.”

He nodded.

“Chee didn’t call it Poj Ntxoog when she saw it,” I continued. “She called it by name. Mai Neng.”

“The first girl.”

“Exactly. And there was something about the bodies. What this guy did to them. He turned their feet around, Fong. Turned them backwards.”

“Jesus christ,” Fong said. “This is fucked.” He downed his whiskey, and I poured him another one. He stared at it thoughtfully. “They’re going to catch him.” It sounded like a statement, but it felt more like a question.

“I don’t know.” We sat in silence, waiting for the sun to rise on Milwaukee.

Those stripes brought me here. They kept me here for months. And now they are about to make me famous.

I pluck my phone from the console and check the signal. One bar. I might get lucky. I touch redial and listen, tongue on the roof of my mouth, for any sign of a connection. Ahead, the road twists right, then left, around turns blind even in broad daylight. It’s nearly midnight now, with the moon a sliver that does little to aid navigation. I want to press harder on the gas. Instead, I tap the steering wheel with one broken, dirty nail.

“Come on, come on,” I mutter at the phone. After a minute, I glance at the screen again. No signal.

“Damnit.” I thumb the screen to sleep and drop it in the console, then shift my attention back to the road.

The gleam of eyes in my high beams throws my heart into overdrive. I slam the brakes, and the dark woods spin around me until the stag is racing toward my door instead of my bumper. My hands drag the wheel toward him just as he leaps to fly into the right side of the windshield. The impact rolls his body until his flank presses through the demolished glass, half passenger, half hood ornament.

Tires skid, rubber squealing, then crunching gravel and low brush on the downhill slope as I leave the road.The ground drops into a steep bank and the car tilts, two wheels in the air before it rolls, leaving the stag behind. Airbags before and beside me explode, thickening the air with the smell of burnt rubber. Rocks, shrubs, and trees somersault on the other side of the blood-spattered windshield. I bounce in my seatbelt, arms flopping and head joggling to some macabre beat I cannot hear.

The car slams into something—a tree? a boulder?—at the edge of the precipice, that loud metallic crunch echoing as my head whips to one side. The sudden stillness, broken only by the falling of loosened debris and the distant bawling of the injured stag, reaches numbing fingers to drag me into its depths as the woods around me fade to black.

I wake to bright agony, the reek of gasoline, and whispered voices. Someone found me?

“Help!” I whimper and turn my head in excruciating increments to see who has come to my rescue. The slope above me shines pale, brighter in the waning moon’s light, which gleams on the silvered fur of animals gathered there, staring at my predicament. Humans stand among them with long mussed hair, willowy forms, wide eyes… and wings.

I blink, rub my face, which burns with gritty powder. When I look again, the animals and winged people are gone. Trees above the slope stretch shadows down the scrubby incline as if to push or pull my wrecked car from the ledge.

What’s left of the windshield sags toward me like a hammock, its surface spider-webbed and perforated. Glass pebbles lay scattered over me, the seats, the floors, the dash, even the ground around the car, their surfaces winking with moonlight. They look as cold as I feel. I reach for my phone. Its usual cubby sits empty save for the glass. My lifeline is unreachable, lost inside the vehicle or lying somewhere between me and the road that I left so unexpectedly moments—or was it hours?—ago.

I push the button on my seatbelt. The catch ignores my fingers, snugs me tight against the seat cushion. I press harder, struggle, and the car shifts, groaning against the rock.

The drop before me wobbles. I freeze. A chill beyond the night air pumps gooseflesh up my neck, down my arms, across my chest.

Movement on the dark slope draws my attention, head and neck throbbing in protest. Halfway up the hill, a figure makes its way toward me. Another motorist saw the deer, maybe. I close my eyes and breathe a sigh. Help, at last.

“Oh, thank god.” The sound of my own voice is like a knife in my head. “Did you phone for help?”

My rescuer continues down the slope in silence until she nears my car. Thick white hair falls over her shoulders, casting darkness across her eyes. Her cheeks are shriveled like a plum left out too long. Her nose and chin protrude into the moonlight, her puckered mouth lagging in the valley between them. The woman’s shoulders hunch forward, rounding her back with the weight of years. One gnarled hand holds a long, knobbed staff, a useful tool on this uneven ground. Dark clothes hide the details of her body.

Outside my window she pauses, takes in the scene. Looks my car—and me—over from end to end, inside and out. She sucks her teeth. Shakes her head. Puts her free hand on one hip.

“Got yourself in a pickle, I think,” she croaks.

The throbbing in my head muddles my thoughts. “Yeah. Can you help me out here? My seatbelt’s stuck. I need a knife or scissors.”

She stares a moment longer, her eyes still obscured.

Her inspection triggers an itch deep in my chest, beyond the reach of fingers that might dispel it. But something else stirs beneath the itch, an unnerving sensation, as if she is reading my soul. Head trauma can cause all sorts of hallucinations.

Soft footfalls whisper outside my door, and I look up just as the old woman grasps the handle.

“Careful,” I warn. “My balance is off.”

“More than you know,” she says. She opens the door while muttering something beneath her breath, reaches across me, and releases the belt with a light touch. The strap zips back into its sheath, and she takes my hand. “Out with you.”

I try to be gentle. She looks as aged as the woods around us. But the power in her hand and arm, strong as the rocks beneath our feet, catches me off-guard. She pulls me upright as if I were a toddler.

“Thank you,” I say. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I’m Caitlin.”

“I know who you are.”

Her nose points toward me, but I still can’t see her eyes. I frown. Maybe she found my wallet on the ground? I didn’t look for it in the car. I peer down at her hunched form as it moves back toward the wood.

“Come.”

Strange how I hear her command so clearly, even though she did not raise her voice from a near-whisper. I glance back at my totaled SUV, teetering there on the edge of a precipice so deep-set in darkness I cannot see the bottom. I shudder and scurry uphill toward my savior. Aches erupt down my back, as they have in my neck. Twice, I almost fall.

“Do you have a car on the road?” I call. “A phone, maybe?” Probably not at her age. “What’s your name?”

Her silence makes me wonder if she’s heard me, so I shout my questions again. The effort makes my teeth throb.

“You’ve already roused the forest,” she says without looking at me. “No need to wake the dead, too.”

“But I—”

“Shh.” She nears the tree line, her steady pace devouring the rugged terrain like she could do it in her sleep.

A soft peripheral glow draws my eye. Only shadows meet my gaze. Another, ahead, pulls my attention back to our path. Again, there is nothing to see but leafy boles and the last of the moonlight as it slips behind the crags above the treetops.

We follow the path of destruction wrought by my crash. The canopy’s cover mostly shades our passage. I hurry to keep up with the woman’s form, even though a blind person could find their way back in this trail of vegetative carnage. I look around at the gouged terrain, gaps in the kudzu, saplings splintered or ripped from their foundations, and shake my head. How I avoided every mature tree, how I managed to ram against the one boulder at the edge of the crag, how I remain upright and breathing are puzzles I cannot solve. Any landing you can walk away from, as they say.

Ahead, a snuffling grunt accompanies feeble tremors to one side of the trail. The old woman slogs through uprooted shrubbery and broken branches toward the sound. I follow until I see the catalyst of this near disaster.

The stag lies on its side, blood visible along its flank, belly, and face, even in this light. The angle of its head belies the rapid, trembling breaths that still flutter in its chest. It should already be dead. It will be. Soon.

Ah, hell.

My lungs heave for both myself and this innocent bystander. Stupid mistake. I should have been going slower. I should have waited to call Jonah. I should have been watching the road. My knees tremble. My chest shakes. I clap a hand over my mouth. This wasn’t part of the plan.

It hurts to move and I mutter a curse. Climbing and digging will be difficult for a while. Healing, not to mention finding a new SUV and tools, will slow me down. Such a nuisance, this interruption. Innocent or not, if it weren’t for this deer, I’d already be in town, having a beer with Jonah and telling him about my find.

The old woman reaches the stag’s side. I stumble closer.

She squats, lithe as a teenager, touches her hand to its head, mumbles words in a soothing tone I can’t quite place, and the animal quiets. Settles. Its last breath frosts the air around its head, and the woman stays there long after, her lips moving in a litany I cannot hear. At last, she strokes the beast’s head one last time, pulls herself upright, and looks at me.

“Such a shame,” I say. “He was a beautiful stag.”

She stares, expectant. Her hair gleams in the dark.

“What?” I point at the animal. “I didn’t mean to kill it. He was just there, on the road. It was an accident.”

She watches. Says nothing.

“Surely you don’t think this is my fault. If anyone’s to blame here, it’s the stag. He almost killed me.”

The woman shakes her head, a subtle motion in the surrounding darkness. Again, a glow appears off to one side but is gone when I look that way.

“He volunteered,” the woman murmurs.

My attention swings back to her face. “What did you say?”

“I am Baba.” She steps into the trees, gestures for me to follow. “You should see.”

“What about the road?” I can’t seem to help the whine in my voice. Every muscle in my body burns. I touch my face and find crusted blood there. “I need medical attention.”

Baba stops just inside the wood amid a subtle glow, as if dozens of fireflies surround her. One hand on her staff, she watches me. Waits in stillness.

“I appreciate you helping me, Baba, but I need to get out of here.” I wave toward the road. “I think I’ll try to flag down another driver.”

She tilts her head, a slight cant to the white glow of her hair. “Suit yourself.”

I turn toward the road…

… and awaken still belted in my car.

I blink. Frown. Look around as if I have awakened to a dream. This can’t be right, can it?

No. No, I was out. I was, if not safe, at least not wedged against a boulder on this escarpment, teetering at the precipice of my new life. How did I—

I pinch myself. Hard.

Nothing changes, except that the sky seems lighter now. Stars have faded. Without my phone, I don’t even know what time it is.

I look outside at the ground next to my car. No footprints mar the dewy sparkle there. My head falls back against the seat’s restraint. Baba was a dream?

Whispers, soft as a sigh, tickle my ears like a blade of grass drawn along the skin and I start, jerking my head to the side harder than I’d intended. Pain slices into my head and stabs down my neck into my shoulders. I suck a breath through gritted teeth and wait for it to pass. When my vision clears, I see no one, but I feel them.

“Hello?”

The whispers fall silent. Even early birdsong and morning crickets break off. Morning mist lends an otherworldly haze to the setting.

Then, between one blink and the next, I am back in the path wrought by my car’s passage. Baba waits among the trees while I stand calf-deep in a gouge ripped into the ground, neither of us moved so far as a pace.

“Changed your mind, did you?” She sucks her teeth, a glimmer of light twinkling where I imagine her eyes to be.

“What—” I frown and point at my surroundings as I gape and stutter. “How did—”

Baba plucks a weed, chews it a moment before she moves on. Her footfalls make no sound among the clutter of leaves and twigs, as if she levitates. Her passage sets the sparse weeds swaying and soon she is almost out of sight.

“Are you coming?” Her voice is a whisper carried on an invisible breeze.

Like the murmurs I heard in my car. I was back there. I was. And now I am here. How does that even—

“Don’t dawdle,” she calls back. 

I jog to catch up, stumbling over the clutter, my ankles twisting in their own discomfort. Here, beneath the trees, fluctuating patches of shade and pale light dance and shift across bole, ground, and rock. I stop at one particular stone, the size of my fist, with spangles that gleam like burnt amber in a sunbeam.

I’d know it anywhere, now. Metathracite. Or that’s the name I’ve used. I hope it will serve as a foundation in medical cures for something like cancer one day—the tests I ran in camp indicated its enormous potential—but if it finds a worthwhile home in the tech arena, that will serve just as well for my purposes. My name and career ride on the bet that this is a heretofore unknown mineral, that I am in fact its discoverer, and that its unexpected and unique properties will ensconce my find in a position of high demand. I pick it up.

“Nice rock,” Baba says from beside me.

Startled, I leap almost a foot downhill. I stumble into a tree, one hand pulled back to lob the metathracite in defense. I whoosh a loud, long breath. “Baba, don’t do that. I could have hurt you without meaning to.”

“Could you now?” She squints at me, then nods at the rock. “That ain’t worth what you’ll pay.”

“What does that mean?” My head throbs and I squeeze the back of my neck with my free hand.

She steps away, beckons.

I follow, hefting the stone, valuing it in my mind. If it’s as unique as I suspect, metathracite might even revolutionize entire industries. My mind wanders along that pleasant dream as I traipse after Baba, our steps carrying us farther from my vehicle until I’m no longer certain I could find it again. Maybe she’s taking me to her own car? No. That makes no sense. The road lay closer than this, and the path to that destination needed no breadcrumbs up the hillside. Not after my passage.

Maybe Baba lives nearby and heard the crash?

I glance around. This wood seems best fit for animals and trees and birds. What kind of house might Baba have here, so far from the city’s civilized services? My most primitive campsites may not have running water, but they at least have satellite.

Usually.

The tightness in my shoulders and back make continued movement a chore. I should have swallowed a few aspirin before I left my car. Assuming I could find them in the wreckage. “Where are we going?” I call.

She stops a few yards ahead, in the liminal space between light and dark. I make my way to her side.

Baba points to a carpet of blue threaded between and around the gnarled roots of nearby trees as far as I can see. Sun sparkles in dewdrops on tiny velvet caps where the light breaks through the canopy. In the shade, spidery veins of turquoise glow across the mass fungal growth, peering out from within like lights behind curtained windows.

“Spritefoot,” she says. “Catena civitatis. Guter nachbar. Ffrind y coedwr. No matter its name. As essential to this wood as neurons are to your brain. Watch your step.” She leads me on a narrow path between the vivid beds.

I look behind, where our feet have passed, and catch a glimmer of light as it dissipates behind a tree. Just like the others. What is that? I stop, go back, swing around the tree into a cloud of Lilliputian rainbows, wings aflutter all at once, patches of morning sun reflecting their iridescence. The diminutive buzz of one pair multiplied by dozens, hundreds, hums loud as a swarm of hornets. I gasp, then close my mouth, hopeful I’ve not swallowed one of these creatures.

“Ostanovis’, ty uzhe poveselilsya.” Baba speaks from beside me. She waves at the insects, her tone indulgent, even amused. “Begone. We’ve work to do.”

The tiny wings scatter and Baba resumes our trek. “They’ll be back. Curious creatures.”

I hurry to catch up. “What are they?”

“Fae.”

Images of childhood fancy dance through my mind, complete with enchanted forests where time passed differently than in the human world and where winged beings made their home. “Fae? Like faeries? That kind of fae?”

She tosses me a glance past the white hair on her shoulders, the kind of look my grandmother used to keep wee me silent in the midst of company when I rambled too long. I am no longer small, and I open my mouth to say more, but think better and shut it once again. Baba is my exit plan, though I’m starting to think I would have been better off hiking to the road and hitching back to town.

“You tried that,” Baba calls back. “Didn’t work like you expected, did it?”

I stop dead, my shoulders pulled up tight toward my ears like someone poured ice water down my back. She heard my thoughts?

Ahead, she reaches up into the lower branches of a tree, murmuring words I can’t make out. Her hand comes back down slowly, slowly, and she approaches me, still speaking to something on her palm. When she’s close, I see her little friend.

Little: not the right word in this case. The spider Baba holds is larger than her hand.

If I wasn’t frozen already, this would be the catalyst. I stare at the enormous thing, its body and all eight legs covered in fine, glistening hairs that sway in a breeze I don’t feel. Peacock blue cephalothorax and green abdomen stand out in the verdant gloom of the wood, their luminous color capturing light like insects in its web. Red leg joints make every movement look deadly, and its black eyes shine out at me as if I am a juicy offering at its altar.

I back up a step, and Baba stops. “Lady of the wood,” she says. “Nothing to fear. Say hello.”

I nod, babble some inane greeting to the spider, but keep my distance.

Baba pulls the Lady closer to her face. “Sometimes, if I ask nicely, she donates drops of venom to dry infections. Her silk then seals the wound. She and her sisters eat those pests who would carry disease to me or the other mammals in the woods.”

The spider crawls up Baba’s arm. If it gets tangled in the crone’s hair, I’ll have to help her get it out and I can’t do it, I can’t—

Baba coos to the spider and takes it back to its perch, then continues in her original direction. I follow, veering off the side to pass far from the Lady’s nest while keeping Baba in sight. She treads no discernible path. If I lose her, I will never find my way out.

The silence of this place presses against my ears, my chest. I hug myself as I walk. This is all wrong. If not for my eagerness, if not for that deer, I would be in the city. Jonah and I would be having coffee, or maybe breakfast, at that cable car diner he loves so much. Has he missed me yet? Probably not. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone off-grid for weeks. When last I saw him, he tried to give me a job in his department, as if I could ever take root in one spot instead of seeking my fortune out here, under the sky and on the land.

Baba stops. Light falling through the canopy still shows me nothing of her eyes beneath the crown of her hair.

She tilts her head. “Look around.”

I blink. Frown. “I don’t—”

Baba gestures with her chin, left and right. “What do you see?”

Past the wooded shade, a patch of green glows in bright sunlight. Tall spikes of blue flowers bow and waggle with the weight of butterflies and bees that flit between blossoms. A hummingbird, all gleaming iridescence, zips in from the side, spearing flowers one after another.

Above us, crown-shy trees mark fractals against the morning sky, their boughs moving in unison. A small red-and-black bird climbs one bole, moving in jerks and stops, probing the bark before its face with a sharp, long bill. A rustling sound to my right pulls my attention. There, a wild sow shuffles through the undergrowth, her snout scouting the ground before her feet. Behind her, grunting, follow five small piglets, their dark fur spotted and blobbed with random white. They take no notice of us and are gone so quickly I could almost forget they were ever there.

Baba waits, still and quiet.

“Trees,” I say. “Birds. Bees. Flowers. Pigs. Bushes.” I shake my head. What does she want from me?

“There’s your problem. You see the bricks, but not the house.” She gestures. “Those flowers grow only in these forests. They are the only source of food for that hummingbird. The spritefoot and the wood lady who frightened you so are connected. Without the fungus, the spider couldn’t survive. Without the spider, the spritefoot would not grow. The sow and her offspring eat a mushroom native to these mountains. If they did not, the fungi would invade the forest floor, crowd out other native species.” She resumes our journey and speaks over her shoulder, her voice accompanied by the occasional thump of her walking stick on root or stone. “Not just trees. Not just flowers. Not just pigs. Together, they make the Forest. If you pull at even one thread of that tapestry, you damage the whole.”

I follow her footsteps, but her words make no sense.

“Your plan will kill it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We have been watching you. I know what you intend.”

Aw hell! Just my luck to be rescued by an aged greenie, living off-grid in the woods. Yes, she pulled me from my car. Yes, she appeared to be leading me to safety. But she was also trying to stop me from pursuing a dream.

To hell with that.

“My plan will create medicines,” I say, unable to keep the snark silent. “My plan may even save millions of lives.”

“And what of the billions in this forest, and in its brethren all along these mountains?” She shakes her head, but her voice is as quiet now as it has been all along. “Your actions will trigger their fall and affect lands far from this spot. Is that not too high a price to pay?”

“It’s a patch of trees. It’ll grow back.”

She snorts, shakes her head. Mutters something I don’t catch.

“What?” I say. “We’ll only dig the minerals we need, then we’ll move on. Your precious forest will be fine.”

Baba stops so suddenly I almost collide with her hunched form. She peers at me. “You care nothing for the millions. You care only for the one.”

She moves forward again. I wish I had stayed in my car. I wish I had made my way to the road. I could be in town by now, clean and fed. It occurs to me how thirsty I am.

“You need tea.” Baba starts uphill, her aged body taking the incline better than my own.

I’m not surprised that she heard my thoughts. Hear this one, I think, with an imaginary rude gesture.

Baba laughs, a raspy cackle like the sound of ragged fingernails on sandpaper.

“Where are we going?” I cough, one hand to my mouth, then stare wide-eyed at the rosette of blood on my palm. What the—internal injuries? There is pain, yes, but…

“Almost there.”

Baba’s voice and a squawk ahead of us drags me back to the moment, to my surroundings, in time to see a raven swoop toward us. I duck, throw my arms over my head, and shield my face.

“Glupaya zhenshchina.” Baba’s voice reaches me as she moves forward. “Ne obrashchay na neye vnimaniya.”

I peek between my arms. The bird—enormous against Baba’s head—sits on the crone’s shoulder and eyes me as if I am some strange new prey. It chatters and croaks in a near growl while Baba walks on ahead.

“Almost there,” I say, “where?”

Baba points her staff up the hill.

There, a rickety house perches between two trees whose spreading bases and sprawling roots look like large chicken feet that grip the forest floor beneath the dwelling. Beside and behind its exterior walls, the trees rise like guardians, their leaves whispering in a breeze far above the ground.

“That’s where you live?” I say.

Instead of answering, she ascends the steep slope with ease on footholds only she can see. I clamber after her, finding traction where I can until we stand just before the structure. Beneath, branches stretch between the trees, their massive boughs woven together so long ago their flesh has melded one into the other. At the side, Baba climbs a stair that winds around the trunk. I follow, taking in every tiny detail. Each riser bears pads of soft green moss, thin in the center where Baba treads, plush at the sides out of the reach of foot traffic. There, in the thickness, delicate stalks support pale pink cup-shaped flowers so tiny I must stoop to see their forms. Moisture beads along the surface of these tiny worlds, and I wonder if creatures live therein.

As I start up the stair, a breeze wafts some heady fragrance past. I glance around. There, upslope from Baba’s home, a swath of blue flowers hang teardrop heads that nod and bob along curved stems, their leaves swaying like long blades of dark grass. I sniff the air.

“Deòir na baintighearna.” Baba’s voice distracts me. “Officially Dominae lacrimae, though no one gave them the honor of a formal name until they were thought extinct. Once, they covered the floor of these woods and those in similar landscapes. Now…” She sighs and looks over her domain. “They grow only here.”

I step up to the next riser and fall to my knees and Baba is there, her hand on my arm. She lifts me as if I were a child, as if I did not tower over her hunched form. I peer into her face. Shadows gather where her eyes should be.

“You are weak. You need tea.” She speaks to the raven who still rides her shoulder, and the bird is off, croaking a response in flight. It ascends into the shafts of morning sun breaking through the canopy, its wings blotting out the light, and I am falling. Baba says something in a tongue I don’t recognize. Then… nothing.

The world twists around me, all its facets bathed in hues of murky green. Noises and murmurs filter through the confusion. I squeeze my eyes tight, fight the nausea that rises in my throat and threatens to eject my last meager meal. My fists close around something soft. Something crisp. The green swirling slows, and the voices grow louder, crystallize. One stands out among the rest.

Jonah.

Jonah!

I push against the lethargy and struggle awake.

“Well, hello there.” Jonah’s voice sounds beside me.

His short hair is mussed, as if he were dragged from his bed at a wee hour. But he’s smiling, dimples in stubbled cheeks, thin lips surrounding bright white teeth. Concern deepens the brown of his eyes. Instead of his usual loosened tie and button-down shirt, he wears a wrinkled polo shirt, its logo old, unrecognizable.

Above and behind him hangs the white ceiling of a hospital, and it all comes rushing back. The stag. The woods. The slope. The boulder.

Baba. The fae. The watching animals. The delirium that followed the accident.

I roll my head on the pillow and rub my face, clean now of the burning powder from the airbags. My mentor leans on the bed rail, which creaks. I know his expression without looking—bushy brows pulled together in the center, dark gaze scrutinizing me through the lenses of his spectacles, critiquing my actions as if I am still the prized student who hasn’t quite achieved academic superiority.

I lick my lips.

“You are hereby on notice,” he says, “not to ever worry me like that again.”

“How bad?” I croak. I sound like Baba’s raven friend. The one I dreamed of.

“Well,” he pauses, “you will mend. Your car, however, is toast.”

“Yeah.” In a blink, the woods are rolling around me again. The metallic crunch of car versus boulder echoes in my head.

“Do I need to ask what you were doing up there?” The resignation in Jonah’s voice matches that in his expression.

“No. But—”

“Cait.” He shakes his head. “At least don’t go on these goose chases alone. You could have died.”

“A partner wouldn’t have stopped that buck from jumping in front of my car,” I say. “And then I would have been responsible for someone else being hurt.”

“Let me guess.” Jonah peers at me. “You were on your phone.”

“Trying to call you.” I look into his eyes. “I found it, Jonah.”

He pushes upright, runs fingers through his hair. He shoves his hands into his pockets and mutters something under his breath.

“I didn’t catch that.” No doubt, it wasn’t complimentary.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” Jonah says. “Though admittedly this is the first time we’ve had it in the ER. Don’t make me play it out solo in the morgue, Cait.”

Of course, he’s right. But he’s also wrong. “It’s different this time. I really found it.”

His stare holds mine, peering into me, searching for the truth in my demeanor, my words, my resolve. Well, maybe not that latter. I’ve always been resolved, even when chasing false leads. I like to think of it as my superpower.

“What makes this time different?” he asks, his voice tired.

“I found a mineral layer I’ve not seen before. Anywhere.” I don’t tell him I’d stumbled across it by accident when I fell into a shallow ravine and got stuck there for two days while the swelling in my ankle cleared enough to climb back out. “Took a lot of samples back to my campsite, ran chem baths, extractions, the works. At least as much as I could do in a rough lab.” I grin. “The powdered stone showed amazing properties. I believe it’s catalytic. Everything I added it to changed in unexpected ways.”

Jonah frowns. “Explain ‘unexpected.’”

“I’d rather show you.” I stop. “Wait, did they get my things from my car? All my samples were in my field case.”

“I don’t know. They managed to retrieve a few items, I think, but there wasn’t much left. Getting you out was dicey enough. They can’t get your car out yet. They need special equipment to reach it.”

Damn. My belongings must be flung out along the gouged terrain. In that mess, they may never find my field kit. I’d need another. “Oh well. We can go back for more. It looks plentiful in the gorge walls above the tree line in those mountains, and hints of more farther along the range. Now that I’ve found the markers, we can track it.”

Jonah shakes his head. “Cait, I don’t think I can convince the university to back you again. You’ve had too many false leads.”

I stare at him. This man has supported my endeavors without fail ever since pre-doctoral studies, when I took one of his undergrad classes. Okay, yes, I’ve followed a few trails that petered out, but this—

Metathracite is real. I knew it even before I found proof, and now the rest of the world will see, too. He has to believe me. I won’t accept anything less.

The machine beside me begins to beep with a will. Jonah glances at it, then at me, a frown on his face. I breathe deep, slow. The machine still beeps.

He pats my shoulder. “Calm down, Cait.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” I say. “But you need to listen to me. This isn’t like the other—”

Another machine joins the first, and the door sweeps open to admit two nurses and a doctor. Jonah backs away from the bed.

“Step outside, sir,” says the doc.

Jonah moves toward the door.

“No!” I shout. “Jonah, wait!”

“All right, Ms. Banks.” The doctor injects something into my IV line and smiles at me. “Let’s calm things down, shall we? You need your rest.”

I peer past the doc at Jonah, outside the closing door. “No! Jonah—”

The door clicks shut, blocking him from my view. Hospital sounds blur, fuzzing into the texture of my consciousness like moss on a tree root until I can’t tell reality from fantasy.

The doctor speaks to one of the nurses, her voice drawn out and inhuman. “She gets no visitors until…”

Lights dim, greying into twilight like the forest around Baba’s house. My body grows heavy, pushed down into the mattress as though it were weighted with stones.

I try to speak, to tell the doc that I need to tell Jonah… something… I can’t…

A pungent aroma awakens me. The lumpy bed beneath me and the dark, smoke-stained roof timbers above are not those of a hospital. I try to sit up. When that fails, I try to move my head. Nothing works like it should.

“Hello?” I call.

“Good. I wasn’t sure you were coming back.” Baba’s voice comes from my left, followed by a rasping sound.

“Baba?” Stupid. Who else would it be? Except… I was in the hospital. Jonah was there, and—

Baba appears above me, her figure silhouetted by the light behind her.

“Why am I back here?” I try again to sit up. “And why can’t I move?”

“You never left. I gave you a tincture to stop you hurting yourself.” She tilts her head. “Why this stone?”

I blink. “What?”

“The world is full of rocks and pebbles. Why must you destroy these forests to take ours?”

That again. “This mineral is special. It could help to make groundbreaking medicines. Maybe even cure cancer. But I haven’t found it anywhere outside these mountains.”

“Ah. So, you’ve searched the world over then?”

“Well, no. But I’ve done the research, read papers by geologists in every country. None have reported this mineral.”

She stares at me, or at least I think she does. It’s disconcerting to not see her eyes.

“Your work will kill this wood and others like it, wherever you crumble the mountainside.”

“It’s a few patches of trees, Baba. They’ll grow back.” If I could, I would shrug. “It isn’t like I’m hurting the entire planetary ecosystem or anything.”

She moves out of view. Something clatters, metal on metal. Then she returns and lifts my left foot to slide a thin tray beneath it, one with a trough at its edges. I feel nothing, but the image of my foot on a tray disturbs what remains of my calm.

“What are you doing?”

Baba disappears, then returns with a small bowl, the source of that smell that awoke me. She dips a cloth into the bowl, then swabs a sticky brown substance around my ankle and across the top of my foot.

“What are you doing?” My voice carries a shrill tone. The foreboding that began with a thin tray swells to outright concern.

Again, she moves out of sight. Another clattering sound and she’s back, balancing another tray on a stand beside my foot, close enough to see what it holds.

Knives. Scalpels. Saw. What the actual—

“Baba! What are you doing?”

She turns to me and finally, I see her eyes. I wish I hadn’t. Around the lids, her brown flesh is carved into wrinkles that stretch out to her hairline and down onto her cheeks. In the gap between the lids, deep green irises pierce my soul, their color so dark they appear almost black. No white field surrounds them. If I fall into that gaze, I’ll never crawl out again.

I manage to squeak.

“I’m going to take off your foot,” she explains, her voice calm, soft, as it has been all along.

“What?”

She holds up her instruments as if to examine their edges.

“Why?” I ask, my voice still small. “Is it damaged?”

“No.” She wipes the scalpel with the same cloth from her bowl. “But I can use the marrow from your bones in my tea.” She looks up. “Good for my aches.”

“What?” I shriek. “No, you can’t do that!” I struggle. Or, rather, I try.

Baba faces me. “Where’s the harm? It’s not like I’m hurting the rest of your body, right?” She goes back to cleaning and disinfecting her implements. “You can survive with one foot.”

I babble for a moment, scrambling to find words that will stop this horror from taking place. “Okay! Okay, Baba. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Can you wait and let me consider what you’ve said?”

Baba stops, staring at me like I’m a bug beneath a microscope. “I need that marrow.”

“I know,” I say, too fast. “Just let me think this over. Will you do that?” If I can delay her long enough for this… this tea or whatever to wear off, I can get out of here. I’ll find my way back to the road, somehow. And I’ll do it on two healthy, attached feet.

My insides squirm, as does my brain inside its bony shell, like she’s in there rooting around, searching for the lie I know I’m telling. Oh, she’s going to know. She’ll know, and then she’ll suck my marrow, and—

She looks away. “Don’t think too long.” She drops the tools on their tray and shuffles out of view. Seconds later, a thump and a creak tells me she’s grabbed her walking stick and left the house. Her raven friend croaks to her as she goes.

When I can no longer hear either of them, I try again to move. I strain as hard as I ever have for anything. Nothing happens. I stop, panting. A trickle of sweat rolls off my face. I can’t even wipe it away or scratch the itch it left behind. What the hell did she give me?

Breathe, Cait. Stay calm. Be patient. It won’t last forever.

I pass the time by going over my site tests, checking my process for mistakes, anything that might trip me up when I finally get to Jonah. The realJonah, not some hallucination conjured by mushroom tea or whatever Baba gave me.

It seemed so real, though. His hand on my shoulder, the expressions on his face, the fear that he would leave me there. That he wouldn’t push the University to back yet another Caitlin Banks shenanigan.

A grunt escapes my throat. At least there is some consolation in the fact that it was an illusion, that no one at uni waited to say, “There she goes, chasing rainbows.”

Again, I try to move. Baba’s tea still holds me fast. Geological tables, mineral properties, and hardness scales run through my head. I recite their numbers and figures to myself one after another before attempting to turn my head, shift my arm, lift a finger. When it fails, I start over. And over.

And over…

My finger twitches, scrapes against something soft and crisp with a rasping sigh. I roll my head on the pillow and lick my lips. Thirsty.

A rustling off to my right jolts me. My head whips back to confront the sound. Baba?

But no. White acoustic tiles appear where smokey rafters hung before. A disembodied voice sounds on a P.A. system in the hall.

And Jonah’s face appears above the bed.

Wait, what—

This can’t be real. But if I can move, I can flee. I struggle to sit up.

Jonah presses me back onto the bed. “Calm down, Cait, or they’ll sedate you again. I had to threaten to bring the University in on this matter to get back in here.” He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t make me look bad.”

I peer into his face, waiting for it to switch to Baba’s. When it doesn’t, and he smiles, I frown. “Jonah?”

“Last I checked.” Reflected light gleams in his gaze, bright spots in the shadows like those in Baba’s face. Back there. In the cottage in the woods.

Where I probably still am.

I close my eyes. “Tell me something only Jonah would know.”

Silence greets my demand, and I look up into his frowning face. The awkward pause draws out while I rote-quote mineral properties in my mind. The machines remain quiet.

Jonah blinks. Shakes his head. “You got drunk after your dissertation defense.”

“Who doesn’t?” I peer at him. “Anyone could guess that.”

“You showed up at my house naked at four in the morning.”

Oh. Okay, he’s probably Jonah. Except even if I am imagining it, I know that event. Well, I sort of remember it.

He leans on the bed rail, his face coming closer as he props on his elbows. “This is about more than finding rocks. More than a car accident. Wanna fill me in?”

I open my mouth, and he holds up a finger.

“If,” he continues, “you can do it calmly.”

I take a slow breath. Press my lips together. Stay calm. Right. Okay. I can do that.

“You won’t believe me.”

He cocks his head, shrugs a little. “Try me.”

My body feels solid, the bed beneath me soft, the smells in the cubby where they’ve stashed me the same as any hospital anywhere. Maybe this is real. I welcome the noise in the corridor in place of forest sounds and raven squawks and, after a pause, I tell him everything—the accident, the lights that looked like people, the animals, the raven, Baba, Baba’s house—except the foot part. I leave that out. Too creepy to think about.

When I stop, he is nodding, a minute movement of his head, as if he is trying to convince himself that this conversation is not the result of a blow to my head.

“Okay. Give me some time to absorb that,” he says. “What about your find? Tell me everything you can. Give me coordinates and describe this clue you found about how to spot the mineral. I want to send a team to confirm your finding while you’re incapacitated. Maybe, by the time you’re back on your feet—” He stops, hesitates, stands upright. One hand goes to his hair, his usual nervous shuffle. “I mean, once you’re all healed, you can join the mining team. If you want to.”

I frown. “Of course, I want to.”

“Details.” He smiles, both hands in his pockets now.

I describe the slender, dark amber- and honey-colored layers between the otherwise blue-grey shale, how to look for the milky scars where the stone had been broken or chipped, and the natural flaw that sent light back in multiple shades of brown. How, unlike most stones of similar color and texture, it breaks off in small, pebble-sized chunks when I chip it away from the surrounding bedrock.

Jonah stops me, pulls out his phone to record, then has me repeat everything I just said.

“Good.” He glances from his phone to my face. “And what was the clue you mentioned? The one that will help you find it again?”

I remember spotting it the first time. Down in that ravine, a quick downpour puddling around my seated body, rising almost to my chest before the rain stopped and it drained away. A chance sunbeam gleaming off the surface of the puddle to shine on the wall of the ravine. That’s what I thought it was, at first. A shine from reflected sunlight.

“The shale layers go from grey to that ruddy brown on both sides of a vein, but as it gets close to the metathracite, it pales to almost pink, as if the color has leached out of it into the mineral between its layers. It’s not a big swath, mind. But that’s a pretty big contrast. It should be easy to see even at a distance.”

“Where, exactly, was your campsite?”

“Coordinates are on my phone. If you can find it. Search the area between where I left the road and where the car landed.” I flash back on that night, the rolling of boulders and trees outside my windshield. I blink the images away. “The university should be able to find it using the geotracker. Look, whoever you send…”

I trail off, stopping myself before I say more about the strangeness of the place. My left foot itches, and I move the right one to scratch it.

It meets only blankets and otherwise empty space. My leg twitches, trying to bring my feet together so I can scratch the itch. I look down at the other end of the bed. There is one hump in the blanket.

One. Not two.

I raise my eyes to Jonah’s and find a grimace on his face.

“It was too mangled, Cait. They couldn’t save it,” he says, reaching toward me.

“No,” I say, my voice sharp, shrill. “Baba did this.” The walls behind him waver, the ceiling shifts from white to sooty to white again. Baba’s soft whisper hovers at the edge of my awareness, teasing, torturing.

Jonah sucks air through his teeth.

“Look,” he says, “you’re safe. You’re in the hospital. Whatever you think you saw wasn’t real. It’s the drugs, Cait.”

“Listen to me, Jonah,” I hiss, pushing all my fear into my words. They tremble with its weight. “There were samples in my car. Look for those and look for my site. It’s important. But whatever you do, don’t let anyone go there alone. They should work in packs, keep watch on one another—”

A machine beside me begins to beep.

“—make them keep watch. Those woods are strange. I told you.”

Jonah squeezes my shoulder. “Cait, calm down. You’re safe here.”

“No.” I shake my head so hard it hurts. Another machine’s alarm joins the first. The wall behind my mentor flickers between Baba’s house and the hospital white. For a moment, Baba’s disinfectant permeates the air. I grab his arm with both hands. “Don’t let them sedate me, Jonah. Don’t let them send me back there!”

He looks alarmed now. He pulls at my fingers, clasped tight around his arm. “Cait, stop this.”

“Jonah, please.”

A third machine joins the chorus, and the duty doctor comes close. His lips move, but the raven’s cries drown his words. The doctor pushes a medicine into my IV and—

The noise stops, replaced by a ringing in my ears and a soughing in the trees behind me. I stand near the edge of a cliff, balanced on one bare foot and what remains of my lower left leg. The stiff breeze of an approaching storm lifts my short hair. Across the gorge, a blob of color wraps around a huge boulder at the opposing cliff’s edge.

My SUV.

Such an odd perspective, this distant view of the boulder that stopped my descent. From here, I see the cracks in the boulder’s foundation. Their fingers reach out into the surrounding cliffside, softening the boulder’s hold on the precipice so that it leans out over empty air. A strong wind could take it down now.

I hobble-turn to face my surroundings. To either side, rough ground edges the precipice, scattered with boulders jutting from or settling into the ground beneath them. I stand at the edge of a twilight forest. Trees crowd this slope all the way up to the ravine where I found the metathracite.

This is Baba’s doing.

I close my eyes. Is she here? Watching? I listen.

The wind.

Birds, far distant, as if they want no part of me.

Traffic. Or, more specifically, trucks. Big ones. As in heavy equipment.

Jonah?

My head goes up, looking for my dig site, but all I see are trees. I take a step back toward the clearing behind me—

Except I can’t. My foot, or rather my stump, won’t move. I look down.

My leg is merging with the ground beneath it. My flesh stretches out and down past rock and stone and bone, rooting itself in the earth. I pull, twist my body, push against the ground with my remaining foot until my toes stretch longer, thickening as they go. They dig past the tendrils of my other leg, reaching toward the marrow of the mountain, anchoring me to this spot.

A tingle spreads from my ankle and lower leg up onto my shins and calves, and I shout. My breath comes faster, noisier. Before me, animals peer around boles, creep out into the open. Two bobcats stand near a lynx. A wolverine hunkers at the base of some nearby scrub. An owl flaps in to land on a branch.

The itch spreads up my legs and I look down. Skin and clothing have thickened into scaly brown. As I watch, my legs merge. I breathe hard and fast, lungs keeping time with my racing heart.

What did Baba give me?

What did the doctors give me?

A grizzly joins the animal audience, rises to its full height, and looks down on me as if I am a morsel too small to consider. An elk, majestic in its size and beauty, ambles into the scene, followed by a small pack of coyotes and a fox pair.

The thickening itch is in my torso now. I twist my shoulders, flailing against this change.

The fae arrive, standing in full view among the animals, all of them moving closer as the wind rises, keening up the cliff face to lift my hair, which thickens and stiffens and won’t fall back into place. I raise my hands to touch it, and my arms freeze, extended toward my head. Twigs, then leaves sprout from my fingers, my forearms, my elbows. My skin thickens into the brown scale of my legs. The bark spreads up my chest, my neck. Even as my hair stretches out into branches thick with foliage, the bark covers my face.

I can’t breathe! My lungs—do I still have lungs?—suck at nothing, like someone has stretched plastic over my face.

But I still hear and feel.

Murmurs, whispers, the electrical sensation against my skin regardless of its new form. The presence of the fae. Close. Touching me. Murmuring some magic. Did they do this?

Over all, the growl of heavy equipment digging into the cliff above the wood. Jonah’s crew, come for my metathracite.

But if I was never in the hospital, if that wasn’t real, how did he know? My thoughts tumble over one another like ants trying to escape a flood and realization slams into me. I am now part of these woods. Will it survive the dig?

Baba’s voice carries on the wind.

“Now we will see,” she whispers, “if the bones of one foot will take the whole body with them when they go. Taste the fruit of your labor. You will feel it all.”

White hot fear races through my veins like sticky sap. I inhale, draw air through my skin, my leaves, and scream. The sound that emerges is the thundering wind of a hundred wings as a whole flock of ravens take flight from my branches. Then they are gone, and the canyon echoes with the grinding of metal on stone as the diggers begin their work.