“The sun’s been up for hours,” Maggie called out.
“As was I, dancing for rain beneath the moon.”
“Can I speak with you?” Bree said to Mia. “It’s important.”
The woman grumbled, but pulled the vine curtain back farther. Bree ducked inside, not wanting to see the look on Maggie’s or Ness’s face.
“Sparrow is a talented healer, but everyone has to die eventually,” Mad Mia said.
“Not him,” Bree said. “Not Heath. He’s barely ten!”
“The earth calls for some sooner than others.”
Bree fumed. Here was Mia, old, ancient, and acting like it was perfectly fair for a young boy to have his life end before it truly began. Like children being Snatched was just as natural. Lock claimed it was merely the cycle of life, but Bree wasn’t convinced. If only the boys were lost, then maybe. But the girls—how it took only some of them . . . It was like a conscious choice was being made.
There was Fallyn, Snatched well before Bree’s time, but still a legend recounted around the bonfire. Stubborn. Bold. So brave she’d jumped off the jetty in a raging storm to save a child who’d lost his footing.
Keeva’s daughter, Cora, a natural leader destined to take over for her mother until she’d been stolen when Bree was still a toddler.
Wren, the island’s most recent female loss, who had been Bree’s biggest competition when it came to hunting and fishing.
And so many other girls, gone. All gone. Plucked from Saltwater like the ripest crop during a season’s harvest.
“Keeva’s just as bold as some of the Snatched, and she’s still here,” Lock once pointed out. “There’s no logic to it, Bree. It’s a random cast into the ocean.”
A cast that someone has to reel in, she’d thought.
Mia was burning some sort of herb in the cramped hut, and the scent was making Bree light-headed. Dried plants and grasses hung from the rafters, dangling so low she’d had to duck around a few when entering the hut. Symbols and numbers were carved into Mia’s table. Animal bones and small clay containers lined every shelf. A few more mobiles and wind chimes hung at the edges of the room. Being in the hut was like swimming through seaweed. And bones. An underwater graveyard.
“You made something for Lock once,” Bree said. “‘Lucky Lock,’ they call him now—that’s how amazing whatever you made was. It did the impossible.”
Mad Mia flashed a toothy smile and Bree tried not to cringe.
“I remember that,” Mia said. “I got lucky. Perhaps as lucky as the boy.”
“Could you get lucky again?”
“If you bring me something, maybe.”
“Bring you what?” Anything. Bree would bring her anything if it meant saving Heath.
“A heron.”
The hope in Bree’s stomach disintegrated. “I haven’t seen a heron on the island in weeks.”
“Just yesterday, at dusk, one flew toward the freshwater as I prayed for rain.”
Convenient, Bree thought, and perhaps a lie. Though what did the woman have to gain? Heron or not, it made no difference to Mia.
“They’re flighty as anything,” Bree said of the bird. “Scare at the sound of a snapping twig.”
“Then you ought to be quiet when you hunt the thing, no?” Mad Mia’s smile thinned to a doubtful pout. “I heard you’re a stealthy one. Is that not true?”
“I can catch anything,” Bree insisted. Even a heron. It didn’t matter that the bird was her favorite, that she thought it beautiful and pure. For Heath, she’d spill its blood.
“Then scram,” Mia said.
Bree didn’t like the woman—not her tactless nature, nor unkempt home, nor mindless rain dances—but she bit her tongue now. It was only at the mouth of the hut that Bree paused.
“Why a heron?” she asked over her shoulder.
“You’re the storyteller’s daughter. You know the importance of that bird—the power, the magic. It accompanies the impossible.”
“It’s just a bird,” Bree said.
“A bird with blood that might save the boy.”
Maybe it was another fable, another sliver of hope that was bound to disappoint, but Bree couldn’t risk idleness. She went not to the shore, but home, where she dropped off her spear in favor of different equipment—a pack, water, her slingshot. Then she made for Crest.
FIVE
TO HIKE THE MOUNTAIN TOOK half the day.
By the time Bree pulled herself onto Crest’s small plateau by way of a scraggly tree, the heat and humidity was unbearable. She’d sweat through her shirt, and she was pretty certain she had a blister from her sandal, right where the leather straps tied around her ankle, but didn’t bother looking. What would it matter? She’d still have to climb down with that same blister. Acknowledging its existence would only be like letting it win.
No longer obscured by rock or brush, a blissful breeze whipped over Bree’s limbs. She found her typical resting place—an area where the rock was more smooth than sharp, almost like the weather had worn out a bench for view-hungry climbers. Mad Mia claimed she saw the heron flying toward the lake, but it was just as likely the bird had simply flown over the island after hunting along the shore. From this vantage point Bree could keep an eye on both water sources.
She’d sat here with Lock many times over, and with her mother only once. With Lock, it was always a thing to do to kill time. After fishing and hunting, and before someone could saddle another chore onto their backs, they’d sneak into the woods and climb Crest, then sit and stare at the endless stretch of ocean beyond Saltwater in complete silence. They didn’t need words, Lock and Bree.
The first and only time she’d hiked Crest with her mother, it had been an anniversary of her father’s Snatching. They’d both needed a distraction, and so Bree showed her mother the rough path she’d carved out with Lock. She was only eight back then, so the passes weren’t as clearly marked and worn as they were now, but her mother had managed better than expected. Who knew a storyteller could have such nimble limbs?
When they reached the summit, Bree’s mother had stood dangerously close to the edge, one hand gripping the tree that grew from the rock, the other held out at her side.
“Look at that lake,” she’d said. “It almost looks close enough to dive into.”
It was not.
“Maybe I could fly there, like a bird.”
The woman let go of the tree and spread both arms like she had wings. Her toes flirted with the edge.
“Ma?” Bree had said, voice cracking.
“I’m tired, Brianna. I’m tired of feeling empty and tired of living without him.”
“Without Pa?”
She’d nodded. “I’m no one alone. He carried so much of me. He was me.”
Bree didn’t understand. Her mother was her mother. Her father was her father. They were two people.
“I really feel like I could fly today.”
Bree watched her mother lift a foot.
“What about me?” Bree asked.
“What about you?”
Bree’s bottom lip quivered. “You can’t fly. You’re not a bird. And then what about me?”
“You’re stubborn as a weed, Brianna. You don’t need anyone.”
“You’re my mother!” Bree had shouted. “It doesn’t matter if I need you or not; you’re supposed to be here. You’re not supposed to fly away.”
Her mother looked in a trance, though. Her fingers moved with the wind, her chin careened forward. Bree felt her heart breaking—a crack in the center of her chest, a split that seemed to grow, screaming, You’re not enough, you’re not the person who makes her days worth living.