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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