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“CORINNE!” MY HEART IN MY THROAT, I turned to face Sophie running toward me, stumbling a little in the soft sand, her auburn hair whipping into her face. Lips parted, eyes wide with alarm, probably the most flustered I’d ever seen her. “Where are they?”

“Mason is gone,” I said, running shaking hands through my hair. “I can’t feel our link.”

“Where’s Angeline?” Sophie said. She stopped beside me, breathing hard.

I reached out, searching for my link with my best friend. “Oh no,” I whispered. Terror burrowed a hole straight down through me. “I can’t reach her either.”

I couldn’t meet her gaze. Why had I thought my stupid little plan would work? How could I have been so naïve? Now Mason and Ang were gone, and I didn’t know where to find them. Fear and guilt surged through me in sickening waves. Bile rose in my throat, and for a second I thought I might vomit in the sand. Instead, I breathed the mountain air deep into my lungs, forcing calm.

I turned to Sophie. “Can you feel her at all through your link?”

She shook her head. Her eyes seemed to plead with me to give her an answer, a reason to feel less scared.

I licked my dry lips. “Okay. I don’t want to leave you, but I need to try reading their threads to see if I can figure out what happened to them. Wake up and wait for me in my room. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

The faintest whuff of sand under her feet was the only sound at the cove as she disappeared before my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on Angeline, and physical sensations melted away as I drifted into the sea of threads. When I opened my eyes a moment later, my best friend’s thread called to me. I grasped it gently in my fingers and wanted to recoil. It felt . . . not alive. No vibrations, no hum of memories and life. I let go.

I stuffed all thoughts, arriving at Mason’s thread a moment later. His thread gave me the same horrible sensation.

I sat up in my bed and faced Sophie. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, pulled into a compact ball. She was staring wide-eyed at something beside me.

I followed her gaze, and ice gripped my heart. Ang lay next to me on the bed, where she’d fallen asleep, her face still as death. A small cry caught in my throat as I leaned over and pressed my ear to her chest, fragments of pleading prayers racing through my mind. I heard the slow and steady thump of her pulse in my ear, and a small puff of air escaped my lips. I closed my eyes against the flood of tears piling up behind them.

“I already tried to wake them up,” Sophie said. “They’re alive.” She dragged her eyes to Mason’s still form on the floor. “But they won’t wake up.” She pulled her arms tighter around her legs, shrinking away.

I fumbled around until my hand closed over my phone, and absently noticed it was very early in the morning. I dialed.

“Aunt Dorothy,” I said, my voice cracking. “You have to come over here. It’s Ang and Mason.”

* * *

Later, after Aunt Dorothy left and the medics came and strapped my two best friends to boards and transported them away to the hospital in Danton, I sobbed. Heaving breaths wracked my body, and I hardly recognized the shuddering voice that accompanied each new wave of tears. I doubled over on my bed, unsure if I’d ever get up again.

After several minutes, some of the grief and guilt had worked itself out of me. Enough that I could dry my face, blow my nose, and dress myself. Aunt Dorothy was expecting me.

Sophie had driven home to get dressed. When she came back to pick me up, her puffy eyes and tear-streaked face told me she’d worked through her own little breakdown, too.

“We’re going to figure this out, Corinne. They’ll be okay,” she said. I must have looked pretty bad, too, if she was trying to reassure me. But there was no way to know that our friends would be okay.

I closed my eyes, and the images of my two best friends’ parents decided to haunt me. All four of them had arrived at nearly the same time, just a moment after the ambulances. Pure panicked grief stretched their faces into masks that hardly resembled the people I’d known for so many years.

Mason’s mother had let out a strangled cry and fallen into her husband’s arms. An inexplicable flash of anger whipped through me as I looked at her. Mason had practically raised himself, but now, in this moment, his parents showed up.

At Aunt Dorothy’s suggestion, I’d used the influences to help dampen the emotions of all four parents, and plant the thought that their children had probably caught something at the hospital and their comatose states were similar to symptoms of some of the others. My great-aunt managed to soothe them a bit more the old-fashioned way: soft, reassuring words. I’d never seen her so gentle, in fact.

I knew that when they got to the hospital, my friends would be diagnosed with the same mystery illness as the others. I wanted nothing more than to be with them right now, but Aunt Dorothy had convinced me that I needed to stay here and figure out what to do. So as my friends were strapped up and carried away, I frantically tried to bathe their bodies in white influence. But every time the thick layer of Harriet’s influence began to peel away a bit, it snapped back into place like a rubber band. All I could do was try to saturate them with white influence. Maybe it would just take some time. It could help them later, if I could just give them enough . . .

Sophie cleverly devised a one-Guardian net that she wrapped around each of them, a protective shroud.

I glanced over at her as we pulled into Aunt Dorothy’s driveway.

“How come Harriet didn’t get you?” I asked.

Sophie twisted the key and the Honda’s engine died. She looked at a spot on the floor near my feet. “I don’t know. She tried. Maybe because she’d taken me before, some part of my brain recognized what was happening so I could react.”

“But you shouldn’t have been able to resist her influences,” I said. “I mean, no one is really immune to them, not even me.” I thought back to what Sophie had done in my room. Guardians weren’t even supposed to be able to cast a free-standing net alone. What else could she do that I didn’t know about?

When she raised her eyes to meet mine, my eyebrows shot up. She could have bored through concrete with that expression. “I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt me,” she said, her voice deadly calm.

For the first time that day, I started to feel the faintest spark of something that possibly, with a little more encouragement, could become hope. As badly as I wanted my friends back, at least I had Sophie. And of the four of us, Sophie was the natural-born fighter.

We found my great-aunt and Mr. Sykes in the kitchen, sipping from steaming mugs. I poured tea for myself and Sophie. It seemed ridiculous to be standing around drinking tea at a time like this, but the warm liquid soothed me. I wrapped both hands around the mug, absorbing the heat.

“I have to find Harriet,” I said. “I tried to find her thread once, but it didn’t work.” I looked back and forth between Aunt Dorothy and Mr. Sykes.

“Ah.” Mr. Sykes set down his mug. “That is probably because you do not know her true nature.”

I considered it for a moment. “I guess I don’t. When I tried, I was picturing the evil, snake-eyed Harriet who wants to suck the life out of me. But she wasn’t born that person. I don’t know who she really is, though. And I wouldn’t know how to figure it out.”

“No, you must confront her in this realm,” said Aunt Dorothy.

She was right. I’d done everything I could to avoid it, and hoped that Harriet didn’t have the strength or nerve to do any more damage. Brad and the others getting sick was horrible, but at least I’d been able to help them. Now, Harriet had Angeline and Mason in her clutches and seemingly beyond my ability to do anything for them. Reacting to her destruction and hoping for the best wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

“Well, she has to stay around here, right? Because she needs to be close to the convergence,” I said. I looked at Sophie. “I’m going to need your help.”