AS THE FIREBALL streams toward the directive, the red filling more and more of the view, Rumi is suddenly yanked out of the vision. All is crisping flame, Sky’s magic strong enough to project the actual heat to him, hot enough to make his skin sizzle and stretch . . . and then the air is cool and moist, his vision full of soft brown—the backside of a tapir.

“Hey, hey!” Sky’s concerned voice says. “Rumi! Stop screaming. You’re blowing my feathers all around.”

Of course Rumi hadn’t realized that he was screaming. He closes his mouth. His throat is aching. “Mez and Chumba and Lima,” he sputters. “They’re in trouble.”

“Is it anything that we can fix right now?” Sky asks patiently.

“No,” Rumi gasps.

“Then take a moment before you go back in,” Sky says. “Your pulse is racing, and you’re almost hyperventilating.”

“You don’t understand, you don’t understand—”

“Shh. Rumi, you’re out of control. Your heart.”

“Okay, okay. I’m calming down. Now send me back in.”

“No, you’re not. You’re still trembling all over. You won’t be any help to anyone if you let this do you in. I’m still receiving the directive’s vision,” Sky says. “It’s storing in my feathers themselves. You can go right back to the panthers as soon as you’ve calmed down, and it will be like no time has passed. I’ll basically put you back in time. You won’t miss a thing, okay? But I don’t want your heart to stop in the meantime.”

“But—”

“This isn’t a choice, Rumi.”

“Sky. My wind,” Rumi says. “Was I . . . ?”

“You didn’t release much wind. Just enough to muss my feathers.”

“I’m relieved, actually,” Rumi says as the thudding in his veins begins to subside. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone accidentally.”

“I bet you were worried about that,” Sky says. “It’s understandable, given what we both know. About that, Rumi. I woke you up because we’re nearing—well, you’ll see for yourself. Just on the other side of that stand of ironwood trees, there’s your old swamp.”

Rumi gauges the speed of the lumbering tapir beneath him. “So I have only a few minutes?”

“Just about,” Sky says. “Should I call Gogi over? It will be easier to tell him ahead of time.”

“I know, I know,” Rumi says. “Let me do it. Gogi!” he trills.

A flash, then his monkey friend is beside them. “Hey, you’re back with us,” he says. “How’s Mez?”

“Not good,” Rumi says. “Mist has a cult worshipping him, and he used the rule of dominion to take control of the nearby jungle. He usurped Usha, and now he just discovered that the panthers and Lima are there, and he’s cast a fireball, one of your fireballs, Gogi, and it’s heading right for them.”

“Rumi, don’t forget to breathe,” Sky warns. “We can all check in with them after, through my feather memory. You’re not ready to go back in yet.”

“Yes,” Rumi says, willing his breathing to go regular and even. “We’ll go back to the panthers as soon as we can.”

“Wait, we’re not finding out right away whether they’re okay?” Gogi says. “Something is more urgent than that?”

“I’ve got too much going on in my brain to make it safe,” Rumi says with a sad croak.

“Whoa, buddy, I can tell this is major,” Gogi says. “Okay. I’m listening.”

“Sky, your directive power,” Rumi says. “Could you transmit our memory of the vision itself, what we saw with the guardians in the Cave of Riddles?”

Sky cocks his head. “I suppose I could try. I wasn’t consciously embedding the memory into a feather at the time, unlike what I’m doing with Mez’s directive right now, so some of the details might be shaded by my imperfect recollection. But let’s see what I can turn up.”

“Who’s doing what to who now?” Gogi asks.

Sky peers at Rumi. “Are you going to be okay?”

Rumi nods sadly, throat pouch quivering. “This memory is depressing instead of worrying. Quite a different emotional effect.”

“Here goes,” Sky says. “Just grab onto a feather. I’ll pull you back out once the recollection is over.”

As one, monkey and frog reach out and touch Sky.

An egg in a clutch, glued to the underside of a leaf, eyes behind clear membranes, watching the sun above, then the moon above, then the sun. Some neighbors are taken, some remain. A wasp hauls eggs away, one by one, until Rumi’s father comes by to scare it off.

It’s not easy being an egg.

Rumi is one of the last to emerge, kicking his tail fin, gills pumping furiously as he works his way past the gooey remains of his siblings’ eggs. A baffling few minutes, then his father is near. Rumi wriggles onto his backside, gluing himself to skin. Lurching into motion, Rumi’s father carries whatever offspring he can find up the side of a tree, higher and higher into the canopy, leaving them in a water-filled leaf high over the forest floor before going back down to ferry another batch.

Rumi and his siblings eat and wriggle and grow, chowing down on algae as soon as it appears. That and the occasional mosquito larvae—yum. Though he can’t talk yet, Rumi gets to know some of the personalities of his tadpole siblings. There’s Shy Rumi and Ferocious Rumi and Thoughtful Rumi and more. They grow and grow, and soon the leaf can barely hold them all. It bows and bends with each rain droplet.

His hind limb buds can’t come soon enough. Eventually they’re there, and Rumi can swim-walk, leveraging the beginnings of his legs to get around. His body tail reabsorbs, his front legs burst through his chest, his gills start to feel gummy as they close up. Ouch. But at least soon he’ll be able to take his first gasp of air!

Whew. Air in his lungs. It feels amazing.

His father’s there, and Rumi clambers onto his back. His mother is near too, and other froglets climb onto her.

Rumi gets a good look at his home swamp for the first time. Dank and misty, giant trees shading the starlight, mud and tasty ants everywhere.

It’s simply perfect.

He gives up on his gills, and opens his mouth to take in some more of that amazing air.

It goes in. When it goes out, though . . . !

Rumi goes zooming through the air, landing on his back many frog-lengths away from his family. He lies there, stunned. What just happened to him?

Rumi hops back over, making sure to breathe as shallowly as he can, so he doesn’t go flying again. But just a short while later, he gets distracted by his first tangy fire ant snack. He exclaims in glee, and the force of the air leaving his mouth sends him hurtling.

His siblings watch with wide froggy eyes as he hops his way back.

He shrugs when they ask what happened, keeps his gaze trained on the leaves around him. Nothing to see here, just trying to fit in.

Later, when the Veil rises and Rumi’s siblings are all finding hiding places to wait out their daycoma, Rumi finds himself wide awake. Strange. So much strangeness. No tree frog is meant to be up during the day! The sun is harsh on young amphibian skin, so he has nothing more to do with his day than wander around the shady underside of a fern where he and his siblings are resting, back and forth and back and forth, as the rays change in angle. He experiments with letting out slight gusts, watching the tips of the ferns sway. He sends out bigger gusts, watching the branches of the next tree over sway. Hmm!

He stops experimenting for a while, but then the questions scratching his mind grow too great: why wind? Where does this power come from? Why do none of the other frogs have it? Can he direct it to a tiny spot? Can he make it blow all over? Can he use it to fly? Rumi takes in his breath and holds it while he counts to ten, savoring the buzz of magical energy fighting to escape his lungs.

What if he blew the hardest gust he could, to learn the limits of his power?

He can at least see if he can make the highest branches of that fig sway, the one just barely in view. That shouldn’t be too risky an experiment.

Rumi creeps forward, so that he’s outside the hiding spot his parents chose for their young frogs, at the edge of a sunbeam on the rainforest floor.

He takes in the largest breath that he can.

He sets his gaze on the treetop in the distance.

He aims.

He prepares to release.

That’s when he’s attacked.

Rumi hadn’t even noticed the motionless snake, perfectly camouflaged around the nearby tree branch, until it strikes. Fangs slash through the blinding sunlight, heading right for his tender belly.

There’s no time to run, no time to dodge. There’s only one thing to do, which is to open his mouth and release all the air he was holding in.

The fangs disappear as the snake is blasted across the clearing, pulverized against a tree trunk.

Rumi has no idea what happens next, only that he too is flying through the air, that trees are cracking, that insects and birds and mammals and other frogs are soaring, maybe his parents and siblings, there’s debris everywhere, swirling through the sky and clouding the sun. A sound like thunder is coming from his own mouth as he flies, then he hits something in the grayness where there used to be sunlight, and all is still.

When he comes to, Rumi sees that he’s somewhere else entirely. A ruined land of fallen trees, where soil has been uprooted and flung everywhere, where the land itself has scattered, dirtying everything. A landscape whose normal sounds are gone, replaced by the moans of dying animals.

He staggers to his feet.

Father? Mother?

Where are his siblings?

What’s happened to his forest?

His head and body aching, Rumi wanders through the swampy land, hopping this way and that, calling out for the other Rumis of his birth group. There is no answer. No birds call, no insects chirp. All’s quiet and eerie, the only sound the drip of rainwater on ravaged earth. He struggles to get his thoughts in order, to remember what might have happened.

A horrible thought grows in Rumi’s mind, one that he can’t entirely face. If he lets it wriggle its way to the front, it will undo him entirely.

No. It’s not possible that he did this.

Finally he sees another living creature. It’s a big frog, a cane toad, a terrible wound on its back already beginning to scab over as it staggers through the growth. Only a creature as massive and fat as this one could have survived the typhoon that devastated this rainforest.

Frogs are the worst predators of other frogs. Though Rumi hopes for answers, he knows this one is more likely to eat him than to answer questions. He eases forward delicately, not announcing himself early.

The cane toad, though, is a hunter perfectly attuned to its surroundings. Its focus lands right on Rumi, where he thinks he’s safely hiding in the shadows of an uprooted tree. “Everything in this part of the rainforest is dead. All my family is dead. Only I was sturdy enough to survive. How did you survive this disaster, little frog, so little that you still have fresh gill marks on your throat?”

Rumi doesn’t answer. Maybe there’s hope this predator doesn’t know precisely where he is. Besides, Rumi doesn’t have an answer.

“Then Big Rumi will tell you,” the giant cane toad says. “I woke from daycoma to find our rainforest demolished. Just a short ways over there, though, the rainforest is completely intact. This was no storm. There was no flooding. This disaster reeks of magic.”

Rumi hangs his little head. The cane toad’s words ring true. It was magic. It was Rumi’s magic that created the whirlwind that destroyed all these lives. Finally he speaks. “I have to confess. It’s my fault. I did this. If you want to eat me, I won’t stop you. I deserve it.”

Big Rumi pauses, then takes a shuddering step forward, his jowls rippling. “I did not expect you to give yourself up so easily. You cannot blame me for taking my revenge, little one.”

Rumi looks up sadly, feeling his toxins beginning to coat his skin. “I’m poisonous. If you kill me, you will die as well.”

Big Rumi nods. “Then that will be my destiny. I will die in order to punish you. It will be worth it.”

Rumi chirps quietly, undone by the enormity of the devastation he’s wrought. He would gladly accept Big Rumi’s punishment. But then another animal would die, the only other one to survive Rumi’s magical cyclone. His wrongdoing would be absolute.

He won’t let another creature’s death be on his hands, even if it’s a murderous bully like Big Rumi.

And so Rumi turns and flees the swamp, Big Rumi right on his heels.