11

ABRA COULD ALMOST FEEL THE RAIN, even though it was only the dream again. She was surrounded by the same old leaves and branches, details she recognized easily now that she had been having the dream off and on for nearly four years. The drops clattered down through them, all around her. She was up in the tree again, up in its highest branches, and despite her familiarity with this particular dream, she was still afraid. She clung to the branch she was on, a branch much too thin to hold her. It broke, and she fell. She grabbed for anything she could hold on to, eventually finding another branch much too thin to hold her for long. It was the same branch she always grabbed. She dangled there, looking down at the ground far below.

She watched a huge wolf-like creature pick up the small girl in its jaws and toss her aside. She watched as the boy grabbed on to a small sword, cried out in pain before swinging it again and again at the wolf. She watched as the sword found its mark and the huge creature listed to the side like a boat preparing to sink. When the creature fell, the boy fell.

She twisted and turned where she hung from the branch, wondering if the girl was okay. Wondering if she could do something differently this time, but it was always the same. That’s when the streak of light came, and a man, or something in the shape of a man, knelt beside the girl. He put his hands on her head and closed his eyes, and Abra knew that the man was bringing the girl back to life.

She could hear through the girl’s ears again. She was still dangling there in the air; she was still feeling the soft patter of rain on her head and bare arms; she could still feel the thin branch slipping ever so slowly from her grasp. But there it was: her hearing was the girl’s, and she heard the man begin to whisper.

“Abra, this is very important. I have a few things I need to tell you . . .”

But again, she fell.

I should have hit the ground by now, she thought. And just as she remembered this thought always came to her in this dream, she looked down, and there was the ground coming up at her, and she took a sharp breath.

She woke up.

She was not hanging from a tree. There was no rain falling on her head. There was no Amarok, no boy, no man speaking into her ear. It was only her, alone in her bed while the dim, early morning light crept up over the eastern horizon. She could tell it would be another cold winter day. She tried to enjoy the warmth under her covers, but the images wouldn’t go away.

The man in her dream had been Mr. Tennin.

He had saved her life.

What had he been trying to tell her?

She had dreamed the dream on an almost monthly basis for the last four years, ever since that first night in the hospital on the day the angels fell. It didn’t surprise her. Nothing surprised her anymore.

This didn’t mean everything was the same as it had always been.

Before the Amarok and the Tree of Life, everything about the valley had felt predictable. She went to school. She worked around the farm. There was baseball and fireflies and bike riding all summer. There was the church at the end of Sam’s lane. There were the mountains rising up on either side, solid and unmoving.

But since the Tree, everything felt tenuous, as if the slightest movement could change everything. It was like holding a soap bubble in the palm of her hand. The reality she saw felt thin and breakable, a film of ice covering a deep, still pool. Her eyes had been opened to another layer of reality, and she spent those weeks and months looking for signs of the other world, waiting for it to break through.

Four years is a long time. A northern red oak, for example, grows more than two feet per year. That’s eight feet of living bark and twigs and leaves shooting for the sky. A red maple grows three to five feet per year—that’s twenty feet in four years. A weeping willow can stand at the edge of a pond, its wispy tendrils flowing, and grow up to thirty-two feet in four years.

A child. A child can become a young adult in four years. A friendship can grow faster than trees or vanish altogether in that time. The world is always changing all around us, molecules shifting from this to that, so that in four years, what is recognizable? What could possibly remain the same under the erosion of so much flowing time?

On one particular day, after those four long years had passed, Abra found herself lying on her bed after school, the heavy sword beside her, pressing down the blankets. You would barely recognize her if you saw her lying there on her stomach, legs crossed and propped up behind her. Her hair was longer and straighter. Her form had somehow become less awkward, the way a foal grows into its stride. She rolled over and her blue eyes stared at the ceiling. She thought about the dream that wouldn’t go away. She thought, for the first time in a long time, about Sam. She thought about all that had happened that summer. And she was filled with a familiar, aching disappointment.

Of all the things she remembered about that day when the angels fell, the thing she recalled with the most detail was the final sentence Mr. Jinn had said, smirking.

“And you,” he said, staring deep into her eyes, looking for something. “You have only just begun.”

He had seemed to utter those words like a curse, but they filled her like a promise. She reached over and gripped the sword beside her on the bed, and it fit her hand like the right puzzle piece.

When everything happened, she had felt suddenly crucial. She had a feeling that she was something more (and oh how silly it seems for her to even think these words), that she was Mr. Tennin’s replacement, given the responsibility to destroy the Tree of Life whenever and wherever it appeared.

Replacing an angel.

Abra Miller.

The idea had filled her with purpose, but it seemed ridiculous four years later, in the light of day. She was still only a teenager, after all, and how could she take over a task of such massive importance?

She wandered over to the window, staring aimlessly in the direction of the eastern mountain range.

That’s when she saw the woman.

It was a fair distance from her window to the road, but even from there something intrigued her about the woman. First of all, Abra couldn’t remember the last person who had walked up Kincade Road. She lived a long way from town, and unless you were going to her house or Sam’s house, there was no other reason to go out that road.

She looked closer. The woman wore a tan jacket over a light blue dress. She had brown hair, and it rustled in the cold breeze. But that wasn’t what got Abra’s attention.

“Mrs. Chambers?” she whispered to herself, because the woman she saw on the other side of the road looked exactly like Sam’s mom. His mom, who had died when lightning struck the oak tree all those years ago.

She dropped everything and ran out of the house without even putting on her coat. She sprinted down the lane—it was the kind of run where she nearly outran herself, where every stride felt like it might lead to a fall. Her feet pounded all the way to the stone road, and the cold swept down, stinging her eyes and her ears and her nose. It was so cold.

She stopped, panting the icy air into her aching lungs. She looked both ways, peering into the woods that stood dark against the drab grays and tans of winter. There hadn’t been any snow recently, but the air smelled crisp and the clouds were low and flat with no blue sky to be seen.

Who was that woman? Where had she gone?

She remembered, as if out of nowhere, the woman she had seen in Sam’s room in the hospital that first night. She shivered again as memories of her came rushing back. Abra had forgotten the terror on Sam’s face as he pushed away from her. She had forgotten the way the woman had sniffed as if seeking out her prey. She had forgotten the ice-cold touch of the woman’s hand on her shoulder.

And for the first time in a long time, she remembered the initials signed at the bottom of the note on her hospital tray.

KN.

For the next four months, from winter into spring, Abra felt a renewed sense of purpose, and she spent every spare minute studying the atlas and reading the notes written in Mr. Tennin’s handwriting. She took long, slow walks, looking for the lady who looked like Sam’s mother. Her parents worried about her, gave her more chores to keep her outside, but she did them quickly and retreated to her room. Even when spring arrived, Abra’s favorite season of the year, she came home from school and walked straight past the new blooms peeking up through the wet ground. Daffodils and tulips held nothing for her. Her sixteenth birthday came and went.

She was distracted at school. Teachers taught and she continued to get decent grades, but her mind went round and round. She desperately wanted to know her role with the sword or how she would find the next Tree of Life. The responsibility of her mission became heavier, and she turned increasingly inward, became more and more obsessed with the atlas and the notes. She thought of all that was at stake.

The Tree might be growing, and there was no one but her to stop it.

One week after high school let out for the summer, Abra pushed her blonde hair behind her ears and stood by one of her bedroom windows, staring out across the yard and beyond Kincade Road. If anyone had pulled up to the house at that moment, they would have seen her standing there, perfectly framed by the window, looking like an apparition mourning a long-ago life.

She didn’t remember how she had ended up with the atlas and the notes and the sword, but Sam hadn’t seemed interested in reclaiming them. She was frustrated and close to giving up. The forest was green and there was no sign of the fire. She marveled at how things can change, how the old empty spaces can be filled in.

That’s when she saw the woman again, standing at the edge of the woods on the other side of the road.

A chill moved up and down Abra’s back. She dropped everything and ran.