Chapter Five

The first time I ever remember making a friendship bracelet was after moving to Knoxville. It was a fad that girls in my class had started doing during recess or study periods. When Izzie invited me to try knotting the multicolored threads, my fingers moved on their own, creating a pattern much different than any other girl’s bracelet.

It was a unique pattern that I’d known how to make without ever having to learn it.

And here it was, attached to the wrist of a boy whose mere touch evoked such a powerful sense of nostalgia that the black hole inside me roared with pain.

Without thinking, I reached for his bracelet. He tucked his wrist behind his back and stepped to the side, his eyes wider with fear or shock—I couldn’t tell which.

“Where did you get that?” I demanded.

“None of your business,” he replied the second the words were out of my mouth, as if he’d anticipated my question before I’d even asked.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing once in his throat, and then his expression shifted into a perfect mask of annoyance. It was the face you gave to someone when you were standing in the Starbucks line, talking with your friend, and the guy behind you interrupts you to put in his two cents about what had happened on Riverdale last night.

“It is, actually, since I made it for you.” If he still wore this bracelet then it had to mean something to him. So had I meant something to him six years ago?

His green eyes narrowed. “Do you remember doing it?”

“Well, no, but—”

“You should leave,” he repeated.

“Why do you want to get rid of me so badly?”

A brief flash of pain rippled across his features and he took a step back. “Go, please.”

He seemed to be at war with himself, or an actor trying to figure out two completely different roles. One minute he was aloof, feigning ignorance, and the next he was pleading with me to leave as if he cared about my safety, deeply. “Who are you?” I asked again.

He turned to go, but I caught hold of his shirt.

“I made that bracelet for you, didn’t I?”

He tried to yank his shirt from my grasp. “You have to let go,” he said, voice gruff with frustration.

“Not until you tell me who you are. Look, I lost my memories. From when I was a kid. I know you, I just don’t remember you. Please—” My voice went much too high on the last part, but the pain was back, and it was kicking me in the heart with steel-toed boots.

His hand closed around mine on his shirt, slowly, gently, prying my fingers away from the fabric. “You shouldn’t be here, Briony,” he said. His voice had lost its edge. There was no angry undertone, just one of deep despair.

At the sound of my name, which I’d never said to him, my fingers loosened, and he slipped away. While I stood there, shocked, he fled from the house, through the scorched, cracked doorway. I didn’t snap out of it until he jumped from the slanting porch.

I went after him. “Wait!”

His warning burned through me like the fire that had destroyed this house. He knows my name and I never told him.

He was the clue. He was the piece that I didn’t know I’d been searching for.

And I wouldn’t let him get away.

His feet pounded against the ground as he headed into the surrounding woods, and I jumped from the porch and followed. There was no clear path through the trees, but the boy didn’t seem to care. It was as if he made his own, weaving his way between the basswood trees and cutting through the sweetshrub, wild hydrangea, and tall deerberry bushes.

I ran as fast as I could, ignoring the bushes and undergrowth as well, my steps mirroring his and following the path he crafted. His speed felt almost inhuman, or like that of an Olympic gold medalist. But the strangest thing was that I somehow kept up. I gained on him and felt the air shift around me, as if I’d just entered into a sort of slipstream.

I’d learned the term in a science class—it was the area behind a moving object in which the state of matter around it sped at the same velocity. The very air around him was moving as fast as he was. And I was caught inside—inside the slipstream—with the air bending around us.

Wind rippled through my shirt and shorts, while branches whacked and scraped at my bare arms and legs. Going at this speed was impossible—should have been impossible.

The minute I’d realized it, my body seemed to reject the physics of the slipstream and my own momentum. My feet slowed and the boy disappeared ahead of me. I could no longer keep up. Like a deer escaping a mountain lion, he moved too fast and too gracefully. He disappeared into the forest in a matter of seconds, and I came to a dead stop, my pulse going wild.

“Oh, c’mon!” I shouted into the trees, bending over and placing my palms on my knees.

Swearing under my breath, I waited for my asthma to punish me for sprinting, but it never did. The mountain air that filled my lungs was sweet, and clean. Every breath I took, I waited for it to turn against me, but it didn’t.

Smoothing my hair away from my forehead and sweaty cheeks, I stared in the direction he disappeared and then noticed something odd.

The trees looked different.

The whole forest did.

It…glowed.

Rotating slowly in place, I took in the sight of a forest that looked otherworldly.

Every tree and plant seemed to be alive with a sort of energy that pulsed around it in a wide spectrum of color. No, radiating was more accurate. The woods radiated a hued glow—neither liquid nor gas. In fact, this energy seemed to be a different state of matter entirely.

“What the hell?” I breathed, stumbling back on trembling legs.

Hugging my arms, I rubbed them, and goose bumps peppered my skin. I slowly lowered myself to the forest floor and took deep, steady breaths. Grass prickled my thighs and crunched under my sneakers. Wind whistled through the leaves above me, and when the leaves moved, the green energy moved with them, smearing the sky and air in a sort of watercolor effect.

It was beautiful, but unreal.

Unreal.

I squeezed my eyes closed. I was queasy, despite the fact that physically, I’d never felt stronger.

My eyes had been closed for no more than a few seconds when a soft chirping sound reached my ears. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. It was a bird, surely, even though it sounded like a very strange bird call.

Then it got closer.

And closer.

Chiiirrrppp.

I opened one eye. And screamed.

Crouched by the toe of my right sneaker was a creature that was not of this world.

It would be one thing if it was, like, a weird-looking squirrel, but it was much more than that. It was chipmunk-sized with a face, underbelly, and limbs covered in rich auburn fur, but then…green clover petals sprouted from its back, covering it like the shell of a turtle.

Clovers literally growing from its back.

It nipped the air with a tiny mouth, sniffing my sneaker, and then chirruped again.

Chiirrrrpp.

Letting out a squeak myself—of terror—I scrambled to my feet and began running again. It didn’t matter to where, just as long as I put as much distance between myself and the strange creature.

As I glanced behind my shoulder to check if it was following me, I ran into something. No, someone.

Hands grabbed me and, heart pounding, I looked up.

It was the boy.

He looked as scared as I felt.

“What are you… How did you…” He gasped, his eyes huge and wide. “Did you follow me?”

“There was this thing,” I cried, trying to twist from side to side to see if the tiny alien was around my feet.

“How did you follow me?” he asked, raising his own voice to meet my panic level.

Satisfied that the little green gremlin was nowhere to be seen, I looked back at the boy. “What do you mean how? I just did.”

“That shouldn’t be possible.”

“I mean, I ran after you as fast as I could, but then I lost you—”

I stopped mid-sentence as what I was seeing caught up with what I was processing. The forest wasn’t the only thing that was glowing. The boy was, too.

Energy pulsed and moved around him like an extension of his body. Like an aura.

The gold mist-like energy around him seemed to be bleeding into my skin as his fingers pressed into my arms. As the energy swirled against my skin and seeped underneath, my senses exploded.

Sweet and sour juice of wild blackberries. Pounding mountain rain against wet skin. Whistling leaves in the trees. Heavenly wildflower scent.

The Smokies invaded my whole body.

From this boy’s mere touch, I could feel the mountains themselves.

I ripped away from his grasp, violent shivers climbing up and down my body.

Even more scared of him and his touch than the strange clover creature, I ran. Again, the where didn’t matter, I just had to get away.

The irony that I had been following him five minutes ago and was now running away from him was not lost on me. But I could still feel the remnants of his strange aura on my skin, lingering there like the moisture in the air after an afternoon summer rain. It was too much. Too much to understand. Too much to feel.

I couldn’t hear him coming after me, but I knew he was somehow. The way he’d moved through the forest before… He could travel through the woods like some sort of ghost. His presence wove through the giant elms that glowed copper, mixing with the gold of the sun.

As I rounded a bend in the path, he shouted my name. “Briony!”

That only made me run faster. My leg muscles burned as they carried me out of the forest full of elms and to a cliff face.

White-and-pink mountain laurel climbed skyward, threading through cracks in a rust-colored mountain wall directly before me.

I tried to stop, but I was running too fast and skidded through the brambles of the path, a cloud of dirt erupting around my ankles. In just a brief glance, I could see how far up I was—and yet, I didn’t remember hiking up to this elevation.

The tops of trees stretched out before me, and a lake glittered with reflected sunlight. Emerald colliding with sapphire.

Unfortunately my stop wasn’t hard or graceful. My shoulder collided with the sharp rock of the mountainside, and my left foot wobbled. I teetered. A small cry escaped my throat as my fingers scrambled for purchase against the orange and gray stone-face, but there was none. I came away with dust and air, and the mysterious orange energy coating my fingertips, as my ankle folded and I fell off the edge.

The fall was epic. Blue, blue sky filled my vision as my body became level with the earth and the wind screamed and roared.

The boy was suddenly above me, sliding down the cliff in a storm of dust and leaves. He jumped off the side of the ledge and reached for me.

The same second, a gust of mist buffeted me from behind.

The quintessential “smoke” of the Smoky Mountains uncurled beneath me, the wispy clouds forming a blanket of fog that hid the world below.

The last thing I saw before I fell through was desperation in the boy’s face, his braceleted hand stretching for me, strained muscles pulled tight under his skin.