Thick mist covers everything; swirls of lighter and darker grey are all you can see. You could walk and walk, and never get anywhere, at least not to know it. Sometimes shapes swirl in the fog, and you think you see a corner, or a tree, or a face, but the next minute they’re gone. You can shout as loud as you like, but the fog sucks up your sound and gives nothing back, not even an echo. There is no way out.

You walk, because there is nothing else to do. You concentrate very hard on the movements of your body: are you swinging your left leg as far as your right? Does your foot twist at all to one side or the other, even the tiniest fraction? You have no way of being sure you’re walking in a straight line, except to make your movements as perfectly symmetrical as they can be. You tell yourself that if you walk in a straight line for long enough, you must eventually get somewhere; you can’t be the only solid thing in this space. You grimly welcome every new blister, every hunger pang, because they prove that time is passing. You don’t know how long you’ve been here, but every muscle aches; your hunger has passed from discomfort, to pain, to nausea, to pain again, and now all you feel is a keen emptiness. The longer you walk, the more your body hurts, and the harder it is to keep your feet and legs perfectly straight. You can’t quite tell if your eyes are open or closed; either way, everything looks the same. At last you stumble and fall to your knees. Even then, one thought remains paramount: keep your feet where they were, do not move or twist your body.

You take the opportunity to rest, head bowed where you fell. You have not used your voice for a long time, the silence is so disheartening, but you call out now, shout for help. Nothing answers; the sound is gone as though it had never been made. You close your eyes—or open them, whichever it is—and concentrate hard: she is somewhere near, she is thinking of you. You have met her so many times in your mind, it cannot be too hard to reach out now, to call in a way that she will hear. You focus every last shred of thought on her, wherever she is, your entire mind calls out her name—

Gaby woke with a start, eyes wide in the dark. For a moment she thought she was still in the dream, bound by mist and nothingness. Then she realized she could see shapes above her, dark bands striped overhead, the rafters of the church.

She sat up and looked around. Outside the windows the dark was just thinning into the pale grey of early morning. Julia slept on the pew next to hers; Nick was across the aisle. And Will—Will was not here, Will was in trouble. She did not know how much of that dream was literal and how much was interpretive, but she knew what it meant. He was in trouble, and she needed to find him now.

Gaby got up and began rolling up her sleeping bag. She would not be able to sleep any more now, even if she was willing to lose the time. When she zipped it closed, Julia began to stir, and when she hoisted it over her shoulder Julia sat up.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “What time is it?”

“Looks like about six.”

“There’s no rush, you know,” said Julia. “Nick won’t wake up for another three hours anyway.”

“He’ll have to,” said Gaby. “Will’s in trouble.”

Julia sat up more sharply. “What do you mean? How do you know?”

Gaby had no idea how to answer that. It hadn’t been even the normal kind of dream she and Will shared, where they met each other face to face. She had been Will, felt exactly what he’d been feeling at the moment. It was an entirely new experience, and even if she could explain it, she couldn’t explain why she was so sure she knew what it meant.

Julia took her hesitation for reluctance. “Fine,” she said. “Forget I asked. Should have known better.” She got up and began rolling her own sleeping bag, obviously not looking at Gaby.

“I didn’t mean…” Gaby started, and then stopped. Maybe it was just as well, since she had no explanation anyway. “So you’re coming?”

Julia gave a little snort. “What choice do we have?”

“I… of course you have a choice,” Gaby said, taken aback. “I can go look for him by myself…”

“…And run off with him as soon as you’ve found him,” said Julia. “No way. This is our fight as much as it is yours. We’re in it. Get used to that.”

Gaby sat down slowly on the pew, feeling completely disoriented. “I’m not sure it is, technically,” she said. “I don’t know if Will explained to you, but—”

“He explained. He said that you were both pretty sure that it all happened because of you in the first place. To which I say, Bull. I don’t care why it happened, it happened to me. And Nick. And Mom and Dad and Paul and Hannah. And I’m tired of being elbowed out just because you two are somehow ‘special.’ I have at least as much right to be involved as you do—you didn’t lose any family members.”

Gaby looked away. There was absolutely nothing she could say to that. For one thing, it was true: the Colven family had been shredded after what happened, and all Gaby’s family had had to do was relocate and worry about her health. For another, it was entirely unfair: they had been a second family to her for half her life; in the years before the chase began, she’d spent as much time at their house as at her own. They may not have been her own parents or siblings, but aside from Will and her own parents there was nobody in the world she cared so much about. And she couldn’t let go of the knowledge that Julia had once believed her responsible for the whole thing; the hatred that Julia must have felt back then lingered like a sore in Gaby’s mouth. For a moment she wished that they had never found her, that she was still looking for Will on her own.

“It’s up to you,” she said, in the very low, flat voice she used when she was hurt or angry. “I’m going, and you can come along or not.”

“Well, we are,” said Julia flatly. She picked up her sleeping bag and took it outside, while Gaby sat still on the pew, trying to dislodge the queasy feeling in her stomach. None of this was happening the way she expected it. It should have been her and Will at this point, solving problems together; what was she doing getting into fights with his older sister? And what was the fight even about? Gaby went over her words that morning carefully; she didn’t think she’d said anything to provoke it. She and Julia had always been friendly in the old days. She’d slept in Julia’s room whenever she was staying the night, in the bed that had once belonged to the oldest, Meg. The four of them—Will, Gaby, Nick, and Julia—had built a treehouse together, just a few years before the chase began, a vast and elaborate construction which took them nearly a year to finish. They hadn’t been friends, exactly, but they’d been friendly. So why was she so snappish and hostile now?

After a while she decided it was useless to worry about this and started to worry about Will instead. Lost or trapped or both; those were the things she could say certainly, based on the feelings she’d had while moving through that strange non-dream. Whether it was a literal representation of what he was going through, or images that corresponded to his state of mind, she couldn’t be sure. There hadn’t been any sense of imminent danger, only weariness and a mounting desperation. She wondered if he knew he’d reached her. She wondered how she could possibly find him. Finding the man he’d gone to see was the first step, but what if he wasn’t there? Or couldn’t help? Where would she even begin to look after that?

Deciding it was useless to worry about this as well, she went back to fretting about Julia, when Julia re-entered the church.

“Hey,” she said, a little awkwardly.

“Hey.”

“I’m making oatmeal. You want some?” Her tone was diffident, if not apologetic. It sounded like a peace offering.

“Yeah, that’d be good.” Gaby still didn’t understand what the fight was about, but at least it seemed to be over.

“Okay. Um… so what’s the plan? How are you going to find Will?”

Gaby got out of the pew. Finally, down to business. “The first step is to find the man he went to see. He said I’d be able to. What was he doing yesterday morning?”

“Yesterday morning?”

“Yes. Besides writing that note to me and helping you get underway, he must have done something else. What was it?”

Julia cocked her head to one side, thinking. “He was sketching while I made breakfast.”

“Sketching! Good. Where’s his sketchbook?”

Julia pointed Gaby to Will’s duffel bag. “You can dig around in it yourself, he’d probably prefer you to do it than me.”

There was very little in the bag: a few changes of clothes, five books he particularly loved, and a small, folded-up quilt. Gaby took this last out slowly, her hands unaccountably shaky. She knew that quilt like a second skin, it was the one the two of them had used during the days of the chase. Nearly broke, with all their possessions destroyed in fire, the Colvens had gone to Salvation Army stores for changes of clothing and a few extra blankets. Will and Gaby had selected this one, worn and thin as it was, because it had a warm, comforting feeling to it. Every so often they got feelings like this from objects, different from a smell but similar in quality. Sometimes the feeling was pleasant, sometimes decidedly unpleasant. They had adopted this quilt as their own, and had spent many nights curled under it, on a pile of cushions in the corner of a dingy motel room. It was heavy now with memories. They had always taken turns sleeping, one lying awake at all times, because they did not fully trust the others to hear the first sounds of the shadow-hounds’ approach. The night after Will’s father had been found dead and Paul vanished, Gaby had held him tightly and stroked his hair, while he shook silently with fear and rage and grief. This quilt held all the horror and the sweetness of their last weeks together. She had never expected to touch it again.

Finding that she had to either do something or begin crying, Gaby pushed the quilt away from her and dug into the bag again. Here she found his sketchbook. She took it out and opened it slowly. Most of the sketches were still bound into the book, but several had been torn out and stuffed inside the front cover. It was these, she was sure, he meant her to look at. She spread them out on the pew side by side.

In their childhood, in the fine days before the shadow-hounds had come, Gaby and Will had loved setting puzzles and challenges for each other, testing one another’s skill in deciphering more and more subtle messages. Will’s talent in drawing had produced these picture riddles; many days the mailman had brought Gaby nothing more than a few sketches, which she then spent the day poring over in an attempt to discover the words hidden within. It was the perfect way for him to give her a message now. There was no reason for anyone else to look twice at some loose sketches.

There were seven sketches, and Gaby doubted that she needed them all. She needed three, possibly four words: the man’s first and last name, the name of his street, and possibly the city, if it wasn’t Atlanta. She didn’t think Will would have had time to do seven sketches in the same morning; more likely he had drawn the ones he needed, then pulled some others out to camouflage them. So which were the ones she needed?

The first was a drawing of a small country church, quite worn down. She frowned over it for a moment, but it was not the church they were currently in, nor was it familiar to her. She guessed it must be one of the earlier ones they had stayed in, drawn in an idle moment, and passed it over. The second sketch was a portrait, again of an unfamiliar subject, an old man. Gaby supposed it might be the man as Will had seen him in his dream, but at first glance there didn’t appear to be any suggestive details in the picture, and she gave it a pass for the moment. The third, however, was immediately familiar. It was a hall of a high school, lined with lockers, and Gaby recognized it as her hall: there was the locker next to hers, with the badly dented door. This bore inspection. She looked at the picture closely. The lockers had numbers, just legible at the tops, but these had not been copied from her school; they were five digits long. That was more like it.

The numbers were sequential, which meant that only one of them mattered; he would have encoded the word he needed and put it on one locker, then numbered the others forward and backward from it to disguise it. There was no need to be overly obscure; the right locker was almost certainly her own, and the code would most likely be the same code she used to make her locker combination. That was a bother. Translating letters into numbers was easy: you just took the letter’s alphanumeric equivalent, and if it had two digits, you added them together until you got a single digit. Translating from numbers to letters was difficult, because each number could stand for several different letters. But with a bit of guesswork you could usually manage it.

The number was 11451. That wouldn’t be too difficult. 1 stood for A, J, or S. J and S together at the beginning of a word were highly unlikely, and a word ending in J was even more unlikely. So one of the first two letters was almost certainly an “a”, and the final one was  “a” or “s”. Well and good. 4 could be D, M, or V. It was lucky they were all consonants, and none of them blended well with a J or an S. She worked through the permutations quickly. SAD__, SAM__, SAV__, JAD__, JAM__, JAV__, were the likeliest combinations, with ASD__, ASM__, ASV__, as possibilities. 5 could be E, N, or W, making ___EA, ___ES, ___NA, the likeliest ending possibilities. There were several words one could make out of these combinations, but the overwhelmingly likely one was JAMES. James could be a first name, a last name, or a street name; she would have to rely on the other two words to make it clearer which it was.

Gaby moved on to the next sketch, a very clean and precise architectural drawing. She scanned the rows of windows, the lines of bricks, for any patterns or abnormalities, but saw nothing, and moved on. The fifth sketch caught her eye at once, because it featured a caravan train of elephants crossing a river. Aside from the oddness of the subject (elephant caravans being usually depicted in a desert-like environment), elephants were always suspect. It was by the elephant enclosure at the zoo that they had first met. She looked carefully over the picture: there were no letters or numbers printed anywhere, nor any obvious patterns. She squinted at it to see if any shapes emerged, and tilted the page, holding it flat in front of her eyes and rotating it slowly. Nothing jumped out, and anyway that kind of hidden message took a great deal of time to compose and execute. If there was a message in that one, then, it was somewhere in the subject of the picture itself. She put it aside to return to.

The sixth sketch made her smile: it was a light, whimsical sketch of a small harbor town. In the foreground was a little fishing boat, and a fisherman who was handling his lines very inexpertly: he’d somehow gotten a line crossed over his chest and around his leg, and wore an expression of bewildered exasperation. Gaby lingered over this one, only because its style was very unusual for Will. His sketches tended to be either very precise and analytical, or dark and heavy. She almost hoped there wasn’t a message in it, as that would indicate that he’d spent at least a little time in this lighter mood. There were a few words: on a hill above the harbor, there was a sign, partially obscured by a tree, that said “Town o______is.” And the fishing boat was apparently named simply, “Blue.”

Gaby narrowed her eyes here: something was going off in her head, there was something here. She looked it over again, the sunny little harbor, the concealed sign, and the frustrated fisherman all tangled up—

Gaby laughed aloud. Her father was a songwriter by profession, and had brought her up on Bob Dylan. She should have seen it at once: this fisherman was tangled up in blue. “What’s funny?” called Julia, who had just come into the church to shake Nick awake.

“Your brother’s making puns,” Gaby replied.

“Huh. You’re getting it, then?”

“I think so.” Gaby returned to the picture. That told her that this one was definitely for her, but what was the message? She looked again at the obscured name of the town, and the lyrics of the song came back to her. “Working for a while on a fishing boat right outside of…” naturally, the word was Delacroix. All right. So she had two words, James and Delacroix, which might be a last name or a street name.

The final sketch was of a sleeping dog, and on examination Gaby saw nothing in it to strike her interest. She returned to the fifth, the one with the elephants. This, she guessed, would be Will’s subtlest kind of picture-riddle, the one where the answer was found in something out of place. Elephants, certainly, were out of place in that environment, but that, she thought, was only to draw her attention to the picture. What else? The caravan drivers looked perfectly ordinary, walking alongside the elephants, with their tunics cinched high above their waists… ah, but that was strange. Though the river was very broad, the men walking weren’t even up to their ankles, and the elephants were barely getting their toenails wet. A very shallow river indeed… shallow… shallow river… crossing a shallow river… then she had it. Shallow ford: and she knew Shallowford Road quite well.

So it was James Delacroix, of 12793 Shallowford Road. She gathered up the sketches with zest and zipped Will’s bag shut.