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“No,” I huffed. Nudging him aside, I held my skin to the timber. Its grooves smoldered in color. “See?”

His eyebrows shot towards his hairline. I held my chin high in triumph.

“I must not have pressed hard enough. Let me try again.” He lunged forward.

Nothing came from under his fingers’ imprints.

I crossed my arms and gave him an expression I wasn’t used to wielding: a smirk. “Guess I have the magic touch.”

“You really do.” He stared at me with wide, electric eyes, chest reclining on a long, unsteady inhale. For a moment, he looked like he might run. “And you’ve been right in front of me all this time. I wanted so bad to ignore it.” He ran his hand through his hair and took me in like a panoramic view of a mountain—one he was supposed to climb. A petrified sort of awe that rooted him to the spot. I might’ve paused on his acknowledgment—at least I thought that’s what this was—if we weren’t breaking and entering.

I’d have to revel in the credit later.

Not sure where to go from there, I turned back to the door. “What if the key to get inside is a pattern on this door? Like some sort of code. And we just need to…trace the right one for it to unlock?”

My words seemed to snap him out of his daze. “That’s a good idea, but we’re not going to just get lucky and stumble across the code.” He narrowed his eyes at what towered in front of us. “We need to figure out what the lines represent and narrow down a pattern from there.”

I pulled the beige scrunchie off my wrist, twisting my hair into a loose, low bun. “There are so many to choose from.”

Brows furrowed in concentration, Ryder rested his chin between his thumb and pointer. “Yeah, this could take forever.” Ah, the king of encouragement.

The spiraled bark lifted more the longer I stared, defying its gravitational bounds. I rubbed my eyes until I was no longer seeing double and let out a sigh. Maybe if I treated it like a 3D image the answer would pop out? Javi and I had done dozens of stereograms in our lives, competing for who could see the illusion first—this’d be no different.

Despite my winning streak, after thirty dizzying seconds here, I tapped out cross-eyed and empty-handed. I spun my mom’s necklace, directing my stress to the pendant. The brocade indented my fingers as I pressed into the dull lines—which strangely felt sharp.

“Ow!” Its raised, rounded edges had somehow punctured my skin enough to draw a drop of blood, but that’s not what had the gears of my mind spinning wildly.

Holding my necklace, my breath, and the teensiest bit of hope that I refused to give in to too quickly, I drew the raindrop pattern of my necklace, ripples and all, with the two stars, onto the door. It glowed like bioluminescence against the red wood. So promising, until it wasn’t.

“Damn. I thought I had figured it out,” I muttered as the light faded into nothing.

“You might have the right idea…” Ryder’s hand shook with the slightest tremor as it halted mere inches from my chest. “May I?” I nodded, and he scooped the lapis stone into his palm, tracing its design with an incisive gaze. “This is the Empyrean symbol for water.”

A tidal roar reached my ears although I stood a mile away from the Pacific Ocean. A draft tunneled through the porch and caressed my skin like a chill, velvety current. Something about what he said clicked.

Gently releasing the pendant, he leaned into the door with his arm overhead, pressing his knuckles into the wood. “Since it doesn’t work solo, it could be part of a greater combination.” His eyes swept the door’s gnarled patterns for meaning. “There are three other elements. Earth, air, and fire.”

My heart thumped so hard it could’ve knocked on the door itself. “Do you know the symbols for those?”

“I do.” He dropped his hand and took a step back.

“Okay.” My nerves made it to my voice. “Where do we start?”

“Let’s try ascending order. First would be earth, the basis of all creation. A circle with a star in its center, like the ones on your necklace. Like this.” Ryder spoke with conviction, yet as he drew nearer, the trembling fingers he placed over mine lacked that assurance. He stroked my pinky with his thumb, a silent wish of good luck, and moved our hands to a larger knot in the center.

We traced a single round line, not lifting our fingers until the shape had been completed, then added a four-pointed star in the middle of it.

The drawing burned into the surface and flared with a stability unlike the flickering from earlier, like the door was accepting that part of the code.

“You were right.” I stared at the geometric blaze, almost too dumbstruck to continue. “Which one next?”

“Earth rises out of the water, so water.” I knew this symbol, but he still guided my finger, selecting a knot to trace over, a bit lower and to the left.

We watched, no less intrigued as the ultraviolet rays once again flared brighter.

“Now air, which breathes life into the first two pillars. Let’s put it here.” Still interlocked, together we traced on the symbol, his grip on me tighter than before. “Across from water.”

Beginning with a four-pointed star this time, we used its bottom point to start a spiral that looped around it counterclockwise, then snaked to the right and slightly below into a matching design. A final star was placed above the dip between the two.