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Tayla takes my silence for agreement. “Fucking signs of wonderment,” she says with a sigh.

Her words conjure up the image of black butterflies. The insistent ones that stalked Kiara, the lone butterfly fluttering around my boots like it would tug me the other way if it could. “Oh my gosh!” I yelp. “The butterflies! They were trying to warn us!”

She pauses in the middle of winding her long hair into a bun. “Uh…what’s that now?”

“Tayla, think about it for a second. When did the butterflies first show up? First, before Kiara was snatched. Then when we ran into the snakes. Any time we were about to be in danger, they tried to avert it. Maybe they thought we’d take them more seriously if they came in huge numbers, but it made us uneasy instead.

So then they tried a different tactic and only one single butterfly tried to get my attention. ”

Tayla scoffs, but her eyebrows draw together like she’s giving my theory some credence. “Don’t you think you’re giving butterflies a little too much credit?”

Unwilling to let doubts enter my line of thought, I rush to say, “We thought they were bad omens because of their color, like how the crows were black, too, but what if we’ve been wrong about how we’ve been looking at the signs all this time?

Like my dad always said, ‘Things in the forest will lead you astray if you let them.’?”

“Explain.”

“Okay, walk with me.”

“ Toward the big, scary white tree?” For the first time, she’s forced to hop-skip along to keep up with me. “Nova, wait up!”

As we walk at a fast clip, I tell her my theory.

“The wishing well predates Henry Prior, right? If Petra’s right about the forest being, well, sentient , then I’d imagine it had some pretty strong feelings about humans suddenly invading its sanctuary.

A ton of greedy humans, all looking for the wishing well, trampling the forest underfoot without much care. ”

By unspoken agreement, we give the white oak a wide berth. I don’t take my eyes off the branches for a second. “I’m following,” Tayla says as we skirt around it.

“What does something alive do when it’s threatened?”

Understanding dawns in her blue eyes. In the glimmer of light refraction, I can visualize the copperhead rearing up in an S-shape, poised to strike. I hear the muted hiss, see the flicking forked tongue.

“They bare their teeth,” Tayla breathes. “So this— all of this —is the forest fighting back?”

“It’s as good an explanation as any.”

But even though I shrug and try to play it cool, the way shooting stars are racing across every inch of me means I’m on the right track.

I’m so aware of myself and my body, where I am and who I’m with.

When I inhale, the air is sweet, refreshing.

Nothing like the bracing chill that tasted like the edge of a knife.

My ears prick with the rustle of the brittle leaves, the quiet crunch of twigs underneath.

Everything feels sharper, a world in focus after days of walking around with smudged glasses.

“Anyone who read the guidebook would follow the signs,” I say, picking up steam as I work it out.

“I mean, think about the moss. Keiffer told us it could grow anywhere, but we still read some kind of meaning into it. That’s the whole reason we even came this way.

The moss led us off the well-marked path and onto frankly dangerous terrain.

And the tree is pointing us back toward the snakes because it’s trying to lead us away from—” My breath catches.

“The wishing well,” I breathe. “The forest is protecting the well.”

“Where do the butterflies come into it? You said one tried to warn you to turn back before we met up with the snakes. But how can we be sure the butterflies are looking out for us? If they’re on our side? I mean, they did scare us before, when they attached themselves to Kiara.”

“True,” I admit. “But like I said, maybe they wanted to help but simply miscalculated how best to communicate the danger to us. We just attributed all the doom and gloom to them because they weren’t a bright, pretty color.

” I shake my head, peeved with myself for going along with decisions I disagreed with, for jumping to erroneous conclusions like a sheep.

“Correlation is not causation,” I say, reminding myself as much as Tayla.

The words tumble out faster, my excited heartbeat zinging as I go back to my roots, trusting in me .

“And that’s all superstition is, isn’t it?

It’s so reductive: A happened first, and B happened next, therefore A caused B.

When really, there’s a million explanations.

Like maybe between A and B were a dozen other things that happened, but we missed them, so we fixate only on B, the outcome we saw with our very own eyes.

Or maybe A did cause B, but only if X, Y, and Z thing also happened. Or A and B are both caused by C.”

The words spill out of me like I’ll lose them if I don’t share them at the same speed as my racing thoughts. “Do you remember what you said about everyone in the Fellowship being here for their own reasons?”

Tayla’s eyes are wide. “Uh-huh.”

“Well,” I say, “the forest is older, wilier, and more ruthless than all of us put together. Every single thing in this ecosystem has its own agenda. We can’t assume that all the butterflies and the crows and the steps and the snakes and the trees are working together.

I think most things here are working against us.

Trying to get hikers lost so they’ll never find the wishing well.

They don’t care if humans live or die. And if you think about it, why would they?

It’s not like humanity as a whole has done a great job caring about nature.

Henry Prior never cared about protecting the well.

He just wanted to exploit it for himself, and fuck everyone else. ”

Not for the first time, I find myself loathing my ancestor.

“So the steps disappeared in order to cut off our escape from the snakes,” Tayla realizes aloud.

I nod vigorously until she grabs my shoulders and forces me to stop.

“The forest is an asshole but only because it’s had to be.

It’s protecting itself, protecting its magic.

But I think the butterflies are different.

Maybe they’ve had enough of the missing and the dead.

Maybe they don’t want this place to be a graveyard. ”

I finish with a hungry gasp.

“Okay, take a breath, Sherlock.” Tayla’s words are teasing and light, but the rest of her looks troubled.

I laugh, a little embarrassed at my earnestness, but I can’t play it off like nothing.

I’m right. I know it.

“Suppose everything you just said is true,” says Tayla. “Does that mean we do the opposite of what the signs are telling us? Is that why we didn’t go in the direction the tree was pointing? Do you think this way leads to the wishing well?”

“Yes, exactly! All of that!”

She wets her mouth, frowning when she lifts her hand to touch her chapped lips. “Even if that’s one mystery solved, do you think this breakthrough will help us rescue Kiara? It’s been…god, probably hours by now? And we’re moving farther away from the others, too.”

“It follows that if the forest took Kiara, then it’s been doing everything in its power to prevent us from finding her. I don’t know why it would want to keep her, but…”

She sighs. “Considering the other things we’ve encountered in here so far, the reason can’t be good.”

“Nature is surprisingly nefarious,” I say lightly, sidestepping what looks like the remains of an old, abandoned nest long fallen out of a tree.

“In addition to being an asshole, as the truly nefarious are wont to be,” she quips.

“Clearly I’ve been lied to about the good that going outside will do me.”

Tayla snorts, twisting at a dry bit of skin until finally losing patience and ripping it off. A bead of shocking red blood blossoms, and she grimaces at the taste.

“Where’s your lip balm?”

“Lost it.” She rolls her bloody lip into her mouth. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished a tube, actually.” After a beat, she adds, “But I’ve never lost one so fast before.”

“Must have fallen out of your pocket.”

She shakes her head. “It was in my backpack. Zipped up all safe.”

“Maybe someone borrowed it.”

“Nope. Evan makes their own vegan rose salve, Radhika is a die-hard Glossier girlie, Kiara uses something tinted and expensive from Sephora, and Keiffer is old school with his cherry ChapStick.”

I flash a chubby yellow tube at her, the end squeezed flat. “This is mine. Want some?”

“Please.” She uses her finger to swipe off a bit then hands it back to me with a grateful smile.

I tuck it away. The camphor and menthol of Carmex is heady, walking me into memories of Dad unbidden and without warning.

It’s one of those polarizing scents that people either love or hate, but it’s always been comforting to me.

He kept one in his car’s glove compartment, in his backpack, on the bathroom sink.

We were still finding the places he squirreled spares away even a year into his absence.

“You know,” I say. “Other stuff’s gone missing, too.”

She opens her mouth as if to ask what else is missing when the low rumble of male voices makes us both fall silent. Instinct drives us to press our backs against the nearest trees, flattening our bodies.

The first voice is full of scorn. “What makes you think they’re the ones?”

“Because no one else has made it this far,” says a second, each word laced with patience, as though this isn’t the first time they’ve had this argument. “Not in decades.”

“It hasn’t been that long.” The third voice is deeper than the others, the tone harder to make out.

“Yeah, only feels like it,” chimes in a fourth, this one aiming for lightheartedness that doesn’t quite land, considering he’s the only one to chuckle.