Chapter 1

I was already three steps into the tree line, sneakers squelching in the mud that Greythorne, Oregon specialized in, the kind that seemed to generate spontaneously from the ground even when it hadn't rained. Which it had. For six days. But I'd stopped blaming weather for anything around week two of living here, because in Greythorne the weather was the least weird thing going on.

"Nobody's making you do anything," I called back. "You're the one who said the trail looked off."

"I said the trail looked wet. Those are different sentences, Sky."

Maya Chen stood at the edge of the soccer field behind Greythorne High, arms crossed, one sneaker tapping against the grass like she was keeping time with some internal metronome of disapproval. Her backpack hung off one shoulder the way it always did, covered in pins she'd been collecting since seventh grade, a tiny enamel raccoon right next to one that said I SURVIVED ANOTHER MEETING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL. She'd added a new one recently, a little black cat with glowing yellow eyes, and I hadn't asked where she got it because Maya never told you where she got things. Things just appeared on her bag like they'd always belonged there.

The trail in question ran behind the school property, a narrow dirt path that the cross-country team used in the fall and everyone else avoided the rest of the year because it led, eventually, to the part of the forest that nobody in Greythorne talked about directly. Not in the way that people avoid mentioning something embarrassing at dinner. In the way that people avoid mentioning something that might hear you.

I didn't believe in that, obviously. I believed in wet trails and poor drainage and the particular brand of small-town myth-making that flourished in places with nothing better to do. I believed these things the way you believe the floor won't collapse when you get out of bed, not because you've checked the joists but because believing otherwise would make getting up impossible.

But the trail did look off.

It had taken me a while to notice, because noticing things in Greythorne required a kind of selective attention that I was still calibrating. You had to filter out the baseline weird, which was considerable, and tune in to the specific weird, which was worse. I'd moved here eight months ago, after my mom got the position at the county library, and I'd spent most of those eight months trying to assemble a working theory of what this town's deal was. So far my leading hypothesis was "peculiar but explainable," with a strong runner-up of "everyone here is slightly crazy from the rain."

The path itself was unremarkable as paths go. Dirt, roots, the occasional rock that looked deliberately placed to twist an ankle. What made it off was the marks.

They started about forty yards in, past the point where the soccer field lights stopped reaching. Grooves in the mud, deep ones, each about the width of my forearm, running parallel to the trail but not on it. They cut through the undergrowth on the left side, snapping branches and scoring the bark of two young alders like something had been dragged. Or like something had dragged itself.

"Sky," Maya said, closer now. She'd followed me in, which I'd known she would, because Maya's caution had a shelf life of about ninety seconds before curiosity ate through it like acid through tissue paper. "What is that?"

"I don't know."

"Is it a trail?"

"It's a trail of something."

"That's not the same as 'I don't know,' and you know it."

I crouched next to the nearest groove and held my hand over it. The depth was consistent, the edges clean, and the bottom was smooth in a way that mud doesn't naturally get. It was like someone had taken a router bit to the ground, which was not a tool typically employed by wildlife. The grooves weren't paw prints. They weren't tire tracks. They weren't the dragging marks of a dead branch or the erosion pattern of runoff water, because runoff doesn't leave four parallel channels that curve in unison.

"Could be an animal," I said.

"What animal?"

"A big one."

"Sky."

"A very big one."

"That's not better."

Maya crouched beside me, her phone already out, the flashlight beam cutting white through the early dusk. The grooves seemed deeper under direct light, and there was something else, too, something I hadn't noticed in the ambient grey. The mud at the bottom of each channel was dark. Not wet-dark, which is a brown that catches light, but dark-dark, the kind that seems to absorb whatever you shine at it. I moved Maya's hand slightly and the light didn't reflect. It just vanished into the groove like the mud had swallowed it.

"That's not normal," Maya said.

"No."

"Are you going to say something sarcastic right now, because I need you to not do that."

"I'm saving it."

"For what?"

"For when we're running."

She punched my arm. I let her, because that was our arrangement. Maya punched first and asked questions later, and I made jokes to cover the fact that my hands were shaking, which they were, which they had been since I'd crouched down and gotten a good look at those marks. Not because of the marks themselves. Because of the way the air felt around them.

This is the part I don't talk about, because talking about it makes it real in a way that "baseline weird" doesn't cover. The air near the grooves was wrong. Not cold, not hot, not moving. Just wrong, the way a note sounds wrong when a piano is out of tune, except I wasn't hearing it. I was feeling it. In my teeth, in the bones of my wrists, in the space behind my eyes where headaches start. Like the grooves were producing something that my body could register but my brain didn't have a name for.

I stood up. The feeling faded. I crouched again. It came back.

"We should go," I said.

"Now you want to go."

"I want to go and come back with a camera and a measuring tape and possibly a priest."

"You're an atheist."

"I'm a flexible atheist."

Maya stood and brushed mud off her knees. She was grinning, the particular grin she got when she was scared but didn't want to show it, the one that pulled her mouth sideways and made her look about twelve. I'd known Maya for exactly seven months and twenty-two days, since the first day of junior year when she'd sat next to me in American History and said, without preamble, "You look like you know how to keep a secret." I'd told her I didn't, and she'd said, "Perfect, me neither," and that had been that.

We walked back to the school parking lot, and I drove her home, and I didn't think about the grooves again until two in the morning, which is when I always think about the things I don't want to think about. Lying in my narrow bedroom in the apartment above the library, with the rain ticking against the window and the streetlight outside casting a stripe of orange across my ceiling, I replayed the scene. The depth. The width. The way the light had vanished at the bottom.

And the feeling. That low, tuned-out vibration in my bones that I couldn't explain and couldn't stop noticing once I'd started.

I'd been noticing things like that since we moved to Greythorne. Small things, at first. The way certain rooms in the library felt heavier than others, as if the air had been compressed into a smaller space. The way my mom's cat, Pemberley, refused to enter the back stairwell and would sit at the top of it, yowling, every night at the same time. The way I sometimes saw movement at the edge of my vision, in the gap between two trees or the space beneath a parked car, and when I turned, there was nothing there but a quality of darkness that didn't match the light.

I'd chalked it all up to adjustment. New town, new environment, new sensory inputs my brain was still learning to filter. That's what rational people did. They didn't jump to conclusions about supernatural undercurrents in small Oregon towns. They adjusted their sleep schedule and took more vitamin D.

But the grooves in the trail were not a feeling. They were a physical fact, measurable and photographable, and I was going back with my phone camera and a ruler from the library's supply closet.

I went after school the next day.

Maya had a shift at Hilltop Diner, the only restaurant in Greythorne that served food you'd voluntarily eat more than once, so I went alone. This was not a smart decision, and I knew it was not a smart decision while I was making it, which is a particular flavor of recklessness that I've been cultivating since I was old enough to reach the cookie jar. My mom calls it "your inability to leave things alone." I call it evidence-based curiosity. If I see a thing, I want to know what the thing is. This has gotten me into trouble exactly as often as you'd expect.

The trail was different.

Not gone. Different. The path itself was the same, the same dirt, the same ankle-trap rocks, the same general atmosphere of a place that didn't want you there. But the grooves had been covered. Not filled in, not eroded, not washed away by the overnight rain. Covered. Someone had come out here with a rake and dragged it across the forest floor in careful, parallel strokes, spreading leaf litter and pine needles over the marks until they were invisible to anyone who hadn't seen them before.

I got down on my hands and knees. Under the debris, if I pressed hard enough, I could feel the grooves. Still there. Still deep. Just hidden.

Someone had found them and decided no one else should see them.

I took out my phone and photographed the area anyway, the raked surface, the scattered leaves, the way the covering job was too neat to be natural. Then I followed the trail deeper, to the point where the school property ended and the national forest began, marked by a rusted wire fence and a sign that had been there longer than I'd been alive:

GREYTHORNE TOWN LIMITS — BEYOND THIS POINT: HEMLOCK WOODS

Underneath, in smaller letters that someone had hand-painted at some point and no one had bothered to remove:

STAY ON THE PATH.

I'd seen the sign before. Everyone had. It was one of those town artifacts that became invisible through repetition, like the war memorial in the square or the historical society building with its permanently crooked shutters. But standing there alone, with the covered grooves behind me and the trees ahead, the sign read differently. Not as a suggestion. As a warning. The kind that exists because something happened, and the town decided the best response was a metal sign and a fence with a hole in it that everyone walked through anyway.

I didn't go through the hole. Not that day. I told myself it was because I needed the ruler, because I needed better light, because Maya should be there, because it was getting dark and I had homework. All of which were true. None of which were the reason.

The reason was the air. Standing at the fence line, looking into the trees beyond the sign, the feeling I'd had at the grooves came back, but amplified. Not a vibration this time. A pressure. Like the forest was pushing outward, the way a room feels smaller when someone's standing in the doorway. Something was in there. I don't mean an animal or a person or a fallen tree. I mean something, the grammatical kind, the placeholder for a noun I didn't have yet.

I turned around and walked back to my car, and I didn't look behind me, and the not looking behind me was the hardest physical action I'd performed all week.

At home, I pulled up the photos on my laptop and zoomed in until the pixels blurred. The raked surface looked exactly the way it had looked in person, which is to say, deliberately altered. I could see the stroke pattern, the even spacing, the care someone had taken. This wasn't a maintenance crew doing groundskeeping. This was a person who had seen those grooves and wanted them gone.

I thought about Sheriff Brody.

Ray Brody had been the sheriff of Greythorne for, as far as anyone could tell, the entire span of recorded history. He was fifty-something, built like a fire hydrant, with a grey crewcut and a permanent expression of mild indigestion that intensified whenever anyone under the age of thirty spoke to him. He drove the only patrol car in town, a white Explorer with a dent in the rear quarter panel that he'd never had fixed, and he ate lunch at Hilltop Diner every day at noon, sitting in the corner booth with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door.

I'd interacted with him twice. Once when my mom reported a broken window at the library, which he'd attributed to "kids" with the confidence of a man who had never needed evidence for anything, and once when I'd asked him, at the diner, about the disappearances.

That conversation had not gone well.

"What disappearances?" he'd said, not looking up from his club sandwich.

"The ones people talk about. The hiker last spring. The couple from the campground three years ago. The guy from the lumber mill."

"The hiker was found in Eugene. The couple's car broke down and they got a hotel in Roseburg. The lumber worker moved to Portland."

"All of them?"

"All of them." He'd looked up then, and his expression had shifted from indigestion to something more specific. Not anger. Something quieter and more controlled. "Skylia, this is a safe town. I'd appreciate it if you didn't spread stories that suggest otherwise."

It was the word "appreciate" that got me. Not "ask" or "tell" or "prefer." Appreciate, like he was doing me a favor by not threatening me, and I should be grateful.

I'd let it go, because I was seventeen and he was the sheriff and the conversation was happening over French fries, which is not a venue conducive to investigative journalism. But I hadn't forgotten it. And now, looking at the raked-over trail, I was thinking about it again, because someone had covered those grooves and someone had a rake and someone had been in the woods behind the school between three-thirty yesterday and four o'clock today, and the list of people with both the means and the motivation to do that was short.

My phone buzzed. Maya.

diner tonite? 7? i have news. don't get excited. ok get a little excited.

I typed back: define news

can't. has to be in person. it's about the grooves.

I stared at the message. Maya had gone home last night and done what Maya always did, which was research, which was her version of my version of going back to the scene. She collected information the way other people collected spite, methodically and with great attention to detail. If she said she had news about the grooves, she had news about the grooves.

I told her seven. I showered. I ate a granola bar that tasted like compressed sawdust and ambition. I changed my shirt twice, which was not about the grooves and was about the fact that Maya had said "don't get excited" which meant she was excited, and Maya being excited about something was like a dog hearing a specific pitch, it meant something was coming that was either very good or very not good.

At 6:45, I drove to Hilltop Diner.

Maya's car was already there. She drove a 2004 Civic the color of a headache, a hand-me-down from her older brother that had survived three accidents and a catalytic converter theft. It was parked in its usual spot, the one closest to the back door, which Maya claimed was for efficiency but was actually because she was paranoid about door dings and the back spot had a wall on one side.

The driver's door was open.

Not ajar. Open. All the way, swung out to its full extension, the interior light on, the seat empty. The engine was off. Her keys were in the ignition. Her phone was on the passenger seat.

I stood in the parking lot for four seconds, maybe five, and in those seconds every rational explanation I had ever constructed for the weirdness of Greythorne collapsed like a card table in a hurricane. Because Maya didn't leave her car running. Maya didn't leave her phone anywhere. Maya didn't leave doors open. Maya was the kind of person who checked the lock twice and still came back to check it again, and here was her car, her lifeline, sitting in the parking lot like she'd stepped out for a second and never come back.

I called her name. I called it three times, louder each time, my voice cracking on the third because the parking lot was empty and the street was empty and the light in the diner was on but there was no movement inside and the only response was the rain starting up again, soft and indifferent.

I called her phone. It rang once and went to voicemail, which meant it was off or dead, but I'd just seen it on the seat with the screen lit, which meant someone had turned it off between the time I'd seen it and the time I'd called. Which meant seconds. Which meant someone was close.

I called the sheriff.

The dispatcher put me through, which took long enough that I paced a full circle around Maya's car, and when Brody picked up, I said, "Maya Chen is missing," before he'd finished saying his name.

"Missing how?" he said.

"Missing the way her car is in the parking lot at Hilltop with the door open and the keys in the ignition and her phone on the seat and no Maya anywhere."

Silence on the line. The kind that has weight to it, the kind that isn't surprise but calculation. Then: "Where are you now?"

"Hilltop. The parking lot."

"Stay there. Don't touch anything."

He hung up. I did not stay there. I walked to the back of the diner and tried the door, which was locked, and peered through the window, which showed an empty restaurant with the lights on and a pot of coffee on the burner that had gone past done and was heading toward burnt. The last customer's plate was still on the counter, half-eaten, a burger and fries going cold.

I walked back to the parking lot. I did not touch Maya's car, not because Brody told me not to but because looking at it was enough. The open door. The empty seat. The phone face-down on the passenger side, the way it would be if someone had set it there deliberately, carefully, the way you put something down when you know you're not coming back for it.

Or the way someone takes it from your hand and places it where they think it belongs.

Brody arrived in eleven minutes. I know because I counted, because counting was easier than thinking. He pulled in without sirens, which I noticed and filed. The Explorer rolled to a stop and he got out slowly, the way large men do when they want to establish that the situation is under control before they've assessed it.

He looked at the car. He looked at the door. He looked at the phone. Then he looked at me, and his expression was the same one from the diner, that quiet controlled thing that wasn't anger and wasn't concern and was, I realized with a jolt of recognition, resignation.

Like he'd been expecting this.

"How long?" he said.

"I got here at 6:45. The car was already like this."

"You didn't see her?"

"No."

"Hear anything?"

"No."

He walked to the car and leaned in, not touching anything, just looking. He spent a long time on the interior, longer than seemed necessary for a visual sweep, and then he straightened up and said something into his radio that I didn't catch, and then he turned back to me.

"She's probably around back. Probably stepped out for air. You know kids."

I was not going to let this man stand in front of Maya's abandoned car and tell me she'd stepped out for air.

"Her phone is on the seat. Her keys are in the ignition. The diner is empty and locked. She's not around back, Sheriff, I checked."

"You went to the back door."

"Yes."

"I told you to stay here."

"And I told you she's missing."

He looked at me for a long moment, and in that moment I saw something flicker across his face, something that was almost, almost, a kind of respect, like he was revising his assessment of me from "hysterical teenager" to "hysterical teenager who might cause actual problems." I was fine with either category as long as one of them resulted in someone looking for Maya.

"I'll file a report," he said. "But in my experience, when a young person leaves their car and their phone and takes off, it's usually because they wanted to leave."

"Maya didn't want to leave."

"You don't know that."

"I know her."

"You've known her seven months."

It was a precise number, which meant he'd looked it up, which meant he'd looked me up, which meant that at some point prior to this conversation, Ray Brody had sat at his desk in the Greythorne sheriff's office and typed my name into a system and learned things about me that I hadn't told him. The thought landed in my chest like a stone.

"She was coming to meet me," I said. "She texted me. She had news about something we found yesterday, in the woods behind the school. Grooves in the ground. Someone covered them up today, and she had information about them, and now she's gone."

I hadn't meant to say all of that. I'd meant to say the first part and keep the rest for later, for when I'd had time to think about what it meant and how to present it. But the words came out the way water comes out of a cracked pipe, all at once, and once they were in the air I couldn't take them back.

Brody's face changed. Not a lot. A small contraction around the eyes, a tightening of the jaw, the kind of micro-expression that most people wouldn't catch but that I'd spent eight months in this town learning to read, because in Greythorne the important things were always in the margins, in what people didn't say, in the space between the words where the truth leaked through.

"What grooves?" he said.

"In the mud. Behind the school. Four parallel channels, deep, about the width of a forearm. They led toward the Hemlock Line. Someone raked them over between yesterday and today."

He stared at me. Then he looked at Maya's car again, and then back at me, and something in his posture shifted, a settling of the shoulders that looked like a man accepting a load he'd been hoping he wouldn't have to carry.

"Go home, Skylia."

"I'm not going home."

"Go home. I'll handle this."

"You'll file a report and tell me she probably ran away."

"I'll handle this," he repeated, and the second time it wasn't a dismissal. It was a warning. Quiet, even, and final. The kind of thing a person says when they need you to stop talking not because they don't want to hear it but because they don't want you to be the one saying it.

I went home.

Not because he told me to. Because I needed to think, and I couldn't think in that parking lot with Maya's car sitting there like a monument to something I didn't understand yet. I drove the six minutes from Hilltop to the library, parked in the lot behind the building, and climbed the exterior stairs to the apartment above, where my mom was at the kitchen table grading papers from her adult literacy class and Pemberley was sitting at the top of the back stairwell yowling at nothing.

"You're back early," my mom said.

"Maya didn't show up."

"The diner?"

"The planet."

My mom looked at me with the particular expression she used when she couldn't tell if I was being serious or deflecting, which was most of the time, and which I never resolved for her because resolving it would require explaining the full scope of what was going on in my head, and I wasn't ready for that conversation with anyone, let alone a woman who had moved us to Greythorne for a job and still believed it was a normal town.

"She'll turn up," my mom said.

"Yeah."

I went to my room. I closed the door. I sat on the bed with my laptop and my phone and my shaking hands and I opened the photos from the trail, the ones I'd taken that afternoon of the raked-over surface, and I stared at them, and I tried to think clearly, and I failed, because clear thinking requires a baseline of normalcy and I had just watched that baseline walk out the door of a 2004 Civic and disappear.

The light through my window shifted. The streetlight, the one that cast the orange stripe across my ceiling, flickered once, twice, and then steadied, but the quality of the light was different. Colder. I looked up and the stripe was there but it was thinner, like something was partially blocking the streetlight, and I stood and went to the window.

There was nothing in the street. No car, no person, no animal. The trees along the road were still, the rain had stopped, and the light was coming from the lamp post as it always did, full and steady and orange.

But at the edge of the tree line, where our lawn met the strip of forest that bordered the property, there was a shape.

Not a person. Not an animal. A shape, the way a shadow has a shape when it's cast by something you can't see, long and slightly off, the proportions wrong in a way I couldn't articulate. It stood between two alders, and it was darker than the space around it, which shouldn't have been possible because the space around it was already dark, the kind of dark that the Oregon woods produce at night, deep and total and patient.

The shape moved.

Not the way a person moves, with weight and intention and the physics of a body in space. It shifted, the way a shadow shifts when the light source changes, except the light source hadn't changed. The streetlight was steady. The moon was behind clouds. There was nothing to cast a shadow, and the shadow was moving anyway, sliding along the tree line toward the back of the house, toward the back stairwell, toward the place where Pemberley was still yowling with the kind of sustained, panicked fury that I'd been ignoring for eight months because I thought it was just a cat being weird.

I moved away from the window. Not because I was afraid, though I was, but because the shape had stopped. It was still there, at the edge of the trees, and it was facing me. I couldn't see eyes or a face or any of the features that would make it a person, but I could feel it, the same way I'd felt the grooves in the trail, that low wrongness in my teeth and my wrists and the space behind my eyes, and the feeling was saying something very specific that my brain was translating as best it could.

It was saying: we see you.

I backed up until my legs hit the bed and I sat down hard, and I didn't look at the window again for a long time. When I did, the shape was gone. The tree line was empty. The streetlight was steady. Pemberley had stopped yowling.

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding, stood up on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, and went to the back door to let Pemberley in, because letting the cat in was a thing I could do, a concrete action in a world that had just stopped making sense in any way I could articulate to a sheriff or a parent or myself.

The back door was scratched.

Not scratched like an animal had clawed at it, though that was my first thought, because Pemberley had been known to attack doors with the kind of commitment that suggested a personal vendetta. This was different. The scratches were in the paint, shallow but precise, arranged in a pattern that I recognized immediately because I had been staring at it on my laptop screen twenty minutes ago.

Four parallel lines. The width of a forearm. The depth of a groove in the mud.

And underneath them, scratched into the paint with the same precision, a word:

STAY.

I put my hand on the door frame to steady myself, and the wood was cold, colder than it should have been, colder than the night air, cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the thing that had been standing at the tree line three minutes ago, the thing that had moved wrong and watched me and come to my door and left me a message.

I stood there, my hand on the cold wood, the scratched word in front of me, and I thought about Maya, about her car with the door open and the phone on the seat and the keys in the ignition, and I thought about the grooves in the trail and the raked-over surface and the feeling in my bones that I'd been trying to explain away for eight months.

I was not going to stay.

I went inside, and I closed the door, and I locked it, and I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop and started searching for everything I could find about the history of Greythorne, Oregon, and the things that had disappeared into its woods and never come back.