“What is it?” Tyler asked.

“An infection,” I lied. “Drive faster,” I instructed the driver, though I knew he likely wouldn’t listen to me, “or she might not make it to wherever we’re going.”

We drove for four or five more hours, until dawn began to leech the dark from the edges of the sky, and all of us sat with our legs crossed, our bladders pressed tight and low. Grey’s fever waxed and waned, but her skin remained slick with sweat, her lips sapped of color, her breath stained rotten green.

I sank in and out of sleep. I wished I’d had the opportunity to tell Cate I was okay. Soon, she would wake to the news that we had disappeared from the hospital overnight, that we were gone without a trace. What would that do to her?

In the shadow light of the early morning, I saw ants slip from the corner of Grey’s mouth and walk a tight trail over her cheek, toward her eye.

Vivi yawned and stretched. “Where are we?” she asked as we pulled past the outskirts of a city.

“Edinburgh,” I answered. I’d suspected as soon as we’d crossed the border into Scotland that this was our final destination. Where it all began, a lifetime ago, on a quiet street in the Old Town, in a slip of moments between one year and the next.

When I thought about that night, when I tried to remember it, nothing came back to me. It was only through the retellings of others that I could get a sense of what it had been like.

The way Cate told it, there was no magic hanging in the air, no sense of foreboding, no tall stranger in dark clothing following unnoticed behind us. It was a normal night on a normal street. We were a normal family and then, just like that, we weren’t. Something terrible and impossible happened to us here, and I couldn’t remember what—but maybe Grey did. Grey, with her secrets and her perfumed lips and her unnatural beauty that had brought the world to its knees before her.

Grey, who said she remembered everything. Everything. All the answers, wrapped up on the other side of a fever. All we had to do was break it.

A few minutes later, the car rolled to a stop on a tight, cobbled street. The city was still soaked in darkness. The light here was old, borrowed from another century. Even the modern streetlights seemed unable to fully shift the weight of the Scottish night.

Tyler stretched and went to open his door.

“Stop,” Vivi said, looking up out the windshield at something I couldn’t see. “There’s a kid pointing a gun at us out her window.”

“A kid?” I asked.

“Yeah, a creepy-looking little girl with a shotgun,” Vivi said.

The driver got out of the car slowly and stood there, staring up at her with his hands raised. I heard a gun pump.

“You owe her,” the man said, and then he turned and— without closing his car door—began walking back the way we came. How ruined would his life be from his night of driving three strange girls and a male supermodel across the country?

“What’s she doing?” I asked Vivi, who was sitting very still in the front seat.

“I think she’s contemplating shooting me in the face,” Vivi answered. “The odds are not looking in my favor.”

I opened my door then, slowly, the way the man had, and slipped out from beneath Grey with my hands held over my head. The barrel of the shotgun moved to me. Vivi was right—the person holding it was only a child, a little girl of no more than ten or eleven.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.

The girl broke her stance, glancing over the gun to get a better look at me: my white-blond hair, my black eyes. If the girl knew Grey, she would see her in me. She drew the gun inside and closed the window.

“I think it’s clear,” I said.

Tyler and Vivi opened their car doors and got out. I thought for a minute that that would be it, that the child would shut up the windows and lock the doors on us—but no, the front door opened, and the girl stepped out onto the porch with the gun slung over one shoulder. She was tangle-haired and squalid, her hands and bare feet thick with grime. She wore a cotton nightgown that might once have been white, but was now soiled with earth and muck. It looked like she’d been buried alive in it and then dug herself out of her own shallow grave.

Her eyes traveled from Vivi, to me, back to Vivi’s tattooed throat, and then to my throat, to the shiny hook of scar tissue that glittered in the early morning sun. Her eyes were wide and her lungs drew the rapid, shallow breaths of a hare watching a wolf across a field—as if deciding whether she should run or remain stock-still.

Tyler looked over her shoulder and into the house. “Are your parents home, sweetheart?”

“Shut it, Tyler,” Vivi said.

I took a step toward the girl, my hands raised. “We need you to help her,” I said. “Grey sent us here because she knew you’d know what to do.”

The child looked at me, questioning. I nodded toward the back seat, where my sister lay shaking.

The girl stepped barefoot onto the cold cobbles and came to look at Grey. “Bring . . . ,” she said, her voice a dry and strangled thing. I wondered how often she spoke to anyone. “Bring her inside,” she rasped—and so we did.

Vivi, the strongest of us, held Grey under the arms while Tyler carried her feet. They set her down on a dust- and crumb-covered rug in the living room just off the hall. I ducked back outside to close the car doors and the front door. There was a stack of two dozen or so unopened envelopes piled up in the hall, all addressed to Adelaide Fairlight. Our grandmother’s name. It was also the name Grey used to check in to hotels to hide her identity. So this was another of our sister’s hidden nests. How extensive was her web of mysteries?

I knelt by Grey’s side with the others and looked around the space for more signs of our sister. Green things had begun to grow through the windows and floorboards. Tendrils of vine snuck in through the window frames. Yellow pops of lichen burst from the walls. The wood stacked by the fireplace was cocooned in a fuzz of mold. The rug under Grey’s back was spongy with some kind of fungus that grew in coral-like polyps that swayed softly when the air shifted.