“Everything that dies passes through—but only those who can’t let go get stuck.”

“Part of me hopes she’s here. So I can . . . see her. Say sorry. If I could just see her one more time . . .”

I wanted to say: “Don’t hope for that fate for her.” But I said nothing. If Grey or Vivi died, I would want to see them again.

“Do you hear that?” Tyler asked. “Running water.”

We followed the sound over a small rise and found a milky green river bordered on both sides by brushwood and dead weeping willows that drooped like tangled hair into the water. The water moved quickly and was swollen with bodies that drifted along with the current. Men. Women. Children. All of them naked. All of them with wide black eyes.

A river of the dead.

“Oh God,” Tyler said as he gagged.

“We should move quickly,” I said as I stared at the flowing water. “We shouldn’t stay here. Get in, get my sisters, get out. I can feel them.” I’d felt them since the moment we stepped through. Grey and Vivi’s presence was stronger here. Not close, but tangible at least, a ropy tug around my heart. My sisters had been here before—and so had I. Not to this exact part of the afterlife, but here. All I had to do was let my feet carry me to them.

“This seemed like such a good and noble idea ten minutes ago,” Tyler said. “I forgot that I’m not a good or noble person.”

My sickness was fading now, replaced piece by piece by the thrill of our plan having worked. We were here. We had done it. And there, seeded beneath the excitement, was something else: the sense of familiarity.

The answers to long-asked questions felt suddenly possible.

“Let’s go,” I said. When I started walking, I knew it was in the right direction.

Toward my sisters. Toward some answers.

* * *

We walked for what felt like an hour through the wood. Or was it two hours? Time moved strangely here. Dusk continued to fall and fall and fall, but night never came. Tyler complained about the smell and the damp and the throbbing pain in his face and the destruction of his expensive clothing until I told him to shut up, please, for the love of God, shut up. The pain in the side of my chest nagged at me, a needle pricking against my lungs anytime I breathed too deeply. The rest of my body was covered with slow aches that crept in and nestled in all the bruised parts of me, making their homes there, throbbing in time with my heartbeat.

For a time, we saw other doors, all freestanding and half-ruined, held up by nothing. Stone archways and burned timber, doorways back to desolated parts of our world. Around each of them we found clusters of spirits turned to wood and stone, things that had once been human but were now only memories. I wondered about the people they had been before their souls had gotten snagged here on the way to death. What did they long for so badly that they had been unable to let go? Love? Power? Money? The chance to say sorry?

It was near one of these doors that I spotted the first swatch of fabric: a torn strip of red-and-black tartan, tied around a low tree branch. I stumbled toward it. Despite a few spots of mold, it looked out of place against the forest: red and man-made where everything else was green and gray.

“I know this pattern,” I said as I rubbed it between my fingers. I thought back to the photograph I’d found in Cate’s bedside drawer what seemed like a lifetime ago now but was really only a week. “I was wearing this coat when I went missing.”

“I can see your terrible taste in clothing hasn’t changed in over a decade” was Tyler’s contribution to the discovery. “What are you doing?” he said as I weaved through the trees and the statues of the dead, moving outward in a circular pattern, looking for another flash of red.

“Testing a theory,” I said.

“Well, I’m sitting,” he said.

A few minutes later, I spotted what I was looking for and grinned. I went back to Tyler—who was, indeed, sitting cross-legged on the ground—and pointed through the trees. “There,” I said. “Do you see it?”

“More decomposing forest? Oh, yay.”

I smacked him gently across the back of the head. “Look harder.”

“Another one?” Tyler asked. Just visible in the distance through the trees was another strip of red fabric, hanging limply. “So what?”

“Bread crumbs,” I said breathlessly, giddy with the thrill of the clue. I moved toward the next strip of fabric as fast as my broken ribs would let me. “Don’t you get it? We came this way as children, and we left bread crumbs to find our way—”

My next step did not find ground but air and I suddenly found myself tumbling through mud and forest, down a slope, until I came to lie faceup in an inch of fetid water.

“Are you alive?” Tyler called from somewhere above.

All I could do was let out a low moan. Pain cascaded through my side and wrapped tight around my lungs. I heard him sigh and start to make his way down the bank.

“Can I leave you behind if you die or do you expect me to be heroic and drag your corpse home?” Tyler asked.

It took him a few minutes to reach me, which suited me fine, because I had no desire to move. I lay in the water, drawing shallow breaths as I waited for the pain to ebb. Eventually, the sting in my bones loosened enough that I could prop myself up on one elbow to see where I was.

“Oh,” I whispered. The water I’d fallen into was black and smooth as glass. Distended bodies floated on its surface for as far as I could see. They paid me no mind. When Tyler slid down the bank, they blinked open their black eyes and watched him, but they didn’t come crawling from the water to attack us.

“Well, we are obviously not going in there,” Tyler said as he reached me and helped me stand, then turned to scrabble his way back up the bank. Drowned trees grew out of the water, bone pale and stripped bare of leaves. It was a marshland of some sort, a dead place inside a dead place.