Chapter Text
The boys left her by the road when they got bored.
That was usually how it ended. Not because Natalie won, or somebody came looking for her, or they suddenly remembered they were supposed to feel bad. They just got tired once she stopped making it fun. Once she stopped trying to hit back.
The last shove sent her into the ditch. She caught herself on one hand and one knee, pain shooting up her arm while mud pressed cold through the tear in her jeans. Water soaked through her sock almost immediately. Her camera knocked against her ribs, the strap pulling sideways across her neck hard enough to make her choke.
Behind her, somebody laughed.
"Loser."
Natalie kept her head down. Looking at them only made it worse, so she stayed where she was with one palm sunk in the mud and her split lip warm against her teeth.
Their bikes rattled away. One of them called something else over his shoulder, but she didn't catch it. Or maybe she did and decided not to keep it. She did that sometimes, put things people said somewhere far back in her head behind homework and photographs and whatever Kyle had talked about at breakfast.
It didn't make the words disappear. They usually came back when she was trying to sleep, but it helped for a minute.
Their voices thinned through the trees until there was nothing left. Natalie waited anyway, listening for a wheel turning back or shoes scraping over gravel, but nothing did. Her knee throbbed, her ribs hurt when she breathed too deeply, and one side of her face felt tight and hot. Her hair had fallen into her eyes in damp, crooked pieces, and the little brown clip she had twisted it into that morning hung behind one ear.
Her mom had trimmed it two nights ago in the kitchen with the good scissors, an old towel around Natalie's shoulders while she told her to sit still. Natalie had. Mostly. The ends were already going fluffy around her face again. The little clip had mostly given up, and damp strands kept sticking to her split lip and catching beneath the camera strap.
The Ellis house sat at the end of the road, half-hidden through the trees. Yellow siding. Crooked porch step. The back fence sagging in the middle. The kitchen window caught the late-afternoon light, making everything inside look warmer than it probably was.
Above it, the second floor leaned slightly toward the woods, though Kyle said houses didn't lean unless something was wrong with the foundation. Natalie's bedroom window was the one nearest the oak, and she could see the pale edge of her curtain from there if she squinted. Inside, the hallway light would be buzzing. The floor by the fridge would still be sticky no matter how many times her mom mopped it.
A truck sat in the driveway. A bike leaned against the porch. Someone was already home, probably her mom in the kitchen or folding laundry on the couch.
Natalie started toward the house and made it as far as the back fence before she pictured her mom seeing her.
She wouldn't get angry. Her mom didn't get angry first when one of them came home hurt. She went quiet. Her eyes sharpened, but her mouth went soft, and she'd put two fingers beneath Natalie's chin to turn her face toward the light.
She'd say, Oh, Natalie.
Not like Natalie had done something wrong. Like something had been done to her.
That was worse.
Kyle would look at Natalie's muddy clothes, her split lip, and the loose shoelace dragging through the dirt, then get that awful blank look that meant he was blaming himself. After that, they would all start talking.
They would make it into a whole thing, and she couldn't do a whole thing. Not yet.
Natalie ducked through the low place in the fence instead. Her jacket caught on the wire, and when she pulled, the fabric tore beneath her arm. She closed her eyes. Her mom had told her not to wear that jacket into the woods because the sleeves were too long and it caught on everything.
She'd been right again.
Natalie worked the fabric loose and kept going. The woods behind the house were thin at first. Scrubby trees, beer cans half-sunk in the dirt, and old candy wrappers gone soft from rain. A grocery bag caught on a thorn bush moved in and out with the wind like it was breathing.
Wet grass brushed her jeans, and her shoelace dragged through dead leaves. She passed the dry creek bed, the stump with a rusted nail, and the two skinny trees growing so close together they looked like they were holding each other up. The old oak stood beyond them in a small clearing where the light always came through a little wrong.
It was half-dead and half-alive, split down the middle by lightning, weather, or time. One side was gray and hollow, its bark peeled back in long strips. The other still grew leaves, small green ones, shiny and stubborn even though most of the woods had already started giving up for the season.
Kyle used to say the tree was too mean to die.
Natalie believed him.
The string lights were still wrapped around one of the low branches. Most of the bulbs were dead, and a few had gone yellow from rain and sun. One hung loose by its wire and tapped against the bark whenever the wind moved.
Under the hollow was the old blanket. It had been blue once, maybe. Now it was mostly dirt-colored, stiff at the corners and smelling like leaves and old rain. Natalie and Kyle had dragged it out there two summers ago, when they still thought they were going to fix the place up.
Kyle had drawn plans on graph paper. Real ones. There was supposed to be a shelf inside the hollow, a pulley for snacks, and a wire running back to the garage so they could talk through two old radios. He had labeled every part and drawn arrows where the wires were supposed to go.
Natalie had been in charge of making it look nice.
That was how Kyle had said it.
You make it look nice.
Like that mattered as much as the wires.
There had been a plastic bin too, with comics, a flashlight, and a pack of cards. Natalie didn't know where it had gone.
The blanket was still there. She lowered herself onto it and sat with her hands shaking in her lap, mud drying between her fingers and pulling at her skin whenever she curled them. Her lip stung each time she touched it with her tongue.
The hollow rose behind her, dark enough that she couldn't see the back from where she sat. She had crawled inside plenty of times before. It was big enough for her and Kyle if they folded themselves small, bigger than it looked from outside, though Kyle said that was only because the trunk was wider than they realized.
The wood inside was smoother than the bark and warmer too. Not warm like sunlight. Just never as cold as it should've been. Kyle had said old trees held heat differently, and Natalie hadn't asked whether he knew that or had made it up.
She leaned back until her shoulders rested against the inside edge of the hollow. The grain pressed through her jacket in long, curved lines. It didn't look like the grain on the cut logs beside the garage.
It looked almost like fingerprints.
Natalie closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. That was what her mom always told her.
It didn't work.
Her chest hitched once, then again. She folded forward and pressed her face into her knees, the first sob coming out almost silent before another shook her shoulders and burned her throat.
Natalie hated crying. Everybody cried. She only hated how much of her did it at once. Her eyes, her chest, her mouth, her whole face turning hot like a warning light. There was no hiding anything once it started.
Other people seemed to know how to keep the important parts inside. They knew when to laugh, when to shove back, when something was supposed to be a joke. Natalie always understood too late.
Or she understood perfectly and still couldn't make herself act like she didn't care.
She cried until her nose ran and her head hurt, until the muddy knee of her jeans went warm beneath her breath and the house felt farther away than it was. It sat just past the fence, beyond the thin line of trees, close enough for her mom to call her name if she stepped outside and really tried.
The loose bulb tapped against the oak once, then again.
Then it stopped.
Natalie stayed folded over. It took her a moment to notice what was wrong.
The woods had gone quiet. Not the quiet before rain, when the birds tucked themselves away. Everything had stopped at once. The insects. The leaves. Even the air seemed to be waiting.
Natalie lifted her head. Her eyes burned, but the clearing looked the same- the oak, the blanket, the dead string lights, and roots pushing through the dirt.
Her shoulder was still pressed against the edge of the hollow. The wood beneath her jacket had grown warmer.
Natalie moved away from it.
Then the smell came.
Pennies. Wet soil. Smoke.
She wiped beneath her nose with her sleeve and looked around. There was no fire. The woods were still damp from last night's rain, and her mom would've smelled smoke from the house. Somebody would've come outside with the hose.
Natalie stood. The loose bulb above her flickered.
She froze, waiting for it to go dark again. Instead, it flickered a second time.
The lights weren't plugged into anything. The orange extension cord had been gone since last summer, after somebody ran it over with the mower and her mom said she was done raising kids who tried to electrocute themselves for fun.
Natalie looked toward the end of the lights anyway. The cord disappeared into the leaves with nothing attached.
Another bulb came on, then another.
Not yellow.
Red.
A deep, wet red that made the bark around it look black.
Natalie stepped backward, and her heel caught the edge of the blanket. Beneath the oak, the roots moved.
For a second, her mind tried to help her. Wind. A squirrel. Her eyes were still blurry from crying. Kyle had explained once that when you stared at something too long, your brain started filling in the wrong pieces.
Natalie blinked hard.
The roots lifted again, slowly and carefully. Dirt slipped from them in soft clumps. The hollow didn't open. Not at first.
The air in front of it changed.
A black line appeared against the trunk, thin and straight enough to look cut. Darker than the hollow behind it. Darker than the woods around it.
Natalie stared.
The line wasn't in the bark. It hung just in front of it while the tree moved around it, roots lifting and bark pulling back, the hollow stretching wider as though making room for something that had already been there.
Something beneath the ground seemed to breathe.
The loose red bulb brightened. One by one, every dead glass eye opened. The wire stayed dark, but the bulbs glowed anyway.
Natalie backed away, catching the camera as it swung against her ribs.
The black line widened. It didn't look like a shadow. It looked like something had been cut out of the world.
Then the edges began to glow, pale gold and almost white. One thread appeared, then another. They crossed through the dark, bright and thin, pulling against each other like stitches.
Part of Natalie wanted to move closer.
Not the smart part. The other part. The part that opened locked drawers just to know what was inside, that wasted film on empty windows because something about them bothered her.
The threads brightened, and the dark widened. The oak groaned around it, not like wood splitting but lower than that. Closer to a voice she felt through the ground instead of heard.
Natalie turned to run.
Something cold closed around her ankle.
She hit the ground before she could scream. Her chin struck the dirt, her teeth snapped together, and pain burst behind her eyes.
Then she screamed.
The sound went nowhere. The air swallowed it.
Natalie twisted onto her back. A hand was clamped around her ankle just above the shoe.
Almost a hand.
Too long. Too pale. Its fingers bent in places fingers shouldn't bend, their dark nails sunk through the denim around her ankle.
Behind it, inside the bright split, stood something tall. It had a person's shape in the same way a shadow did. Long arms. Narrow head. Black eyes that didn't reflect the red bulbs.
They seemed to take the light instead.
Its mouth opened.
Teeth. Too many.
Natalie kicked it in the wrist. The grip tightened, and she kicked again, harder. Her free heel scraped through mud while her fingers clawed at the blanket, the roots, anything she could reach.
The thing dragged her toward the threads.
"No," she gasped. "No. No, no-"
Cold air poured from the dark. Natalie dug both hands into the dirt and held on until one of her nails bent backward. The pale pink polish cracked straight through the middle, and pain jumped through her finger.
She kicked again.
The ground dropped away beneath her.
The clearing tipped. The blanket slid from her hands, and roots caught at her jacket. Gold and white filled her eyes.
Cold took her first.
Not winter cold. Winter cold made your fingers ache and your nose run. This went into her mouth and nose, beneath her shirt, behind her eyes. She tried to breathe and couldn't.
For one second, something rough slid beneath her palm.
Wood.
Warm.
The same curved grain.
Then dark.
Then wet.
Natalie landed on her side in black mud. For a few seconds, she didn't move. Her body had gone quiet without asking her. Her ears rang, and her ribs hurt.
One foot was still inside a shoe. The other wore only a sock, already soaked through.
She pushed herself up on shaking arms.
The woods were gone.
Or they were wrong.
The tree stood in front of her, but not only the tree she knew. It was the same one. The same split ran through its trunk. The same crooked pull to one side. The same half-dead shape.
Above, Natalie had only ever seen the part that fit beneath the sky.
Here, it kept going.
The trunk rose into the dark until she lost it among roots and stone. It sank too, widening beneath her into black wood and pale arches that disappeared through the ground.
White roots rose around it. Some were thin as hair. Others were wider than the road. They crossed overhead, sank through walls of dirt, and opened into dark spaces that looked almost like rooms.
The hollow was there too, only larger and deeper. Its opening stretched through the trunk like the beginning of a tunnel.
Natalie stared.
The tree hadn't come through with her. Somehow, she had fallen into the rest of it. The part that had always been there, growing where nobody above could see.
Natalie looked up until her neck hurt. Her breath came too fast.
Behind her, something clicked.
Natalie ran.
She didn't decide to. Her body did.
She ran between roots and over slick stone, one shoe sliding while one socked foot slapped through mud. Her camera bounced against her chest, and branches scraped her sleeves.
Her hair clip snagged on something and tore free. Her hair came down around her face all at once, catching in her mouth.
Something pale brushed her cheek.
Soft.
Natalie ducked away from it with a sound stuck in her throat. Behind her, the thing clicked again.
Closer.
She ran harder.
Natalie was good at running when nobody expected her to be. The boys at school saw the little hair clips and tucked-in shoulders and assumed she was slow. They forgot she had three older brothers. She'd spent her whole life slipping under arms, around doorways, through gaps before anybody else saw them. She was good at being small.
They forgot she had three older brothers.
She'd spent her whole life slipping between them. Under arms. Around doorways. Through gaps before anybody else saw them.
She was good at being small. Good at finding places bigger things couldn't reach.
A white root rose ahead of her, split near the base just wide enough for something narrow to crawl beneath. Natalie dropped onto her stomach and shoved herself in.
Her remaining shoe caught. She kicked once, then again, but it stuck.
The clicking came closer.
Natalie kicked as hard as she could. Her shoe slipped off, and she left it behind.
She dragged herself beneath the root on her elbows. Mud soaked through her shirt, her cheek scraped stone, and her hair fell into her eyes and stayed there, wet and dirty. The camera strap twisted beneath her jacket and dug into her shoulder.
She bit her lip to keep from making a sound. The space was tight enough to bruise her shoulders.
Good.
Tight meant the tall thing couldn't fit.
Probably.
She tried not to think about its fingers. Natalie pulled herself deeper and curled onto her side, one arm pressed over her mouth.
A shadow passed outside.
Long fingers dragged across the opening. She clamped her teeth into her sleeve while they scratched at the dirt.
Slowly.
Searching.
Then they pulled away.
Natalie stayed hidden. Her legs cramped, her arm went numb beneath her, and the cold worked through her wet clothes and into her skin. She stayed anyway.
Eventually, the dark stopped being one huge thing. It became smaller things. Moving things. Watching things.
Pretty glowing things she didn't trust.
When Natalie crawled out, she shook so badly that she had to use the root to stand. Its surface was smooth beneath her hand. Not bark exactly.
Living wood.
The grain curved beneath her palm in narrow loops, almost like the fingerprints inside the oak above.
Natalie pulled her hand away. Both shoes were gone. One sock had a hole near the little toe, and mud had swallowed nearly all the white. Her jacket was torn beneath the arm, one cuff hanging loose over her hand.
Her mom was going to be so mad about the jacket.
The thought came so normally that Natalie's throat closed.
She pressed her mouth together and walked.
There was no sun. No evening. Nothing moved across the dark above her. There was no way to know how long she'd been there or which direction was home when home didn't have a direction anymore.
Natalie kept the sound of the water to her left until it grew too loud, then to her right until she lost it. She passed black puddles that reflected too clearly. Something with thin legs moved between the trees, and she stood still until it passed.
Flowers glowed pale pink from the inside.
They were too pretty to trust.
Her lip started bleeding again. Metal filled her mouth, and Natalie pressed her sleeve against it before she kept walking.
Every few minutes, she whispered, "Mom."
Then, quieter, "Kyle."
She pictured her brothers in the woods behind the house, calling for her, and stopped.
It made them feel farther away.
She found the tree by accident.
At first, she thought it couldn't be the same one. Everything there was bigger. Hungrier. The roots were white instead of brown, and the bark was black and wet-looking. There was no blanket, no string lights, no fence behind it.
No yellow house waiting through the trees.
But the split was the same. Crooked down the middle. Half-dead. Half-alive.
Too mean to die.
It wasn't another tree. It was the same one.
A sound broke from Natalie before it became a word. She stumbled to the trunk and pressed both hands against it.
The bark was cold at first. Then warmth gathered beneath her palms, faint and slow, like something far inside had noticed her.
"Please," Natalie whispered.
Nothing opened.
She pushed her shoulder into the hollow, searching for a crack. A loose place. An edge.
There had to be one.
She'd seen the threads, gold and white lines pulling the opening together. If it had opened once, it had to be able to open again.
That was how doors worked.
That was how almost everything worked.
If it had opened once, it had to open again. There had to be an edge. A latch. Something she could get her fingers into if she found the right place.
Her fingers scraped bark, mud, and root. The hollow was wider there, but it didn't lead home. It bent inward through the living wood, dark and deep enough that she couldn't see where it ended.
There was no gold thread. No light.
Natalie struck the trunk with the heel of her hand.
"Please."
The warmth beneath the bark stayed.
Nothing else happened.
She folded down between the roots and cried. Loud this time. Ugly. She couldn't keep any of it inside, and the sound came out in broken pulls that hurt her ribs.
She was twelve years old and bleeding beneath a sky that wasn't a sky. She had no shoes.
Her mom didn't know where she was.
Something shifted across the clearing.
Natalie stopped breathing.
A boy stood between two white roots.
At least, she thought he was a boy.
He looked close to her age. Maybe younger. Taller than her, but so thin he seemed mostly elbows, long legs, and watchful stillness.
It made him look sharp.
His skin was pale like the inside of a broken branch. Black curls hung in his eyes while one hand held a short blade made of bone.
Natalie pressed herself against the tree.
The boy lifted the blade.
Her whole body went cold.
"No," she said. "No, please."
He bared his teeth.
Sharp.
Natalie tried to stand, but her sock slipped in the mud. Her shoulder struck the trunk, and pain ran through it as she slid back down.
"Please don't hurt me," she said too quickly. "Please. I don't know where I am. I just want to go home."
The boy didn't move.
His eyes were black. All black. No white or brown, no place for the light to land.
His eyes moved over the muddy sock, the torn jacket, the camera hanging against her chest. They stopped on her split lip, then the bent nail with its cracked pink polish.
Then his gaze found her face.
Natalie knew what she looked like when she cried. Her cheeks would be red. Her eyes wet. Her freckles darker against her skin. Her mom always said she could read every feeling Natalie had ever had right off her face.
The boy stared at the color in her cheeks.
He wasn't laughing.
He was only staring, like he'd never seen it before.
Natalie turned her face away.
The boy tilted his head. His nostrils flared. He looked at her mouth, at the blood, then toward the woods behind him.
His teeth disappeared, and his mouth pressed into a thin line.
He said something low and rough. The word clicked at the end.
Natalie shook her head. "I don't understand."
The boy's eyes narrowed. He stepped closer.
Natalie flinched so hard her head struck the bark.
He stopped.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then he lowered the blade slowly, his gaze staying on her face.
Before coming any closer, he put one hand against the tree. His fingers were long, their dark nails dirty near the edges. His palm rested flat against the black bark, and he went still.
Listening, maybe.
Or checking for something.
Natalie couldn't tell.
The grain beneath his hand seemed to tighten, then loosen. The boy lowered his arm and pointed at her, then at the hollow.
Natalie stared.
He pointed again, sharper this time.
She looked at the opening. It was narrow near the front, dark and root-lined, then widened somewhere inside. Barely big enough for her to crawl through.
"No," she whispered.
The boy huffed.
Actually huffed, like Natalie was being difficult.
He crouched in the mud and dragged one finger through it. Up close, his clothes looked torn rather than made that way. Dark cloth hung loose at one shoulder, and a strip wrapped his wrist, dirty at the edge.
He drew a rough tree, then a line, then something low with too many legs moving past it. He tapped the creature once.
Natalie looked from the drawing to the woods.
Danger.
She understood that.
Something clicked between the trees.
Both of them froze.
The boy's head snapped toward the sound. His curls fell into his eyes, and he shoved them back with his wrist, smearing mud across his forehead.
Then he moved.
Fast.
He crossed the clearing in three steps, caught Natalie by the sleeve, and pushed her toward the hollow. A hurt sound escaped her.
His hand was cold enough to shock her through the fabric, but not dead cold. There was warmth beneath it, deep and hidden somewhere under the skin.
The boy shoved her again.
This time, Natalie crawled inside.
The hollow closed around her, tight and damp. It curved farther than the hollow above ever had, the inner wood smooth against her shoulders.
It was warm too. Warmer than the air outside.
Natalie tucked her knees against her chest and covered her mouth with both hands. The boy pulled strips of loose bark across the opening, not all the way, only enough to hide her.
Before he sat, he pressed his palm to the trunk again, briefly, the way someone might touch a doorframe when passing through it. Then he settled with his back against the tree and the bone blade across his knees.
His shoulders were sharp beneath the torn cloth. Black curls fell into his eyes again.
The clicking came closer.
Natalie held her breath until her lungs hurt. Whatever moved beyond the roots stayed hidden. She heard wet steps, a scrape, then something sniffing the air.
The boy lifted his chin and bared his teeth toward the sound.
The thing in the woods went still.
So did he.
The tree seemed to hold still with him.
Slowly, the wet steps moved away.
A long time passed before his shoulders lowered. Natalie stayed curled inside the hollow, shaking in the dark. Her knees pressed so tightly against her chest that her ribs ached, and her cheek rested against the wood.
Warmth pressed faintly back, not enough to comfort her, only enough to notice. Her fingers wound around the camera strap. The camera was still there. The lens might be cracked, mud had worked beneath the buttons, and the strap had rubbed her neck raw, but it was there. Something from home. Natalie held it tighter.
The boy shifted outside. He dug through the mud beside one of the roots, then tossed something through the gap.
It landed beside her knee.
A pale root, thin and wet, still twitching a little.
Natalie stared at it, then at him. The boy nudged it closer with two fingers.
She shook her head.
He frowned.
"No," she whispered.
The boy blinked.
"No," she said again, softer.
He stared at her like the word had personally insulted him. Then he snatched the root back, bit into it himself, and chewed in small, angry movements.
For some reason, Natalie's eyes burned again.
The boy leaned his head against the tree and waited. The bark near his temple shifted, almost too slightly to see, settling around him.
Natalie watched through the strips of wood.
After a while, she whispered, "Natalie."
The boy's eyes opened.
She touched her chest with shaking fingers. "Natalie," she said again.
He looked at her hand, then her face, then her mouth. His lips moved.
"Nah-"
The rest caught somewhere behind his teeth. He tried again.
"Natah."
Natalie almost corrected him, then stopped.
"Nat," she whispered, touching her chest again. "Nat."
The boy watched her mouth carefully.
"Nat."
It came out rough, but close enough. Natalie nodded. "Yeah."
He didn't know what that meant.
Maybe he understood her face.
Slowly, he touched his own chest.
"Dawson."
It came out rough, like something pulled up through the roots.
Natalie swallowed. Her throat hurt.
"Doss?"
The boy's mouth pulled tight.
"No."
She blinked.
He said it again, flatter this time.
"No."
Natalie was too tired to be frightened by that.
"Doss," she whispered anyway.
The boy stared at her for a long time. Then he turned away, offended, and settled against the tree with the bone blade across his knees.
Natalie waited.
Then, softer, just to see, she tried again.
"Doss?"
The boy turned.