The staff room was stuffed with books. Stacks of books were piled on the floor as high as Eve’s hip. Several work tables overflowed with books. Metal bookshelves that ran floor to ceiling were crammed with more books. In one corner a refrigerator hummed, and even it had books shoved on top of it. She wished she could burrow in between all the books and stay, but Aidan would undoubtedly find her here, as soon as he tired of waiting and came in to search the library. Following Zach, she zigzagged through the piles to a bright-orange door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

Zach pushed through the door. No alarm sounded. He held it open for her, and she stepped outside. The back of the library faced the woods.

The woods were thick. Oak, maple, and evergreen trees clustered close together, obscuring any view of the streets or houses beyond. Vines twisted around their trunks, and the undergrowth was a snarl of green bushes. Anything or anyone could be hiding in them. Eve stepped back toward the door as it sucked shut. She squeezed the door handle—it had locked behind them.

“Come on,” Zach said, “before Pretty Boy decides to look for you.” He tromped into the underbrush. “As much as I’d love to fight for your honor, that guy could flatten me with his pinkie. I have a fine sense of self-preservation.”

Eve doubted that. If he had, he wouldn’t be anywhere near her. But she followed Zach anyway. As she stepped into the woods, she heard the crackle of tiny branches snapping under her shoes—and she remembered she’d been in woods before.

The memory slammed into her so hard that she had to steady herself on a tree trunk.

Woods.

But not like these.

She’d been in a forest of gnarled, ancient trees whose leaves blotted out the sun, leaving the forest floor in perpetual twilight. The roots had been so thick that she’d had to climb over them. Here, the trees were as skinny as her arm, and the sun poked through the canopy above. The underbrush was thick and green, tangling her feet and covering a fallen stone wall. “This is a young forest,” she said.

“Used to be a cow pasture,” Zach said. “All of this was farmland. Hence all the stone walls. Now it’s just houses and trees. Must have looked really different.”

“You don’t remember?” Continuing after him, she remembered the sound of her feet crunching a layer of old leaves and needles as she ran. The mat of branches overhead had been so thick that only moss and a few ferns grew on the forest floor.

“It was a hundred years ago. Or, you know, some large number of years. Probably if we chopped down the fattest tree and counted the rings, we’d know. I don’t, however, have an ax handy.”

She couldn’t remember where the other forest was or why she had been fleeing or who had been with her. She did remember the way the trees had towered above her, how the branches had battered her, and how the roots had slowed her escape.

Eve checked behind them. She saw no one, but still, she felt watched. Shivers traveled up and down her spine. Birds rustled in the branches above. A squirrel darted through the underbrush. She jumped at each sound, her ears straining to hear more.

“I used to come here when I was a kid. It was pretty much the best superhero secret lair ever. That was one of my forts.” He pointed toward a fallen tree. “And that was my lookout.” He pointed next to a massive boulder beyond the fallen tree. She tried to see it as a child’s playground, not as the forest that loomed in her memory. “You know, to spot the supervillains that I’d proceed to defeat with my array of superpowers.” Still in the same light voice, he asked, “So, how long have you had superpowers?”

She halted for an instant, looking across the woods at the boulder. She’d thought she’d seen … It had looked like the S-curve of a snake, sleek scales reflecting the bits of sunlight that filtered through the leaves. Victoria? Eve started walking again, faster.

“I mean, it’s obviously not my power.” Crashing through the underbrush, Zach hurried to catch up to her. “I have never been able to do a single thing like that before. Believe me, I tried. I was that kid who used to attempt the Jedi mind trick on his teachers in elementary school. For art class, I fashioned my own Harry Potter wand. Lacked a phoenix feather, though. But when I kissed you … I was thinking how kissing you was like floating on air—and we did. And the second time, I deliberately imagined us levitating.”

“And the books flying?”

“I wanted to see what else we could do. So I imagined that. And it worked!” Up ahead, the trees were thinning, and she saw bits of roofs and corners of houses through the branches. “My current theory,” Zach continued, “is that we’re like the Wonder Twins, except with lips instead of rings. And you know, not related. Not at all related. Because that would be disgusting.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Alternately, and more likely, it has nothing at all to do with who I am. I could be anybody. You’re transferring your magic to me, and then I’m using it. You’re the only special one.”

Eve looked back at the rock. A snake slithered down the face of the boulder and disappeared into the underbrush. “Can we walk faster?” Continuing to look backward, she didn’t notice that they’d reached the edge of the woods until Zach stopped.

He pointed across a street. “That’s my house.”

Zach’s house could have been plucked from the cover of a beautiful-homes magazine. On the left and right, the yards were parched yellow, but his was vibrant green, mowed to look more like carpet than a live plant. The house itself was pristine white and had a porch with two white rocking chairs and a wind chime that hung listlessly in the still air.

Eve took a step out of the bushes and then stopped as she heard a car turn onto Zach’s street. She retreated and crouched behind a tree.

A blue car drove past them.

She emerged again and checked to the right and left, aware that she was mimicking the way Malcolm always checked the street. Several houses down, a neighbor was mowing his lawn. A few houses beyond that, a brown dog slept on a porch. Eve didn’t see anything that seemed threatening or unusual. She started across the street.

Zach didn’t move.

“What is it?” Eve asked. She turned back to him and was rocked with another burst of memory: she’d been fleeing with her family. Or maybe it wasn’t her family, but she knew them well. At some point, she had fallen, and a man had picked her up and carried her over his shoulder as if she were as light as a jacket. She hadn’t been left behind.

Zach pointed to a silver car in the driveway. “My mom’s home.”

“Oh.” Eve tried to picture the people who had run with her. Family or not? The man who had carried her, had he been her father? Brother? Uncle? “Is that … bad?”

He still didn’t move.

“Back to the woods or to the house?” She felt too exposed outside the bushes. Anyone in any nearby house could see her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a red car speed past their street. She tensed, ready to run, but it didn’t turn.

Zach shook himself. “Sorry. House.”

Eve bolted across the street, down the slate walkway, and onto the porch. Zach’s house had an antique door knocker and two baskets of flowers that framed the door. Several long seconds later, Zach joined her.

Slowly, so slowly that Eve wanted to grab the key herself, Zach drew a key out of his pocket. As he slid it into the lock, the front door opened. A woman in a pink shirt and white capris was framed in the doorway. “Yes?” She had pearls around her neck and a faded bruise on her left cheekbone, mostly obscured by makeup. She wore a layer of makeup over her face, her eyelids, and her lips, as if it were a thin plastic mask. “Oh, Zach! You’re home! And you brought a friend.”

This must be Zach’s mother, Eve thought. He had her lips, though hers weren’t curved into a smile like Zach’s often were. Her cheeks were so smooth that Eve wondered if she ever smiled.