“There it is,” says Christian, looking at me with something like admiration.

“There what is?”

“The smile. You always smile when you ski.”

“How do you know?” I challenge, even though I know it’s true.

“I watched you last year.”

“Yeah, well, when you race you do this funny grimace thing with your mouth.”

He makes a shocked face. “Do not.”

“Do so. I watched you, too.”

The wheels rattle when our chair crosses a tower, and a few skiers call to each other below. I turn away from his seeking green eyes. I remember last year, when it seemed like a magical turn of fate when I ended up on the chairlift with him, able to talk to him, really talk to him, for the very first time.

Now I don’t want to talk.

He senses my withdrawal, or maybe he reads it.

“You can talk to me, Clara.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier for you to read my mind?”

His expression clouds. “I don’t just scan your mind whenever I want, Clara.”

“But you could.”

He shrugs. “My power’s unpredictable when it comes to you.”

“It’s amazing that anything in your life could be unpredictable,” I say.

He looks away and knocks snow off his skis. We watch it tumble down to the ground.

“Reading minds isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. I mean, how would you like it, walking down the hall at school, knowing exactly what everyone thinks about you?”

“That would suck.”

“But with you, it’s different,” he says. “It’s like, sometimes you just talk to me, even if you don’t know you’re doing it. I don’t know how to block that out. I don’t really want to.”

“Well, it’s not fair. I don’t ever get to know what you’re thinking. You’re Mr. Mysterious who knows more about everything than I do, but you don’t tell me.”

He watches my expression for a moment, then says, “Most of the time what you’re thinking about, when it comes to me, is that you want me to go away.”

I let out a breath. “Christian.”

“If you want to know what’s going on in my head, ask me,” he says. “But I get the distinct impression that you don’t want to know.”

“Hey, I want to know everything,” I protest, even though that’s not completely true. Because I don’t want to understand what our future would have been if I hadn’t chosen Tucker. I don’t want to feel what he always makes me feel: confused, scared, excited, guilty, yearning, aware of myself and everything I feel and he feels, like he has the power to magically switch on my empathy, even when it’s true—I don’t want to know. I don’t want to need him.

“I want to know what my purpose was supposed to be, for crying out loud,” I go on. “Why can’t somebody just tell me: here’s your purpose, so go do it? Would that be too much to ask? Or where my brother was that night in the woods? Or about Angela’s secret boyfriend? I also want to know why a Black Wing is in love with my mother, and what her purpose was, and why she still, even when she’s dying, won’t tell me anything about it, and if you tell me it must be for my protection or my own good or something, I think I will push you off this chairlift. And is all this some kind of punishment for not fulfilling my purpose? Which brings me back to what, exactly, is my freaking purpose? Because I would really, really like to know.”

Christian shakes his head. “Wow.”

“I told you.”

“So Angela has a secret boyfriend . . . ,” he says.

“Oh crap, I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. Way to go,” he adds with a laugh. “I won’t tell. Although now I’m pretty curious.”

I groan. “I’m so not good with secrets.”

He glances over at me. “I don’t think you’re being punished.”

“You don’t?”

“Hey, I don’t even know what my purpose is,” he says, and then his voice softens. “But I do know that if you hadn’t had your vision about the fire, you never would have come to Wyoming. We wouldn’t be sitting on this chairlift right now. If your mom had told you about the congregation earlier, you would have been at the last meeting, the one I went to, and we would have found out about each other before the fire. Everything would have been different. Right?”

Yes, it would have been different. We would have known that we weren’t supposed to save each other. We would have known that our meeting in the forest was supposed to be something else. And where did that leave us? Would I have still flown off to save Tucker, knowing that?

“It feels like a test.” I lean back in the chair and look up at the clouds. “Like it’s all one long final examination, and now this vision with the cemetery, it’s the next question. Although it doesn’t seem like I’m supposed to do anything. At least, with my fire, I knew I was supposed to do something.”

“What were you supposed to do?” he asks in an amused voice.

“Save you. Only I wasn’t actually supposed to do that, was I?”

“That’s the hardest part,” he says. “The absence of certainty.”

The phrase has a nice ring to it. It could be the motto of my life.

“So if it’s a test, what do you think the answer is?” he asks.

You, I think, the answer is supposed to be you, but I don’t say that. I guess I’m still fighting my purpose, even now that I know it’s my mom dying and not Tucker. It still feels like I am being asked to choose between Christian and Tucker.

“No clue,” I answer finally.

“Right. So,” he says. “Is there something you want to ask me, specifically? I can’t promise that I can give you a good answer, but I’ll try.”

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Did you . . . love Kay?”

He looks away, toward the valley and the town below, knocks his skis together again, gently. Resents me for asking.

Sorry, I think at him.

“No, it’s a fair question,” he says. Sighs. “Yes. I loved her.”

“Then why did you break up with her?”

“Because she was going to find out about me.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

He leans back in the chair too and exhales out his nose. “I’ve had it hammered into my head since Day One that we shouldn’t tell humans. It’s bad for both parties, my uncle says. And he’s right—it’s impossible to have a relationship with a human, a real relationship, anyway, without them noticing there’s something off about you. Once they do, then what?”

Suddenly I think about my dad, how he moved to the other side of the country after he and Mom split, which in retrospect seems extreme, although it now occurs to me, maybe he found out she wasn’t normal. Maybe that’s why he abandoned us. Maybe Christian’s uncle is right. Maybe any relationship with a human is doomed.

A corner of Christian’s mouth turns up. “I guess we could pick really dumb people to be with.”

“Kay’s not dumb,” I say. She might be a royal queen bee you-know-what, she might play dumb in class sometimes, but she’s no dummy.

“No, Kay’s not dumb,” he agrees. “And eventually she would have made it impossible not to tell her. She was going to get hurt.”

I think of the night Tucker found out, his hounding questions, the crazy assumptions he made. He wouldn’t relent until I revealed myself.

“I get it,” I say quietly, looking down at my gloves.

“So how much does Tucker know?” he asks. “Because he’s not dumb, either.”

It embarrasses me that Christian was such a good little angel-blood and did the right thing and kept the right secrets while I so obviously did not. Like a lovesick puppy, compulsively, selfishly, I told a human everything. I put everyone at risk, especially Tucker.

“That much, huh?” Christian says.

“I’ve told him . . . a lot.”

“About me?”

“Yes.”

His eyes when he looks at me now are about ten degrees colder than they were a minute ago.

“I told you. I’m not good with secrets,” I say again.

“Well, you did keep one thing from him, and aren’t you happy you did?”

He’s talking about my dream, of course. How it turned out to be Mom’s grave, and not Tucker’s, that I was seeing.