“Do you think . . . ,” I say after a minute, and it’s tough to get the question out because I don’t want her to think I’m a total coward. “Do you think it’s possible for me to be killed by fire?”

“Clara.”

“Seriously.”

“Why would you say that?”

“It’s just that when I was standing there behind him, I felt so sad. I don’t know why.”

Mom’s arms come around me, pull me close so I can hear the strong, steady beating of her heart.

“Maybe the reason I’m so sad is that I’m going to die,” I whisper.

Her arms tighten.

“It’s rare,” she says quietly.

“But it does happen.”

“We’ll figure it out together.” She hugs me closer and smoothes the hair away from my face the way she used to when I had nightmares as a kid. “Right now you should rest.”

I’ve never felt more awake in my life, but I stretch out on her bed and let her pull the covers over us. She puts her arm around me. She’s warm, radiating heat like she’s been standing in sunshine, even in the middle of the night. I inhale her smell: rosewater and vanilla, an old lady’s perfume. It always makes me feel safe.

When I close my eyes, I can still see the boy. Standing there waiting. For me. Which seems more important than the sadness or the possibility of dying some gruesome fiery death. He’s waiting for me.

I wake to the sound of rain and a soft gray light seeping through the blinds. I find Mom standing at the kitchen stove scraping scrambled eggs into a serving bowl, already dressed and ready for work like any other day, her long, auburn hair still wet from the shower. She’s humming to herself. She seems happy.

“Morning,” I announce.

She turns, puts down the spatula, and crosses the linoleum to give me a quick hug. Her smile is proud, like that time I won the district spelling bee in third grade: proud, but like she never expected anything less.

“How are you doing this morning? Hanging in there?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“What’s going on?” my brother, Jeffrey, says from the doorway.

We turn to look at him. He’s leaning against the doorjamb, still rumpled with sleep and smelly and grumpy as usual. He’s never been what you might call a morning person. He stares at us. A flicker of fear crosses his face, like he’s bracing for horrible news, like someone we know has died.

“Your sister has received her purpose.” Mom smiles again, but it’s less jubilant than before. A cautious smile.

He looks me up and down like he’ll be able to find evidence of the divine somewhere on my body. “You had a vision?”

“Yeah. About a forest fire.” I shut my eyes and see it all again: the hillside crowded with pine trees, the orange sky, the smoke rolling past. “And a boy.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just a dream?”

“Because I wasn’t asleep.”

“So what does it mean?” he asks. All this angel-related information is new to him. He’s still in that time when the supernatural stuff can be exciting and cool. I envy him that.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “That’s what I’ve got to find out.”

I have the vision again two days later. I’m in the middle of jogging laps around the outside edge of the Mountain View High School gymnasium, and suddenly it hits me, just like that. The world as I know it—California, Mountain View, the gym—promptly vanishes. I’m in the forest. I can actually taste the fire. This time I see the flames cresting the ridge.

And then I almost crash into a cheerleader.

“Watch it, dorkina!” she says.

I stagger to one side to let her pass. Breathing hard, I lean against the folded-up bleachers and try to get the vision back. But it’s like trying to return to a dream after you’re fully awake. It’s gone.

Crap. No one’s ever called me a dorkina before. Derivative of dork. Not good.

“No stopping,” calls Mrs. Schwartz, the PE teacher. “We want to get an accurate record of how fast you can run a mile. That means you, Clara.”

She must have been a drill sergeant in another life.

“If you don’t make it in less than ten minutes you’ll have to run it again next week,” she hollers.

I start running. I try to focus on the task at hand as I swoop around the next corner, keeping my pace quick to make up some of the time I’ve lost. But my mind wanders back to the vision. The shapes of the trees. The forest floor under my feet strewn with rocks and pine needles. The boy standing there with his back to me as he watches the fire approach. My suddenly so-very-rapidly-beating heart.

“Last lap, Clara,” says Mrs. Schwartz.

I speed up.

Why is he there? I wonder, not closing my eyes but still seeing his image like it’s burned onto my retinas. Will he be surprised to see me? My mind races with questions, but underneath them all there is only one:

Who is he?

At that point I blow past Mrs. Schwartz, sprinting hard.

“Good, Clara!” she calls. And then, a minute later, “That can’t be right.”

Slowing to a walk, I circle back to find out my time.

“Did I get it under ten minutes?”

“I clocked you at five forty-eight.” She sounds truly shocked. She looks at me like she’s having visions too, of me on the track team.

Whoops. I wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t holding back. I’m going to catch some major flack if Mom finds out.

I shrug.

“The watch must have been messed up,” I explain, trying for laid-back, hoping she’ll buy it even though it means I’ll have to run the stupid thing again next week.

“Yes,” she says, nodding distractedly. “I must have started it wrong.”

That night when Mom gets home she finds me slouched on the couch watching reruns of I Love Lucy.

“That bad, huh?”

“It’s my fallback when I can’t find Touched by an Angel,” I reply sarcastically.

She pulls a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby out of a paper sack. Like she read my mind.

“You’re a goddess,” I say.

“Not quite.”

She holds up a book: Trees of North America, A Guide to Field Identification.

“Maybe my tree’s not in North America.”

“Let’s just start with this.”

We take the book to the kitchen table and bend over it together, searching for the exact type of pine tree from my vision. To someone on the outside we’d look like nothing more than a mother helping her daughter with her homework, not a pair of part-angels researching a mission from heaven.

“That’s it,” I say at last, pointing to a picture in the book and then rocking back in my chair, feeling pretty pleased with myself. “The lodgepole pine.”

“Twisted yellowish needles found in pairs,” Mom reads from the book. “Brown, egg-shaped cone?”

“I didn’t get a close look at the pinecones, Mom. It’s just the right shape, with the branches starting partway up the trunk like that, and it feels right,” I answer around a spoonful of ice cream.

“Okay.” She consults the book again. “It looks like the lodgepole pine is found exclusively in the Rocky Mountains and the northwestern coast of the U.S. and Canada. The Native Americans liked to use the trunks for the main supports in their wigwams. Hence the name lodgepole. And,” she continues, “it says here that the cones require extreme heat—like, say, from a forest fire—to open and release their seeds.”

“This is so educational,” I quip. Still, the idea of a tree that only grows in burned places sends a quiver of excitement through me. Even the tree has a kind of predestined meaning.

“Good. So we know roughly where this will happen,” says Mom. “Now all we have to do is narrow it down.”

“And then what?” I examine the picture of the pine tree, suddenly imagining the branches in flames.

“Then we’ll move.”

“Move? As in leave California?”

“Yes,” she says. Apparently she’s serious.