Lily Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 1 of 17

Lily Whitmore was dead, and she could not remember why she had walked into the forest. She knew a few things. She knew her name. She knew the last thing her body had felt was cold, the kind that climbed up under the ribs and stayed. She knew her mother had grabbed her arm at the tree line and told her to wait until morning. Her mother's fingers had been warm. Lily had pulled away anyway, because her mother was always afraid of something, and this had sounded like more of the same. Now Lily drifted between the pines with no body to go back to. Somewhere under the needles and dirt, her bones were lying where no one had marked them. She wanted to lie down inside them again. She wanted to stop. But the trees all looked the same, and she could not remember which direction she had been walking, or what had pulled her in. A boy stepped out from behind a trunk. He had white hair and a gray sweater with holes at the elbows. He looked at her the way people look at a stray dog they are deciding about. "You're new," Ollie said. "I don't know where my body is." "No one does, at first." He shrugged. "What were you doing out here?" "I don't know that either." He was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Try to remember one thing. Not the reason. Something smaller. What was in your hand." Lily looked down at her hands. They were pale and shook a little when she held them still. She closed her eyes. She tried to feel the weight of anything at all. For a long time there was nothing. Then, faint as a splinter, she felt a shape against her palm. Small. Folded. Paper. "A note," she said. "I had a note." "From who." The answer came before she could stop it. "My brother. Orin." Saying the name made her chest hurt in a place her chest no longer was. "He told me to meet him. He said not to tell our mother." Ollie nodded once, like a door closing. "Then that's your line. You follow it back. The place he asked you to meet him is where you fell." Lily stared at him. "You've done this before." "Three times. It didn't work for them." He said it flat, without softening. "Might work for you. You still know your name." She pressed her hand to the front of her dress, where the note was not, and where the memory now was. She did not know the way yet. But she knew the shape of the thing she was walking toward: a clearing, a brother waiting, and a reason her mother had been right to be afraid. "Show me which way is deeper in," Lily said. Ollie turned and started walking. Lily followed.