Cassie pushed open the warped door of the old schoolhouse and stepped inside. Two weeks of carrying the dead wizard's notes had taught her one thing: keep moving, keep looking. Someone had told her a traveler once camped here. She wanted whatever they left behind. Dust coated the floor. A bedroll lay crumpled in the corner. On a desk sat a heavy clock, its face scratched with chalk tally marks counting down to zero. Cassie touched the marks and felt her stomach drop. Beside the clock lay a leather-bound album. She flipped it open. Inside were bright photos of a girl in swimsuits, laughing by a pool with friends. Someone like her. Someone from home. The last pages had been used as a journal, the handwriting tight and rushed. Cassie read the final entry twice to be sure. The portal closes forever at dawn. Whoever wrote it had not made it back. She checked the clock against the sky outside. A few hours left. Not enough time to decode the wizard's notes alone. Not enough time to do this by herself. Cassie shoved the album into her bag and ran. She hated asking. She hated him. But the apprentice could read the notes, and dawn was coming whether she trusted him or not.

Cassie ran toward the apprentice's tower, the wizard's notes pressed to her chest. She rounded a bend in the path and skidded to a stop. A sleek changing room stood in the middle of the trail, gold trim shining, plants in pots beside the open door. Mia Chen stepped out of it. Cassie's stomach turned. Mia. Here. Eleven years of quiet watching, and now she stood on a forest path in another world like she had been waiting all along. In her hands was Cassie's favorite swimsuit, the pink and blue one Cassie had lost two summers ago. It was frayed now, torn at the edges, faded by water and sun. "You kept that," Cassie said. Her voice cracked. "You took that." "Put it on," Mia said. She held it out. "The dam is breaking. We need to swim." Behind her, past the trees, Cassie heard it — a low groan of stone. Water hissed through cracks in a great wall upriver. A thin waterfall poured from a split down its center. The dam was failing. Cassie's throat closed. She had hours until the portal shut. She did not have time for this. But the ground was already trembling. Mia did not move, did not beg. She only held the swimsuit out and waited, the way she had always waited. Cassie grabbed it. She stepped into the changing room and slammed the door. When she came out, the dam burst. Water roared down the slope toward them, and Mia caught her hand and pulled her into the flood.

The flood spat them out against a ridge of mud. Cassie coughed water and clutched the wizard's notes, soaked but whole. Mia held her wrist until she sat up. The river was already pulling back, hissing through the trees, leaving the forest floor stripped raw. "Look," Mia said. She pointed past a fallen tree, its roots torn up like a hand. Half-buried in the slope, tilted and webbed in moss, stood a stone tower the flood had uncovered. Vines hung wet from its walls. A door slumped open at its base. Cassie slid down to it. She wiped mud from the stones around the door and froze. A symbol was cut deep into the arch — three lines crossing a circle, the same mark she'd circled twice in the wizard's notes that morning. Her hands shook as she flipped the wet pages and held them up. "It matches," she said. "This is his. This was his tower." Inside, on a slanted table, lay a torn book. Half its cover was gone. The remaining page showed a diagram ringed with the same runes — and beneath them, in letters Cassie could read, the words: How to open your portal. She pressed her hand flat against it. Her breath caught. "It's only half," Mia said quietly behind her. Cassie turned the fragment over. The tear ran clean down the middle. The instructions stopped mid-sentence. Somewhere out there, in the mud the flood had churned, the other half was waiting — or gone.

Cassie set the torn book down and turned a heavy page she had missed. Beneath the diagram, a second sketch glowed faintly on the parchment — two girls holding hands, a small heart drawn between them. One had a ponytail. The other had a braid. Cassie's stomach dropped. The faces were hers and Mia's. She read the runes beside it. The wizard had written a name. Hers. The summoning was not only for the demon queen. The tome said the world had called her for a second reason — to find Mia, and to love her. The ink shimmered like it had been waiting eleven years to be seen. Cassie stepped outside. Mia stood beside a mossy stone figure with arms held wide, as if the statue itself were waiting. At its base sat a glass bottle wrapped in moss, a rolled letter inside, the ink soft and old. Mia's handwriting. Years of it. "You knew," Cassie said. Mia did not look away. "I knew part of it," she answered. "I left letters here when I couldn't say things. I didn't think you'd ever read them." Cassie's hands were shaking. The tome wanted an answer. Her heart wanted one too, and they were not the same voice. She thought of the portal. She thought of home. Then she looked at Mia's quiet, steady face, and she made the choice that was hers, not the book's. "I'm not picking because a page told me to," she said. "But I'm not walking away from you either. Not today." Mia's shoulders dropped, like she had been holding them up for years. She took Cassie's hand. The sketch in the tome flared once, bright, then dimmed — and a new line of runes bled onto the empty half of the torn page, fresh and wet. The book had been waiting for this. The instructions were starting to write themselves.