For three days Gator had run out of scent. His master was somewhere ahead, the woman who once knelt on the pavement to put her face level with his. He remembered that day best. He held the memory the way he held everything now, through his nose. But the trail had gone cold, and a cold trail leads nowhere. He had searched every street he knew. He had smelled doorways, gutters, and the boots of strangers. One man swung a stick at him. Gator caught it in his teeth and walked on. The stick was not her. Nothing was her. So he kept moving, because stopping felt worse than failing. The wind pulled him toward the water. He had never gone this far. The ground turned to wet stone. Black rocks rose out of the gloom like broken teeth. Waves slammed them and fell back. Salt filled his nose and drowned out everything else. Here there was no scent to lose. Here there was nothing at all. Gator stopped between the rocks. He lowered his head. For the first time in three days, he did not know where to point his feet. The sea gave him nothing. He had followed his nose to the edge of the world, and the world had ended. Then something creaked. Not the water. Metal. Ahead, wedged among the stones, lay a small airplane. Its nose was crushed inward. One wing bent back like a snapped bone. The body was split open, red paint peeled to bare metal. It had come down hard. Gator's ears lifted. He crept closer, low to the ground, and pushed his nose into the torn side of the wreck. He caught it at once. Her. Faint, buried under oil and rust, but hers. The same warm smell from the day she knelt down to him. It clung to a strap inside the broken cabin. His whole body went still, then trembled. He shoved his head deeper and breathed until he was sure. She had been here. She had been in this thing when it fell. Gator backed out of the wreck. He circled it, nose down, reading the stone. The salt tried to swallow the trail, but he held it now. Faint tracks led away from the crash, up from the water, into the dark beyond the rocks. Someone had walked out of the wreck. Someone had lived. He had come to the coast with no trail left and no place to look. Now he had both. The scent was three days late, but it was moving, and it was hers. Gator turned from the sea and followed it inland.

Gator followed the tracks inland, nose low to the wet stone. The scent was faint but real. Then the wind changed. It came off the sea now, heavy and cold. Far out over the water, clouds stacked into a black wall. Gator smelled it before he saw it. Rain. If the rain hit, it would wash the trail from the ground. He had one chance to reach her before the storm swallowed her scent. He ran. The tracks climbed away from the rocks and into scrub grass. He kept his nose down and his legs moving. Thunder rolled behind him. The first drops struck his back, fat and slow. The scent thinned under the water. Gator pushed harder. He knew he was losing it. Each stride, the trail grew weaker, until the ground gave him almost nothing. Then he caught something new. Not oil. Not rust. Blood, and under it, her. Fresh. Close. He drove toward it as the rain came down in sheets. He found her at the edge of a treeline. A girl sat against a trunk, one leg stretched out wrong. Blonde hair stuck to her face. Red streaks ran under it. Cuts marked her cheek. She was not his master. But the strap in the wreck had carried her plane, and her blood now marked the last of the trail. She had crawled from the same crash. She had walked this ground. Gator stopped a few feet off. He lowered his head and watched her with steady eyes. The girl looked up. Her blue eyes found him. She did not flinch. "You're wet," she said. "So am I." Gator did not move. He sniffed the air between them, hunting for his master under the blood and rain. It was not there. This girl had been in the plane. His master had been in the plane. But their trails had split somewhere he had not seen. "There was a woman," the girl said, as if she read his search. She winced and pressed a hand to her leg. "She pulled me out. Then she went that way." She lifted her chin toward the trees, inland, away from the sea. Gator turned his head where she pointed. The rain hammered the grass flat. The trail he had run was gone now, drowned. But the girl had given him a direction the water could not take. He stepped closer and pushed his nose against her hand once. Then he faced the trees. "Go," the girl said. "Find her." Gator ran into the storm. The scent under his feet was dead. But he was no longer following the ground. He was following where his master had gone, and now he knew the way.