Hollow Wren wanted to bleed. Real girls bled when they pricked a finger. She had jabbed a sewing needle into her thumb three times, and each time only a thread of straw poked out. She was a scarecrow in a patched dress, stuffed with dry husks, and she was tired of pretending otherwise. She sat on the dirt floor of the old shed where the farmer had first stitched her. The place smelled of mold and rusted tools. Wren spread her hands flat and stared at them. Buttons for eyes. Straw for blood. If she wanted flesh, she needed to know one thing first. What magic had made her walk and talk at all? Find that, and she could find its opposite. A cure. But she had no answer. She had asked the mice. She had asked the wind through the broken slats. She had searched every shelf for a book, a spell, a clue, and found only empty jars and dust. Without knowing what she was, she could not begin to become something else. The not-knowing sat in her chest like a stone she could not name, because she had no chest, only packed straw. Then a light drifted through the gap in the wall. It was a firefly. Its round body glowed soft and gold, and its thin wings caught the dark like wet glass. Wren had seen fireflies before. They never flew straight at her. This one did. It circled her button eyes once, twice, then landed on the very thumb she had pricked. Where it touched, the straw thread turned dark. A single drop welled up. Not straw. Red. Warm. Wren lifted her thumb close to her face and watched the drop shine. Her breath caught, though she had no lungs. The firefly had not made blood from nothing. It had found blood already inside her. The magic that woke her was not a spell someone cast on straw. It lived in this small glowing thing, and things like it. She understood now, all at once. Fireflies had stitched her spirit into husks. Their light was the thread. Wren did not smile too late this time. She grinned the instant she knew. The firefly lifted off her thumb. Its glow dimmed. It wobbled toward the gap in the wall, weaker with every beat of its wings, as if the one drop had cost it dearly. Wren scrambled up, straw crackling in her knees. "Wait," she said. "Come back. I need you." The light slipped through the crack and out into the black field beyond. Wren pressed her button eye to the wood. Far off, she saw them. Dozens of glowing bodies, rising from the tall grass, drifting apart in every direction. She knew what made her now. She also knew she could not catch a swarm alone, and each one carried only a single drop. To become a girl of flesh, she would have to gather them all before their light went out.