Jade Bones pushed through the wet ferns, her iridescent vines tugging her forward like a leash. Three days of this pull. Three dead cousins behind her. The sorcerer was close, and she would put a blade through his throat before the week ended. A man staggered out of the trees and dropped at her feet. Vines just like hers wrapped his arms. Same shimmer. Same weight. Her stomach turned to stone. She knelt. A scaled cat-creature with folded wings padded behind him, whining low. In the man's fist was a cracked compass, its needle spinning wild. A patch of glowing flowers bloomed where his blood touched the dirt. Behind him, through the trees, she saw the carved arch of a small stone shrine — his last shelter. "Vael," he whispered. The sorcerer's name. "He knows. He's waiting." His chest stopped moving. Jade closed his eyes. She took the broken compass from his hand. Her bloodline was not three dead. It was four. And the man she hunted now knew she was coming.

Jade walked away from the shrine with the dead man's compass shaking in her palm. The cracked needle stopped spinning. It locked east. Her vines yanked north. Two pulls. Two directions. Her arms burned where the iridescent vines tightened against her skin. She followed both as far as she could, until the forest split at a small cottage ringed by a low fence. Glowing flowers spilled over its window boxes. The compass needle stabbed hard toward its door. The vines on her legs hauled the other way, into the dark trees beyond. Jade chose the compass. The dead man had carried it. He had earned that much. Inside the cottage, the air was warm and wrong. No sorcerer. Only a notebook open on a small table, its cover wrapped in carved vines. Beside it sat another compass, this one alive, twisting roots curled around brass. The needle pulsed and pointed back at her own arms. A tracker. Not Vael. A trinket meant to find people like her. She read one line in the open notebook. Her name. Her cousins' names. A list, ticked off in fresh ink, four marks deep. The handwriting was patient. The last line read, Come north. The cottage was a lure, and she had stepped inside it. Jade slammed the notebook shut and shoved the broken compass into her belt. She walked out the door and turned north, where the vines had been pulling her all along. He had wanted her to waste the hour. She had given it to him. Now she owed him that hour back, in blood.

Jade marched north for an hour, the vines on her legs tugging like leashed dogs. Then, between one step and the next, they went slack. The pull died. She stood still in the cold quiet, her arms suddenly light, her boots rooted in moss. In front of her stood a pile of green bones. They were arranged like a walking figure mid-stride, ribs open to the sky. A marker. A joke. The vines had brought her here and stopped on purpose. Jade ripped the tracking compass from her belt. Its roots curled tight around the brass. The needle spun once, then pointed past the bones, toward a stone mansion half-hidden in the trees. Ivy climbed its walls. A blue clock stared down from its peak. She had not seen it a moment ago. A small creature crept out from behind a mossy boulder near the mansion steps. It had a koala's face, a cat's tail, and scaled feet. It blinked at her, then turned its head toward the boulder it came from. Something behind that rock was breathing. She heard it now. Slow. Waiting. Jade drew her knife. She did not run at the boulder. She backed toward the bone marker and crouched low, putting the green ribs between her and whatever watched. Her compass pulsed hot against her palm. The trap had a mouth, and she had walked to its edge. She would not step closer tonight. She marked the mansion in her mind, marked the boulder, marked the silent vines. Then she slipped sideways into the brush. The hunt was no longer hers alone. Now she knew exactly where he was hiding, and he did not know she had seen him.

Jade crouched in the brush until full dark fell. The mansion's blue clock ticked across the clearing. Then her arms began to glow. The vines on her skin flared bright in the shadows, throwing pale light onto the leaves around her. She froze. Any step forward would paint her like a lantern against the trees. She dragged her handcrafted cloak from her pack and wrapped it tight over her arms and legs. The thick fabric dimmed the glow, but light still leaked from her wrists and ankles. She tucked the sleeves under her gloves. She pulled the hood low. The cloak grew warm against the cold vines, and her breath steadied. Then she saw it. Not far from the mansion steps, a tall candle stood burning on a wax-covered book. Iridescent vines, the same as hers, twisted up its sides. The flame flickered as her own vines pulsed. They were linked. The candle was reading her. A small girl in a yellow dress stepped out of the mansion door, holding the hand of a red-haired woman. The child pointed straight at Jade's hiding spot. The woman's eyes followed. Jade had not moved. The cloak had hidden her glow, but the candle had not. The flame leaned toward her like a finger. Jade lunged backward and her boot caught rope. A dirt-covered net snapped up from the ground and yanked her into the air. She hung upside down, knife loose in her fist, the cloak tangled around her face. The vines blazed gold through the cloth. Below her, slow footsteps crossed the moss. The hunt had flipped. She had tried to hide her light and walked into the watcher at the door. Now she swung in the dark, lit up like a signal fire, waiting for the hand that would reach her first.

The net spun slow above the moss. Jade saw the small girl in yellow break away and sprint down a path lined with pale stone lanterns. Each lantern flickered as the child passed. The girl was fast. If she reached the mansion door, the red-haired woman would bring more hands than Jade could cut through. Jade twisted in the rope. Her knife was still in her fist. She sawed at the cord above her boot, and the vines on her arms pulled the strands tight against the blade. The cloak fell open. Gold light spilled across the clearing and lit the small watch-house nearby, its stone walls crawling with centipedes around a quiet statue. The rope snapped. Jade dropped hard onto her shoulder and rolled. She came up running, not toward the mansion, but along the lantern path. The girl glanced back once. Her small face went wide. She pushed harder, blonde hair streaming, sneakers slapping stone. Jade was faster. She caught the child at the third lantern and swept an arm around her waist, lifting her off the ground. The girl kicked and shouted, but Jade clamped a gloved hand over her mouth and dragged her sideways into the brush. The shout was already out. From the mansion steps, the red-haired woman froze, then started walking. The woman crossed the moss without hurry. "Put her down," she said. Her voice was even. "I should have stopped her running. That's on me. But she's six. You're not going to use her, and we both know it." She stopped ten paces off, hands open at her sides. Jade's grip loosened. The girl slid free and bolted, not toward the mansion now, but behind the red-haired woman's legs. A scaled blue shape uncurled from the lantern's shadow then — a cat-bodied thing with folded dragon wings, yellow eyes fixed on Jade. Its claws dimpled the moss. Jade had stopped the alarm. She had not stopped what the alarm would have brought. The thing took one slow step forward, and the mansion door swung wide behind it.

The scaled cat stepped off the moss and onto the lantern path. Its horn caught the light. Jade backed toward the tree line, one hand on her knife, the other tugging her cloak shut over her arms. The gold light leaked through anyway. Every vine on her body was a lit fuse pointing at her chest. The red-haired woman took the child by the shoulders and walked her back toward the mansion steps, quick now, not looking back. The mansion door stayed open. Jade saw movement inside it. A candle stood on a table just past the threshold, thick as her wrist, wrapped in vines that glowed the same color as her own skin. It was burning. It had been burning the whole time. She understood then. He was not tracking her from a window. He was tracking her from the flame. Wherever she moved, the candle told him. Advancing meant walking straight down a path he had already drawn. Jade turned and ran into the trees. The scaled creature came after her, wings half open, faster over the moss than she was. She cut left off the game trail and immediately caught her shin on a wire. Dried leaves puffed up. Somewhere behind her a bell clanged twice against wood. She rolled through the fall and kept moving. Ten paces on, another wire brushed her knee. She stopped. She crouched. The wires were everywhere, strung ankle high, smeared with sap and hidden under leaf litter. They did not form a wall. They formed a funnel. Every wire she could see pushed her toward one clearing on her right, where a low wooden stage sat rotting between two pines, red curtains still hanging in strips. A net was rigged above the stage. She could see the dirt-caked mesh sagging in the branches, waiting for a body to land on the boards. The lizard-horned creature paced the tree line behind her, herding, not charging. It knew the funnel. It had walked her toward the stage a dozen times in its head already. Jade backed away from the stage on her hands and knees, under the wires, not through them. She crawled until she found the game trail again and lay flat. Her plan was simple and it was not the plan she came with. She was not going to reach the mansion tonight. She was not going to reach him at all while that candle burned and her skin answered it. She had to put the flame out first, or cut the link, and she could not do either from out here. She pulled her cloak tight and pressed her glowing arms into the dirt to smother them. The scaled creature stopped pacing. It sat on its haunches at the edge of the trees and watched the place she had been. Jade lay in the dark and listened to the bell rope creak. She had learned the shape of the trap. She had not sprung it. That was the night's only win, and she took it.