Judy walks through streets that glow like neon signs, looking for a girl who died thirty years before she did. The afterlife looks nothing like she expected — all sharp angles and bright colors instead of clouds or darkness. She doesn't know where to start. She turns a corner onto a street marked by a glowing sign that reads ANUBIS ST. The letters burn warm against the dark buildings. A thin black lion sits beneath it, ribs showing through patchy fur. Orange and pink light pulses under its skin like a heartbeat. It watches her with eyes that shouldn't be able to see anything at all. The lion stands when Judy stops walking. It crosses the cracked pavement and presses its shoulder against her leg, warm and solid despite looking half-starved. She touches its mane and feels the static buzz of neon. The creature turns and walks three steps toward a cluster of glowing sunflowers growing through broken concrete. It sits beside them and looks back at her. Judy kneels by the flowers. Their petals are too bright, edges traced in colors that don't belong in nature. The lion nudges one stem with its nose and a single bloom falls into her hands. She stares at the sunflower — Rayne's favorite — and knows with absolute certainty that someone left this here for her to find. The lion rubs its head against her arm like it's been waiting a long time to bring her this far. She doesn't know who sent it, but she's not walking blind anymore.

The lion lifts its head and sniffs the air. Its ears swivel forward. Then it stands in one smooth motion and bolts down the street, silent except for the click of claws on cracked pavement. The sunflower slips from Judy's hands as she scrambles to her feet. She runs after it. The lion leaves a trail of glowing sand behind it, orange and red specks that fade into the air like embers. Judy's lungs burn but she keeps running. She clutches the locket around her neck — the one she wore the day she died, the one Rayne gave her that last summer — and uses the pain in her chest to push harder. The lion turns a corner and she follows, her shoes slapping against pavement that cracks wider with each step. The trail of sand suddenly stops in the middle of an empty plaza. The lion is gone. Judy spins in a circle, searching, but there's nothing except the fading glow of sand specks settling on the ground. Her breath comes in ragged gasps. She let go of the sunflower and now she's lost the only thing that knew where to go. The plaza is silent. No movement. No guide. Then she sees it — a second sunflower growing through a crack in the concrete at the exact spot where the sand trail ended. She kneels and touches the petals. They're warm. The lion didn't abandon her. It brought her exactly where she needed to be next. She picks the flower and stands, looking at the buildings around the plaza with new eyes. Rayne left more than one marker. Judy just has to learn how to see them.

Judy stood at the edge of the plaza with the second sunflower in her hand. The locket at her throat went hot without warning. It pulled forward, tugging her chin down, dragging her a step toward the far side of the square where a row of figures in reaper masks had gathered around a black staff covered in carvings. The metal burned through her shirt. She grabbed the chain and tried to hold it still, but it kept straining toward them like a compass needle that had found its north. A shape moved between two buildings across the plaza. Tall. Lanky. A black hound with eyes like lit coals stood watching her. Judy froze. She should have been afraid. She wasn't. The hound didn't crouch or snarl. It just held her gaze, and something in her chest loosened. The locket kept pulling toward the masked figures, but the hound's stillness felt like a hand on her shoulder telling her to wait. Then the masks began to turn. One of the reapers lifted the carved staff and started walking in her direction. Judy ran. She tucked the sunflower inside her jacket and shoved the burning locket under her collar and cut down the nearest side street. A chain link fence rose ahead of her, wrapped around a gothic wreck of a building surrounded by rusted cars and heaps of parts. The gate hung open. She slipped through and pressed her back against the inside of the fence, breathing hard, listening for footsteps on the cracked road behind her. A low growl started somewhere to her left. Then another, and another, until she was ringed by dogs. Seven or eight of them, lean and scruffy, their fur glowing in bruised purples and pinks and blues. They didn't lunge. They waited. A woman stepped out from behind a stack of car doors, dark coat trailing, hair lit gold at the edges. She looked Judy over once, quick and complete, the way someone checks a lock. "Locket," she said. "Take it off. It's screaming at them." Judy's hands shook as she lifted the chain over her head. The woman held out a strip of dark cloth and wrapped the locket in it before Judy could ask. The heat dulled at once. The pulling stopped. "Vixen Tremaine," the woman said. "These are mine. You're safe inside the fence as long as you don't lie to me." Outside, boots passed on the pavement and kept going. Judy sank down against a pile of tires with the wrapped locket in her fist. The sunflower was still in her jacket. The trail wasn't lost. She had traded the open street for a walled yard, a stranger, and a pack of dogs that had decided, for now, to let her stay.