A brilliant blue sky shone overhead as a pale spring sun illuminated the fields in a soft glow. The rays felt warm on Kellen’s coat, promising the last stubborn drifts of snow would melt and the brown fields would burst to life once more. Sometimes the Idaho winters felt like they would never end. When they finally thawed, the whole world felt brand new.

“Are you daydreaming again?”

With a last deep breath, Kellen tore his eyes away from the rolling farmland. Allison stood a few feet away, impatiently waiting for him. They were out fixing fences together and she held a strand of broken barbed wire in one hand.

“I’m just glad we’re back, that’s all,” Kellen said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you or home again.”

Allison gave him her best smug grin that exuded every bit of confidence he lacked. “I never doubted it! I knew you’d find me.”

Kellen would have rolled his eyes, but his gratitude was enough to make him smile and shake his head. He grabbed his pliers and took a firm grip on his end of the broken barbed wire to twist it into a loop. Next, he reached for the stretching tool that would pull the ends together. It took all his concentration to keep the spiny barb from flipping out of the jaws of the tool and hitting him in the face. He didn’t dare look away and held out a hand for Allison’s strand of wire. She didn’t.

“Hey, hand it over. Allison?”

When Kelled looked up, it wasn’t Allison standing next to him. The woman had gray hair with red-orange highlights, cut just above her shoulders. She smiled, revealed a mouth of canine teeth. Somehow, Kellen looked away from these long enough to realize the woman also had narrow, pointed ears with cream-colored tufts. They almost looked like…

“A coyote,” the woman said. Her voice was high, but not in a silly, girlish way. “Should Coyote Lady not look like a coyote?”

One of Kellen’s hands still held the fence-fixer. The other remained half-raised where he’d reached for Allison’s wire. In the back of his mind, he realized Allison had never been there. How was he back in Idaho, and where was his sister?

“Dreams are funny things,” Coyote Lady said, holding out one hand to examine her nails. “I can visit you humans in them, but everything around me is completely out of my control. Believe me, I’ve been in some very weird and, ah, awkward situations trying to speak with your kind.”

She peered at Kellen through big, brown eyes behind long lashes. The corner of her mouth turned up in a teasing smile. Kellen still couldn’t find any words, though he blushed an impressive shade of crimson. He looked away. To his surprise, Vex lay between his insulated boots, curled in a ball, asleep.

“Take Vex, for example,” Coyote Lady said. “He wasn’t here at all until your mind wondered where he was and — poof! There you have it.”

Kellen cleared his throat. “Allison?” he asked in a weak voice.

Coyote Lady nodded. “I’m afraid she’s still with Ubira. That’s where I come in. Ubira and his new friends are… meddling in things they shouldn’t. And believe me, as the world’s foremost meddler, when their meddling is meddlesome enough for me to take notice, it is a meddle too much. I thought perhaps you could help me out, but you went and got yourself stuck in a trap, didn’t you?”

“You know the best way to get out of a trap?”

A new voice, that of a self-assured little boy, drew Kellen’s attention to Coyote Lady’s feet. A raccoon the size of a toddler lounged on her booted feet to stay out of the mud. He was all animal, except for his bare feet, which were covered in raccoon-patterned hair but still shaped like a human’s. He wore a red woven vest with green ivy patterns and carved bone buttons.

His face lifted in a cocky little raccoon sneer. “Chew your foot off.” Without warning, he twisted in half and began to gnaw on his ankle.

“Stop that!” Coyote Lady gave the talking raccoon humanoid a bump with her foot. The raccoon growled up at her but stopped.

“Told you,” he said.

“This doesn’t count,” Coyote Lady snapped at the raccoon. “He hasn’t died and he could still work his way out on his own. I’m just… nudging things along a bit.” She flipped her foot. The racoon shouted in alarm as he sailed over the barren fields and eventually out of sight over the hills.

Kellen stared open-mouthed. Coyote Lady looked confused, then glanced in the direction she’d punted the raccoon. “Oh, don’t worry about him. It’s only a dream. Raccoon Boy is too smart for his own good sometimes. That’s why we get along so well.”

“… who?”

Ordinary dreams were disorienting. The level of confusion Kellen felt in this one far exceeded anything he could wrap his head around. He told himself over and over to wake up, even pinched himself. It hurt and nothing changed.

“I’ll let you get back to the real world in just a moment,” Coyote Lady said. “Well, not your real world, but the realest world you’re going to come across for now. Once you get out of this mess, there isn’t much time. We’ve got to do some meddling of our own.”

Realization took shape in Kellen’s mind. He remembered the cave and their predicament. A wave of sadness hit him. It had started out as such a great dream.

“So… so how do we get out of the cave?” Kellen asked. This, at least, meant there was hope. Or he was hallucinating. Compared to waking up in Oras and meeting Vex, this one had all the makings of a hallucination. Maybe the cave was air tight, and they were running out of oxygen?

Coyote Lady picked up the strand of broken barbed wire and held it between two fingers, studying it. When she looked back at Kellen, she gave a very wolfish smile.

“I can’t spoil all the fun for you.”

She dropped the barbed wire and flicked his nose.

“Wait!”

Kellen shot straight up, surrounded by nothingness. For a moment, he thought he heard Coyote Lady’s laughter fading. Before he could tell for certain it was gone and Vex and Shani were both talking.

“What is it?” Vex mumbled, summoning a flicker of light. With nothing else to do, they’d all fallen asleep.

Shani rubbed her face. She looked twenty years older in the shadows cast by Vex’s faint light. Kellen couldn’t imagine what he looked like. He looked between them, caught in the disoriented state from sleep to waking.

“You were yelling in your sleep,” Shani said.

“I… I had a weird dream,” Kellen said. Already, the details were fading in his mind. He looked at Vex. “Do you remember anything?”

“I was dreaming about pizza and ice cream,” Vex said. “Was that what you were dreaming about?”

“No,” Kellen trailed off with a frustrated sigh. Aside from being home with Allison, the rest sat on the tip of a memory. Across from them, Shani yawned and laid back down. “It felt… important, somehow. Something to do with a lady that looked like a dog or something?”

Now it was Shani’s turn to bolt upright. “Do you mean Coyote Lady?”

At the name, the dream surged back into Kellen’s mind like it rode on a bullet train. “Yes!” He recounted the dream to both of them, leaving out the part about Coyote Lady’s mention of visiting people’s awkward dreams.

“Coyote Lady is one of the Wild Mother’s grandchildren,” Shani said. “They serve as her messengers. That was a powerful dream. Do you know what it means?”

Kellen sorted through each detail of the dream again. Idaho, Allison… springtime? None of that seemed to help their current situation.

“Maybe it means you’re supposed to kick me over there so hard that I hit that plate on the floor and press it down?” Vex suggested. “You know, like the raccoon.”

Kellen gave him a deadpan look. “Do you really think that’s the answer?”

Vex put on a very patient, patronizing face. “I’m just trying to think outside the box. My other idea was for you to chew your foot off, so count yourself lucky.”

“Something in your dream had significance to where we are now,” Shani said. “This thing you were doing… fen-cing? What is it? A celebration of your people?”

A dry laugh escaped Kellen. “It’s work. There’s nothing special about it. You put two pieces of twisted metal wire together and…”

Kellen paused. Was that the answer?

“Vex, do you think you could feed strands of mana through the hole in that rock over there?” Kellen pointed to the skinny stalagmite. “They would have to come all the way across back to me.”

Changing back into his bat form, Vex flew across the space and behind the stalagmite, peering through the hole like an eye of a needle in the top of it. “I think so, but what good will that do?”

“I’m thinking if we can create enough strands across the gap, we can make a rope from one end to the other,” Kellen said. He reached into one of the pouches he carried and produced the mana stone from the bear. He’d been storing a bit of mana in it every night since Nokom had showed him how to channel mana from his beast heart and feed the stone. “If you feed it through and wrap it around that end, then I can shape it and make it stronger. You’ve got more mana than me and I can work it into what we need.”

It would be just like repairing two pieces of barbed wire on a fence. They’d stretch them out and combine the strands into one. If he was wrong and Coyote Lady’s hint had been something else entirely, they were going to die, but the chances of them dying anyway were the same odds.

“That’s going to be harder than it sounds,” Vex said, still hovering above the stalagmite. “It’s one thing to make a light. It’s a whole other thing to make the mana solid so your hands don’t pass right through it.”

Shani rose and stood next to Kellen, studying the rock across the chasm. “And what will you anchor it to on this side?”

Kellen didn’t answer right away as he mentally calculated the width of the pit between the two ledges. It was probably six strides across — just under twenty feet. Already knowing what he would find, Kellen glanced at their ledge in the hope he’d missed a spur of rock or something that he could support himself against. He hadn’t.

“Vex will keep channeling the rope on his end and I’ll hold it on my end so you can climb across.”

Shani didn’t protest, but the look on her face plainly said she didn’t think Kellen could hold her weight.

“Do you trust me?” he asked her.

There wasn’t even a moment’s pause. “Of course not! You may mean well, but nothing you have shown in your training proves this will work.”

Kellen knew he should have been offended. Instead, he laughed. “You’re probably right. At least we’ll know?” He let the question hang while Shani pondered it.

“You are right,” she said at last. “I would rather try this than die of thirst.”

Just before he gave Vex the word to start forming the mana, Kellen paused. “There is always the chance that Nokom will show up and get us out of this.”

“And by the time they find us, Ubira will be lost in the mountains,” Shani said. “If they can get us out at all. Let’s get out of here, kill him and find your sister.”

Shani’s confidence spilled over into Kellen, covering up at least a few of the thoughts filling his head of how his idea could go horribly wrong. To focus, he turned away from Shani and faced the wall. For some reason, line dancing felt completely awkward when only one person watched him, compared to the whole group of Gray Dawn. He completed it anyway, moving along to the tune in his head as he felt the mana building and coursing through him. In his pocket, the mana stone hummed with magical energy, sensing the buildup of mana within Kellen’s beast heart. It was now or never.

“Okay. Ready, Vex?”

On the far side of the cave, Vex began to glow. He opened his tiny fanged mouth and strands of light the thickness of nylon chord wormed their way through the hole in the stone. The sight of Vex in his bat form with strands of golden light wiggling out of his mouth was more than a little creepy. Kellen ignored it and focused on the end of the entwined mana, working its way across the open space. The strands floated like blossoms on a breeze, defying gravity. Kellen could already feel the strain on Vex and the smooth growing of the mana like a creeping vine halted for a moment. When it continued, it jerked and bobbed like a line with a fish on it.

“You’re doing great, buddy!” Kellen shouted. He stretched out his own hand, sensing the sun mana in the strands and pulling it toward him, like a plant turning to the sunlight. The motion of the mana smoothed out and crossed the gap. As soon as Kellen’s hands grasped the strands, now about as thick as two of his fingers, he willed them to wrap around his wrist. At the same time, he fed the long line the mana from his stone. Kellen gasped. The mana stone was draining at an alarming rate. Even the effects of the mana dance were weakening from the sheer amount of energy required to hold the mana in an extended physical state.

“Okay, go!” He said to Shani in between ragged breaths. She gave him a single nod, gripped the mana rope with both her hands, and swung out over the ledge.

A rush of apprehension sent adrenaline burning through Kellen. The rope sagged, but rather than pulling Kellen forward, it pulled at the mana in his beast heart even faster. Shani moved like a gymnast, swinging hand over hand across the gap. She’d made it about two-thirds of the way across the gap when Kellen’s connection frayed, not like a slow, twisting unraveling, but as if someone was sawing away at the strands of mana with a knife. He felt the last wisps of mana drain from the stone, his beast heart only seconds behind.

“Can’t. Hold. Much. More!”

Kellen’s feet slid out from underneath him. The dust on the stone floor made a scraping sound against his boots, and he inched toward the edge. He locked his eyes on Shani. Only one or two more swings to go and she’d be there. He gritted his teeth, heaving with all of his physical and magical power. A crack like a whip resounded across the chamber and his connection with the rope of mana broke. Rather than dropping, the mana disintegrated, like the fuse of a firework.

“Shani!”

With a last swing, Shani heaved herself forward and released the mana rope just as it burst into golden powder. Kellen’s stomach lurched as she sailed through empty air, slamming into the edge of the pit with her chest, elbows bent over the top. She kicked once, twice, and pulled herself up, Vex yanking on her shoulder with his teeth. When she’d made it onto solid ground, she rolled over. In the dim, flickering light Vex provided, he could see her chest heaving. When she caught her breath, Shani sat up. Kellen never would have expected it, but a wild, manic grin covered her face.

“That was close enough!” she called across to him.

Kellen nodded, still trying to catch his own breath. “Vex, you good?”

“I feel like someone tried to pull insides out but I’ll survive.” After he’d pulled Shani to safety, he’d changed into his fox form and lay belly up on the ground beside Shani.

“How will you cross?” Shani yelled over the gap. “Can you do that again?”

Kellen shook his head. “No. It took everything in my beast heart, plus the mana stone. That doesn’t matter anyway if pressing that block doesn’t do anything.”

Shani rose and walked the short distance to the square plate above the ground. Without hesitation, she stepped on it, first with one foot, then put her entire weight into it.

The stone sank into the ground with a scraping nose. A rumbling filled the cavern and for a moment, Kellen thought the slab of rock behind him would open, leaving Shani trapped on the other side. Instead, several stalactites shook loose from the ceiling above the chasm. When they hit what would have been ground level, however, they floated in the air. By the time the shaking stopped, they hovered in a line, like the wooden slats of a rope bridge. The stones bobbed up and down like flotsam on the waves or a tree in the breeze. The thing definitely wasn’t OSHA approved. Kellen didn’t care. Before the logical side of his brain could kick in, he ran across the bridge of stalactites.

On the other side, Vex jumped into his arms. Kellen squeezed the little fox back, bristling with pride and relief.

“I never thought for a second Shani was going to fall to her death!” Vex said. “Even before it almost happened.”

Kellen laughed. “What about you?” he asked Shani.

Any trace of her grin was gone. “I thought I was going to die,” she said, then added after a pause. “But… you did well.”

Unsure how to react to the slim yet undeniable praise, Kellen rubbed the back of his head. “Well, it worked enough.”

He noticed for the first time that the back wall on the side of the cave they now stood had fallen away. Darkness greeted them, but at least it offered the chance of a way out. He glanced back behind them, where he knew Obishi still waited, injured, on the other side of the rock. Kellen hoped Gray Dawn would find him and wished they could at least tell him what was happening. But their only choice was forward, into the depths of the mountain.

Glowing and bobbint like a Christmas ornament, Vex led them down the twisting, descending tunnel. Shani took the spot behind him, one hand always resting on her knife. Kellen brought up the rear, constantly checking over his shoulder to see if they were being followed.

It was only paranoia, he knew. So far, they’d come across no branches in the tunnel, meaning unless secret side chambers existed, it would have been impossible for anyone to get behind them. He couldn’t shake a tension in his back or the hair prickling on his neck. The stale air smelled of damp rock and carried an aura of oppression. Maybe that was what had him on edge, Kellen reflected. It was easy to imagine them as tiny ants, going down, down, down into the depths of the earth, never to surface or see the sun again.

“Do you think Obishi will be okay?” he asked Shani. He’d worried about Obishi since the slab of rock fell and separated them, though he hadn’t voiced his concerns with Shani since before they’d started down this new tunnel.

“Ira will find him,” Shani said in a low voice without turning around. “He also has most of our food and water, and maybe even the tools to make a fire. He’s better off than we are.”

As she spoke, Vex stopped mid air, Kellen peered past Shani and saw they were at a junction. One tunnel led upward and ahead, while another went off to the left and downward.

“Which way should we go?” Shani asked them. The question surprised Kellen, and it must have shown on his face because Shani elaborated. “Do you sense anything in the mana in either direction?”

“Oh, right,” Kellen’s mind had been so busy worrying that they might wander around the tunnels lost, he hadn’t thought of how he and Vex might be able to help them get back to the surface. He took a few deep breaths and tried to extend his senses down each tunnel. There was a faint pull from the left tunnel, but nothing from the path in front of them. Before he’d reached out with his beastcaller sense, logic told him to take the direction that went up. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“Same,” Vex said, sensing Kellen’s internal debate. “There’s… something to the left. It’s faint, but you can’t miss it. The other way,” he paused to sniff the air, “nothing.”

“The mana we feel could be anything, though, couldn’t it?” Kellen asked. “A wild mana beast, or maybe not even anything alive.”

“Yep,” Vex said. “We could hike down that path for an hour only to find some kind of mana-enriched mushroom that isn’t even edible.”

“Then which is it?” Shani pressed. “We should make a decision and go. If we can find water, going down may not be such a bad thing, even if we have to backtrack. My head is already pounding.”

Kellen looked between both tunnels again. “Down.”