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and angling them so he was shoved along by it.
    He didn’t know where he was going, but sooner or later he would have to meet another living thing who could tell him.
    Then he stopped. His nose twitched as if trying to catch a scent. Hunching forward, head cocked, he listened. Something was wrong. Not outside, but inside. Deep inside him, something was all wrong.
    He tried to breathe calmly, to listen, to think.
    Then it came to him.
    His heart wasn’t beating.
    In a panic, he coughed and thrashed about, hoping to force his heart into action. He pounded his chest against the rocky ground. Beat!
Beat!
Desperate for air, his vision flared and swam—then suddenly cleared.
    And he realized he wasn’t dying.
    He was already dead.
    At the same moment, his name came surging back to him. He opened his mouth to speak it and his voice sounded alien to him, saturated with grime and exhaustion. “Goth.”

A C RACK IN THE S KY
    Inside Tree Haven, Griffin watched as they placed Luna on a soft bed of moss. With their noses they gently nudged out her wounded wings. His mother was among the helpers, as was his grandmother, Ariel. In niches carved from the bark were small mounds of different berries and dried leaves and strips of bark. Ariel took some of these things into her mouth, chewing not swallowing. Then she roosted above Luna and proceeded to drizzle the potion from her mouth onto the patches of raw, burned skin.
    Luna was shivering. Why was she shivering, Griffin wondered, when she’d just been on fire? She said nothing, made no sound, just stared straight ahead, eyes wide and unblinking. She didn’t look like herself. It was as if the things that made her Luna had gone away, or were deep in hiding somewhere. She just gazed right through things. Maybe she was concentrating, using all her energy to get better.
    Griffin had always found Tree Haven immensely comforting. He loved the reassuring thickness of its great trunk, and the geography of its craggy grey bark, knotted and gouged with valleysdeep enough to hide in. Most of all he loved the inside, hollowed out by the Silverwings into a series of interconnected roosts, radiating from the trunk into the larger branches, all the way up to the elders’ roost at the summit. At sunset the entire colony would burst through the central knothole into the night with the sound of a torrential river. But his favourite time of all was sunrise, when everyone would return from the night’s hunting, find their roosts, and talk while combing the dust and grit from their fur and licking their wings clean. Then all the mothers and newborns, roosting snugly side by side, would sleep.
    But now, as he looked at Luna, he felt only shame and dread.
    No one had spoken to him yet. There hadn’t been time. In the forest, when all the grown-ups had arrived, his own mother had only looked at him anxiously for a moment and asked, “You’re all right?” When he’d nodded numbly, she had returned to Luna, helping to carry her back to Tree Haven and up to the healer’s roost. Griffin had followed at a distance. As they’d flown up through the trunk, the silence was suffocating. Everyone already seemed to know what had happened. He tried not to look at the hundreds of horrified bats watching as they passed. He didn’t want to look, or be looked at. He didn’t want them to see what he’d done.
    Now the other mothers were taking turns blending the leaves and berries in their mouths, mulching them into a thick liquid and spreading it over Luna’s wounds. Watching this made Griffin feel hopeful. He wished they would work even faster, cover all Luna’s angry welts and burns with the dark unguent, cover up her pain, take it away.
    When at last they were finished, his mother flew over and roosted beside him. “Griffin, what happened?” she whispered.
    He had childishly hoped this moment would never come. His voice shook as he spoke. “We saw some Humans in the forest andthey had a fire and … we