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curled her tail in closer. Remember what he’s planning and what he said and what he’s done. But it was hard not to imagine herself in his scales.
    Gently she used her front talons to slide the mirror out from under his wing. Her warmth had relaxed his grip on it, so he wasn’t clutching it so tightly, and it only took a moment until it was resting coldly between her claws. The obsidian felt thin, like a layer of ice, and the edges were sharp as teeth. Sunny could see her distorted reflection in the dark glass.
    She took a careful step back, then another, and folded her wings back in. Preyhunter made a lost, mournful noise, and his claws twitched as if he were trying to pull the warmth back into him.
    Will they guess I’m the one who stole it? What if they come looking for me?
    She glanced around the clearing. A large, flat gray boulder took up most of the ground between the three dragons, with bright yellow dandelions dotting the edges like topaz gemstones around a pendant.
    I’ll leave them a message…. Something that won’t sound like me. Maybe something that’ll scare them.
    Her own heart was drumming frantically against her ribs like a caged bird. She wanted to get out of there before any of them woke up. But she had a strong feeling that there was something to this idea.
    She dipped a claw in the dark red mud that lined the river and wrote on the boulder, in tall, jagged letters:
    TURN BACK. YOU FLY TOWARD YOUR DEATH.
    Totally spooky, she thought with satisfaction. It even looked like maybe it could have been written in blood. That should at least creep them out, even if it doesn’t send them scurrying back to the rainforest.
    Sunny took a step back, and then suddenly Strongwings let out the loudest snore yet, and Fierceteeth rolled over to swat him with her wing.
    “Shut your noisy snout or so help me I will rip it off with my claws!” she hollered.
    Sunny bolted into the sky and didn’t stop flying until she reached the dense green canopy of the jungle again.
    When she finally glanced back, there was no movement from the NightWings’ copse of trees. Strongwings had even started snoring again.
    I guess she was yelling at him in her sleep. Or she went right back to sleep and didn’t notice me there.
    Sunny carefully tucked the mirror under one wing and used her talons to clamber up and along the trees until she found a spot where the leaves overlapped so thickly it was like a small green cave around her. She studied the mirror. What had Preyhunter done to activate it?
    “Starflight,” she said softly to the cold obsidian, and then she breathed a small plume of smoke across the surface.
    As it had before, the smoke twined and twisted around the mirror, then vanished. Sunny could feel the mirror thrumming faintly between her claws. It was sort of horrible — a sick, slithering sensation through her blood, as if it were pulling something out of Sunny’s heart.
    A faint black tendril of smoke curled up from the center of the mirror, barely visible in the green-tinted sunshine. It didn’t speak, but when Sunny leaned closer, she could hear the faint sound of breath going in and out.
    He’s alive.
    Two pale blue wisps of smoke drifted by, close to the edge of the mirror.
    “I’ve never seen anything like it,” whispered one.
    “The queen said this is what ‘fire’ can do,” murmured the other. “It seems almost as bad as venom, if you ask me.”
    From their voices, Sunny guessed they were two of the healer RainWings she’d befriended while she was helping take care of Webs. RainWing healers were odd, specializing mostly in saying comforting things and offering more fruit to eat. But occasionally they were really specifically knowledgeable, like about jaguar bites, or what to do if you ate too many mangoes, or how to make salves for tails that had been used for swinging from rough branches one too many times.
    “I’d rather be Kinkajou than him right now,” said the first. “She’s healing