The first tree I strike with my mallet is a B-flat.

The pitch reminds me that I’d normally be at rehearsal right now, playing piano for the Kingsford Conservatory Choir. The assistant choirmaster —who is only filling in for my mother, I have to remind people, not replacing— always starts the warm-ups on B-flat. Once I played a half step higher to see if he’d notice, but only the choristers who have perfect pitch like me had any idea a joke was made.

My mallet strike sends something skittering through the underbrush, which in turn causes my sister Squeak to make the noise that earned her that nickname. The Pitch Pipe Forest is one of the few things that can rattle her nerves, and there isn’t a person in Kingsford who would blame her. We’ve all been nervous since the forest appeared. The Spontaneous Emergence of 1883.

Nerves or not, this is the best time of day to play the forest, when the sun penetrates the fall-thinned canopy of red and yellow, when you can clearly see the patches where the outer bark has flaked away to reveal the tubular, reedy pipe at each tree’s core. That’s why I’ve begged off rehearsal — of course , they said, you must be grieving — and dragged Squeak out here with me, our dress hems darkening as they trail over dirt, moss, and pine-scented scrub. We’re going to map the trees— a musical map so I can write a song that will bring our mother back.

I strike the tree a second time, just to confirm the pitch. Still the B-flat below middle C. Or A-sharp, I imagine Mom chiding. It depends on the key, Clara, so don’t you dare tell me they’re the same note. But Mom always starts warm-ups on B-flat too, so that’s what I say when I turn to Squeak, tuck the mallet under my arm, and sign the octave notation: B3? .

A notebook hangs from a cord around Squeak’s neck, and the pouch belted around her waist is full of charcoals, but she makes no move to write anything. She’s so short and round that her downturned mouth makes her look like a disgruntled mushroom as she signs back, Or do you mean A3??

“Smartass,” I mutter, not signing. She’s learned to read that on my lips better than anything.

I fumble a piece of chalk from my waist pouch and try to mark the note on the tree, but I might as well have written a glyph from some other language. The outer bark is thick and knotty in most spots, too uneven to legibly write upon, and it’s like crumbly pie crust where it borders the exposed pipe. I don’t dare write directly on that lest I accidentally sound a chalk-scratched bastardization of the B-flat. The portals don’t always open, but when they do, three notes in short succession is all it takes. And accidental portals, my trembling hands remind me, are dangerous.

And what’s on the other side? Squeak has asked me more than once. She’s been gone two days, what if there’s no food, or water, or...

That’s usually when I turn away, so I don’t have to listen to the rest. I’m more concerned about the beavers. I’ve never spotted one, but their teeth marks are everywhere. There’s no telling how much time we have before they fell another tree or gnaw the pipe enough to affect the pitch. And to open the right portal, the song I create will need the same note Mom played when she disappeared.

I glance at Squeak, who’s finally taken up her notebook to add the tree and its pitch to our map. Despite my unease, I chuckle at the gentle scritch of charcoal against paper; it’s so at odds with Squeak’s scrunch-faced look of concentration. Seventeen going on eighty, as Mom would say. Even as a child at play, Squeak would make that face, whether arranging dolls for tea or gauging the swing of the jump rope.

Squeak lets the notepad drop, shoves the charcoal into its pouch, then squats to touch the ground. After a moment, she signs, her hands tinged with the inks and paints of her artist’s arsenal: All clear.

She can’t hear the forest’s music, but she can feel the vibrations the tree roots send through the ground, and with far more sensitivity than me. She can tell when a tree’s note has dissipated completely, making it safe for me to sound another. I’m not sure I could do this without her. I would do it, for Mom, but terror would no doubt lead to mistakes. I’m already fighting off a queasy feeling worse than stage fright. I haven’t felt this kind of dread since our father climbed into a carriage and left Kingsford —and us— for good.

A rustle draws my gaze upward, where a squirrel leaps from one branch to another, sending flakes of bark drifting down. I’ve seen this particular dance a hundred times, yet still I watch, hoping to gain some new insight into how the forest works.

The squirrel’s tiny claws click against patches of exposed pipe, producing a series of gentle pings that open a luminous, disc-like portal, just large enough for the squirrel to dart through. The portal closes behind it, and soon after, another opens further down the branch. The squirrel re-emerges from whatever world exists beyond the portals— the world in which our mother is trapped. That second portal never opened for her, all because of a single wrong note.

The Pitch Pipe Forest just appeared one day. The place it occupies had once been known as the Tunnet Forest, until the Great Fire of 1882 reduced it to a pile of ash and blackened stumps. How the rest of Kingsford escaped unscathed, no one can say for certain. Some agree with the local clergy, who claim we were saved through the power of prayer. Some agree with the science-minded professoriate at Kingsford College, who say we were saved by the direction of the wind and natural firebreaks. Mom believed it to be a bit of both.

I was nearly nineteen when Tunnet Forest burned, and nearly twenty when we woke to find the Pitch Pipe Forest in its place. Part of a divine plan, the clergy said. We have theories but need to test them, the scientists said.

“I still think it’s both,” Mom said. “The best music is.”

The morning the forest appeared, Squeak nudged me awake and signed, The ground feels strange. Before I could ask what she meant, Mom burst into our bedroom. With her bad knee and stout frame, her normal gait was a lopsided waddle. But that morning there was a lightness to her steps I’d never seen before. She threw open a window and breathed in the mist-heavy morning, looking like one of those thirty-something sopranos about to burst into the aria of her teen-something character. Mom hummed for a while, then spun toward us, signing and saying aloud, “That song, can you sense it?”

Squeak nodded, but I noted only the same birdsongs I heard every morning: flute-like thrushes, shrill blackbirds, cheerily whistling robins. It was only when Mom started humming again that I could match her notes to new ones lurking beneath all that avian twittering. There was a subtle, metal-toned ostinato that reminded me of the glass harmonica Maestro Fanucci had demonstrated at one of his salons. The repeated pattern was beautiful, more of a mood than a song. At first it seemed to be accompanying the birds, but listening closer, I realized it was the other way around. The birds were the ones changing their song, shifting rhythm, pitch, and tempo to match this mysterious pattern.

I had just closed my eyes to enjoy the strange counterpoint when a deep, discordant tone sent them flying back open. The birds screeched and scattered in an angry flutter of wings, and I wished I could join them. That tone, an F if taken by itself, felt like nails scraping my skin.

Soon we were among a throng of neighbors pouring out of their homes, half us still clad in our flannel dressing gowns as we traipsed toward the forest’s edge. Woodside, people called our part of town— a moniker that had been unimaginative when there was a forest, depressing when that forest burned down, and insufficient now that a new kind of forest had magically risen in its place.

Magic , my dawn-addled brain tried to impress upon me, for my mild surprise at its appearance was insufficient as well.

Theories bubbled up from the crowd. “A miracle,” someone breathed. “Surely there’s a natural explanation,” said another. “I’m still dreaming,” from a man pinching his arm. “An elaborate illusion, wasn’t the Great Rufino on tour in these parts?” “A mass hallucination, we’re always breathing in noxious fumes from those chemistry experiments at the college.” “Old lady Pearl has cursed us, I always knew she was a witch.” “We’re all dreaming, have you not read Dr. Lambert’s treatise on the collective unconscious?”

Whatever the explanation, we could all concur on one thing: nothing about the forest, from its sudden appearance to the metallic-tinged timbre of its music, was normal. Only a bold few —Mom, Squeak, and myself included— dared to approach the man responsible for the inharmonious pitch that had drawn us there: Ethan Dunlop, the conservatory’s most talented yet cocksure composition student. He was standing beside one of the trees, a thick, twisted branch dangling from one hand, an equally twisted grin on his face.

“This is remarkable,” he called out, then swung the branch as if it was a cricket paddle. That same discordant F as before resounded, then a piercingly high E as he kicked a sapling, only the effect was worse this close, like an ice pick driven into each ear. A short, sudden gust riled the trees, and the forest's ostinato changed from major to minor. That's when I pinpointed its source. The song was created by leaves, branches, and whatever else brushed against the reedy pipes. But the notes Ethan had played—they didn’t belong. From the way Mom and Squeak cringed, I could tell they sensed it too.

“Why the frown, Clara?” Ethan said to me. “I thought you liked those cacophonous new atonal compositions?”

“You shouldn’t—”

But it didn’t matter what I thought, or what anyone thought, because Ethan had raised the branch again, and he only listened to whatever larks fluttered through his brain at any given moment. He struck a different tree this time, a low reverberant A, but it was just as wrong as the others. So wrong that both Mom and Squeak clutched my arm.

Directly beneath Ethan’s feet, at the base of the tree he’d just struck, a shimmering, silvery circle appeared. Ethan plummeted through it, as if the ground had suddenly become liquid. One moment he was there and yelping; the next he was gone and silent. The portal rippled, then vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving a dark muddy patch of moss and grass, but no trace of Ethan.

If I listen closely enough, I can hear Mom singing, faintly. That’s how I know I’m standing beside the tree where she disappeared.

I don’t need to play this one, I sign to Squeak. Quarter tone between A0 and A0?.

The decisive movement of Squeak’s hands doesn’t invite argument: We can’t take chances.

“Fine,” I mutter. I tap the mallet against the tree, as lightly as possible, yet still I wince when I hear the note. Quarter tone between A0 and A0?, I tell Squeak. Happy now?

Without response, she adds the pitch to the map. Meanwhile, I crouch to study the teeth marks near the bottom of the trunk. They don’t appear any deeper; perhaps the beavers have found a tastier morsel to gnash their teeth on.

“Let’s keep it that way,” I whisper. “I need this note, you furry little menaces.”

A black beetle skitters across the gnawed area, disappears into a thumb-sized portal, then emerges from a new portal further up the trunk. Music on a scale so small I can’t hear it. But it brings me hope: if a tiny little insect can play the right notes to open that second portal, surely a trained musician can. Surely Mom would have if it hadn’t been for the beavers.

Something starts thumping, too blunt and imprecisely rhythmic to be the forest. Squeak and I exchange worried glances; she clearly feels what I hear. We hurry toward the sound to investigate.

Just past the forest’s edge, we find Constable Winterbottom hammering a stake into the ground. Affixed to the stake is a sign: DANGER. KEEP OUT. FOREST TO BE RAZED BY ORDER OF THE KINGSFORD COUNCIL.

“You can’t burn it,” I say, storming up to him. “There are still people trapped in those portals!”

“Trapped. That’s one theory.” Winterbottom’s eyes, shadowed beneath the brim of his stovepipe hat, narrow into the beady-eyed stare he usually reserves for children stealing fruit from Farmer Pearson’s market stall. “You want to test that theory, you’ve got five days.”

“For the entire forest? But we have to finish mapping everything, and then—”

Winterbottom snorts. “There are already maps.”

“Not of the notes, though. Which tree is which pitch.”

“What the blazes does that matter?”

“Because...” How to explain to someone who takes pride in his tin ear, like anything you can’t threaten with jail isn’t worth hearing? “Because this forest is like a big leafy piano, and when people just bash the keys at random, it sounds terrible and bad things happen. But if you can play with the forest, like the birdsong, we can—”

“Birdsong.” Another snort. “A couple of tweets and you think you’re hearing opera.”

“Actually, Guillaume Marchand incorporated birdsong transcriptions into his opera about...”

But I trail off because Winterbottom’s slack-jawed, glassy-eyed stare tells me it’s useless. So does Squeak’s sigh, and she’s only getting my half of the conversation; Winterbottom’s never learned to sign. That he’s looked at Squeak at all is more than he usually bothers.

“Don’t you remember what happened to the loggers?” I ask, wishing I was tall enough to shake the beefy man by the collar of his greatcoat. “What do you think’s going to happen if someone takes a torch to those trees?”

“You’ll have to take your complaints to the council. They figure it took one fire for this forest to appear, another ought to get rid of it. They’ve got specialists on their way from the capital who know precisely how to handle this sort of thing. They’re due here Thursday.”

“That’s before the council meets again.”

“Indeed it is.” He gives the sign one final hit with his hammer, then heads off, calling back over his shoulder, “You girls best keep away before you get yourselves eaten by a shrub the way your mother did.”

“That’s not what happened,” I shout after him. “She’s alive, and we’re going to get her back.”

Yet his words are like a knife plunged into my chest and twisted round until a hot cascade of grief and anger pours out. And though I pretend I'm not hurt, it clearly shows because Squeak quickly signs, What did that gibface say to you?

“That gibface,” I respond, signing with motions as sharp as my tone, “is going to let the council get more people killed.”

Mom could play any instrument by ear, which is why the town council eventually approached her about what had become known as “the forest problem.” But first, they tried the usual solutions.

The local clergy employed every prayer and ritual they knew, but their rites failed to produce any divine revelations to help them understand the forest’s place in their respective theologies. One priest disappeared during an overnight vigil, leaving behind only a dented incense censer.

The scientists took their measurements and performed their tests, yet the data gave them more questions than answers. During their first week of research, the country’s foremost dendrologist lost her right hand when the portal she’d stuck it through suddenly closed.

Then the council sent for the loggers.

I was at the conservatory the morning they arrived, accompanying a soprano as she muscled her way through a difficult aria passage, as if she could make up for her lack of breath support through sheer force.

“Stop,” Professor Cooke cried, bringing the belabored song to a merciful pause.

While Cooke corrected his pupil’s technique, voices drew my gaze out his studio window. Six burly men clad in flannels and suspenders marched past, carrying saws and axes and leading a horse-drawn logging sleigh. A small crowd followed them, chattering and gesturing with excitement.

“A priest, a botanist, and a logger walk into a tavern,” I said under my breath, but Cooke heard it nonetheless.

“What now? Loggers?”

Just like that, the lesson was over and we were joining nearly half the town in following the loggers to the forest. Attempts to tame or explain the trees had become as popular as Maestro Fanucci’s salons, but any excitement I might have felt was tempered by a knot in my chest. Had they forgotten Ethan Dunlop already? The dendrologist with her missing hand? All the others who had vanished?

Mom hadn’t forgotten. When I spotted her, she looked like she was going to get tangled in her own legs trying to keep pace with the logging crew’s foreman, whose stride was twice her own. She warned him what would happen if they played too many wrong notes in succession, but he waved her off upon reaching the forest’s edge.

“We’ve no time for your folksy superstitions,” he said, as if Kingsford was an isolated little country village instead home to a renowned university. “A tree is a tree.”

He ordered two of his men forward, each holding either end of a crosscut saw. They set it against the bark-covered portion of a trunk. One cut was all it took for the bark to crumble away. With the next cut, the metal saw teeth scraped against the pitch pipe beneath. The sound was even worse than the notes Ethan Dunlop had played. Those had been merely discordant tones; this noise was so unnatural and soul-sickening that I turned away and retched.

I didn’t want to look when I heard the screams. I wanted to stay there with my hands on my knees, spitting away remnants of bile, but I knew I’d imagine worse and wake shrieking in the middle of the night if I didn’t look. So, I did. I watched as vines slithered across the forest floor and coiled around the loggers’ ankles, then up and up, coiling and squeezing. Legs, torso, arms, throat. The rest of the logging crew raced forward, axes in hand. They roared and they hacked, but the vines kept coming, and soon the rest of the loggers were screaming too.

Up, up, coil and squeeze, until all six men were dragged into a thicket of thorned leaves, blood seeping between the vines that bound them.

A priest, a botanist, and a logger walk into a tavern— I never had the stomach to come up with a punchline after that.

We end like we began: on a B-flat. B0? , to be precise, a low rumble that I feel in my chest. It’s a pleasant sensation that the forest’s inhabitants seem to savor as well. Even the squirrels pause to listen.

It’s taken three days, but at last Squeak and I have a map— every tree and its corresponding pitch laid out in charcoal on paper. That gives us two more days until the forest burners are due to arrive.

The next step is composing, which should take me only a few hours. Mom could play the forest by ear, intuiting a path from one tree to the next, but that’s not the kind of musician I am, especially when learning a new instrument. I need sheet music. I’m like my father in that, as much as I wish I had nothing in common with him. Because unlike Mom, he left on purpose.

At home, I sit by an open window, the map and a blank page of manuscript paper on the writing desk in front of me. Then I listen— to the forest, to the rustle of the leaves, to the brush of the branches. Like the birds, I try to weave melodies through the pattern. When I land on a tune I can hum without my gut twisting in protest, I write it down. Or I try, rather. The trees don’t adhere to the musical notation standards I grew up with. There are quarter tones.

On the map, Squeak has indicated them with a simple slash method, like C4/C4# to note a pitch lurking above middle C that isn’t quite a C-sharp. But when it comes to writing such notes on staves, musical scholars haven’t agreed on a method. I try several options— a backwards flat symbol, the sharp symbol with a vertical line added or removed, up or down arrows appended to the flat or sharp. Each one is so close to familiar that, instead of offering clarity, the page becomes a blur of symbols that are almost, but not quite, what they should be.

Eventually I give up and write the note names above the notes themselves, the way children do when they’re learning to read music. It feels so remedial that my faces flushes at the thought of someone from the conservatory seeing it, but professional pride would be a ridiculous reason to risk playing the wrong tree. That’s the kind of thing my father would do.

Mom has her pride too, but she doesn’t let it get in the way of using her brain. Though too much thinking, she would remind me, can be just as bad as none. Sometimes the universe has other ideas and drags you off the prescribed path. Sometimes you have to improvise, and that’s something I’ve never been good at, in life or in music.

You might have to, Squeak says when I air my worries. To get Mom back.

The possibility terrifies me enough that, when I take a walk to clear my head, I imagine what it would be like to keep going. To leave Kingsford like my father did. Unlike him, I don’t have a prestigious orchestra position waiting for me. I don’t have a letter of reference to open doors at whatever schools, courts, or churches might have use for a pianist. That should be terrifying too, but instead it makes leaving more tempting. No expectations. No one to let down.

But I wouldn’t have my sister, and that’s what turns me around. One mistake performing my composition tomorrow and Squeak might lose me anyway, but at least she’ll know what happened. At least she’ll have no need of the “why” we were never able to ask our father.

Just as I start toward home, the neigh of a horse and a rumble of wheels sounds somewhere behind me. As the clatter draws closer, I step to the side of the road, and soon a wagon passes on its way into town, the side emblazoned with fiery orange letters: Gilbert & Sons Fire Management Experts.

Dismay descends on me like large, heavy hands gripping my shoulders, trying to force me to sit. The men who will raze the forest, here earlier than expected. And if they succeed...

We can’t wait until tomorrow. We have to play the forest tonight.

“You’re asking ‘why,’” Mom said, “when the right question is ‘why not?’”

That was her response when Squeak and I found out she was going to play the forest.

After religion, science, and brute force had failed to address the forest problem in a way that satisfied the council, they turned to music. The trees were musical, after all, so perhaps someone from the conservatory would be better suited to working out their mysteries.

“Working out their mysteries” was the council’s phrase, but everyone knew they weren’t interested in understanding the “why” of the forest. What they meant was: “Fix the problem. Make the forest safe or figure out how to get rid of it.”

It never occurred to them to just leave the forest alone, and Mom was too curious about what she called “a living instrument” to pass up the opportunity. But that didn’t stop me from trying to dissuade her.

“‘Why not?’” I said, following her through the conservatory’s percussion room, where she was testing out different mallets for her endeavor. “I’d say the chance of getting strangled by a vine or sucked into a tree portal is a pretty big ‘why not.’”

“Those people weren’t considering the full picture.” Mom struck a felt mallet against a wooden block. “Not right,” she muttered, exchanging the felt mallet for a rubber one. “I’ve watched, and I’ve analyzed, and I’ve consulted with everyone who’s spent time in the forest —well, the ones who are still here— and the problem is this: some of them tried to understand it through faith, some treated it like a thing that could be quantified, and some thought strength was all they needed to control it.” She shuddered; there was no one in town who didn’t when recalling the loggers. “But the forest isn’t just one thing, girls. It’s all of those things: heart and mind and body. It’s music.”

Squeak had been lingering in the doorway, but that prompted her to storm over to Mom and sign, Don’t be like Dad. Don’t pick music over us.

Mom’s face contorted in a way that made it look as if she might cry or yell or both. Instead, she set her mallet aside, brushed a hand over Squeak’s cheek, and signed, I’m not going anywhere I can’t come back from.

I carried those words with me when Squeak and I accompanied Mom to the forest the next day. I set them to a melody and hummed it as we secured her tether— a length of rope, one end tied around her waist, the rest secured to a large crank the scientists had loaned her.

When Mom was ready, Squeak and I stationed ourselves beside the crank, prepared to unspool more rope as needed. The scientists never let out much slack, working as they did beside a specific tree at any given time, but Mom needed freedom to move, to play as the music took her.

She closed her eyes, a mallet in each hand, and listened to that ever-present ostinato. I listened too, noting the subtle shift in tempo whenever the breeze came or went, but my heart thudded dreadfully out of sync.

After a long enough hesitation that I thought Mom might have changed her mind, she opened her eyes and struck a tree. A B-flat, of course. I grasped Squeak’s hand, as sweaty as my own. Mom struck another tree, then another, a long pause between each pitch, and a cock of her head after each mallet strike, seeming to listen for a clue that would guide her to the next note.

A rustle through the brush, and I imagined an angry vine snaking its way toward her. A rustle among the leaves, and I imagined a branch reaching down to claw at her. But the reality was always a squirrel, a rabbit, or some other forest creature, all players in this bizarre orchestra.

Mom took to the trees as easily as any instrument. More easily, seeing as she had never played anything even remotely resembling a forest. She had also never been graceful on her feet, yet in that moment she practically glided from tree to tree, picking up the tempo until portals began to open. But unlike so many prior human attempts, these portals did not appear unexpectedly underfoot. These seemed...purposeful. Always close enough and large enough for Mom to step through if she chose, but not so close to endanger her.

I stepped away from the crank and tossed a small pebble into one of the portals. The portal closed, and seconds later, the pebble pelted me in the back of the leg, having emerged from a new portal behind me.

Mom started laughing as she played. That was when I began to hope instead of fear. That was when I listened to the song unfolding and wondered how I had ever doubted her.

That was when I noticed the marks in the tree Mom was heading toward next. Around the bottom of the trunk, the bark had been stripped away. The pitch pipe beneath was scored with deep gashes, giving it an hourglass-like shape. Beside it, a smaller tree had been toppled, a neatly gnawed, tapered point at each broken end. Beavers.

I shouted a warning, but Mom’s mallet had already struck the tree. A note between A0 and A0#. Almost right, but not quite, like that alto in the choir whose voice always sneaks in just beneath the pitch.

Squeak turned the crank’s handle, but the tether snagged on a holly bush. I ran for Mom, somehow avoiding the forest floor tangles that should have tripped me, as if the forest’s ostinato was guiding my feet. And ridiculously, amid the tight-chested, hot-skinned panic of seeing my mother in danger, there was also music: the pitch Mom had just played, and the pitch of that rusty old crank as Squeak furiously worked the handle, all of it blending with the percussive pounding of my feet.

A horribly beautiful song, and then a grand pause. A shimmering portal opened, and Mom fell into it. I grabbed her tether and yanked, but the portal snapped shut. All at once, her weight vanished. I stumbled backwards, holding nothing but frayed rope.

As she’s been in all things, Squeak is my anchor.

The tether I’ve tied around my waist is short, only a few feet of rope, and the other end is in Squeak’s hands. The plan is for her to follow me as I play the trees, keeping the amount of slack short to minimize any surprise snags. Squeak might not be as strong as the crank, but she is strong, and though I’m the older sister, I’m a twig in comparison.

Squeak has also strapped on a makeshift shoulder harness. A pole protrudes from the back, and from that pole hangs a lantern so I can see the map. The contraption makes Squeak look like an eerie, luminescent insect, something that should be chittering along with the owl hoots, fox screams, and other sounds of the darkened forest.

Try not to trip , I remind her. Break that lantern and we’ll end up doing the forest burners’ job for them.

Unlike Mom wielding a mallet in each hand, I have only one. I need the other hand for the map, now with music affixed to the top— several variations on a theme so I can adapt to the ostinato as it changes. Glancing between the map and the music might not allow for the most fluid performance, but I’m more concerned with accuracy lest I open an unexpected portal. This might be our last chance to get Mom back, and so I can’t take chances.

I’m used to being the accompanist, I tell Squeak. But you’re sort of mine this time.

I smile, hoping it’ll ease her worries, but she gives me that grumpy mushroom face of hers and signs, If you fall through a portal and I lose hold, I’m jumping in after you.

I might not have succeeded at easing her anxiety, but her response eases mine. Ever since vowing to get Mom back, I’ve been waiting for Squeak to level the same accusation at me that she leveled at our parents: don’t pick music over me . She never has, though, and now it finally occurs to me why. Because it isn’t a solo this time. It’s a duet.

I take a deep breath, and my chest is so tight that I have to force the air back out. I double check the knot on my tether, nod at Squeak, and we begin our piece.

The first note, of course, is B-flat.

From there, one note dutifully follows the other, in time with the forest’s 4/4 ostinato, yet at no faster a pace than allows me to tromp from tree to tree. Only whole notes in this piece, cautiously sustained. Every step sends unseen forest creatures scurrying out of my path, through tiny portals that blink in and out of existence.

For me, though, not a single portal opens.

I keep playing, double checking each note and tree before I strike. My sweat-grimed fingers leave smudges on the manuscript; the mallet threatens to slip from my increasingly slick grasp. Every note is right and in tune, so why, damn it? Why isn’t it working? A squirrel can do this, why can’t I?

I swing my mallet, so frustrated that I don’t realize I’m about to strike that tree, the one where Mom disappeared. Not until I hear that awful quarter tone, the sound thinner than I remember.

No portals open, yet Squeak yanks hard on the tether. I stagger backwards, fiery pain where the rope digs into my gut. The tree falls to the ground with a whomp . Unseen creatures skitter off in a panic.

The damn beavers. They’ve gnawed on the tree more, weakening it, and now I’ve finished the job for them. The mallet slips from my grasp, then the map, then my hope. But the thud and swish of their respective descents has music to it, notes both high and low, and hope returns with a jolt. The note isn’t entirely gone. I just need a different octave.

I reach for the map —there’s a matching pitch in a higher octave, I’m sure of it— but something chitters at my feet and snatches the paper away. A raccoon. I try to grab the map back, forgetting I’m still tethered to Squeak. Together we’re too slow, overburdened by her lantern harness. The racoon scrambles up a tree and escapes through a portal.

I curse and untie the tether from my waist, ready to climb the tree myself, but Squeak stops me with a touch to my arm.

It’s gone, she says. The portals weren’t opening for you anyway.

“But...” My objection deflates along with my determination. Squeak is right. I haven’t angered the forest, but I haven’t pleased it either. All the right notes, yet I’ve received nothing more than the woodland equivalent of polite, obligatory applause.

You’re favoring precision at the cost of expression— that’s what Mom would tell me. Good is more fun.

Let's go home, Squeak says. Her sadness shows in the heavy, slow movement of her hands. She looks like a child again, the little sister I would protect from the awful neighbor children who would giggle and throw stones when her back was turned and she couldn’t hear them. The little sister who, upon being struck, would spin round and hurl a stone back at them if I wasn't there.

I recover my mallet from the forest floor. While Squeak gathers up the tether’s excess rope, I stand by the fallen tree where Mom disappeared. I can hear her singing, faint and faraway, yet it’s all the things a good performance should be: as expressive and thoughtful as it is technically skilled.

The forest isn't just one thing, girls. It's all of those things: heart and mind and body. It's music.

That’s when it hits me. I need to do more than play the perfect sequence of notes. I need to make music .

Squeak starts to lead the way home, but I don’t follow. Eventually she'll notice, but in the meantime, I listen to the forest's ostinato. I imagine I'm on stage, accompanying Mom and the forest on a piece I've practiced so many times that I don't just play it. I feel it.

One mallet strike against a tree, and Squeak is running back toward me, lantern light bobbing in the darkness. The melody I play isn’t quite what I wrote. I go partly by memory, partly by panicked instinct, finding the right notes by following the rustle of the leaves overhead and the crunch of the growth underfoot. A musical game of chase. Now the portals open, lighting up the forest and tinkling like chimes— another layer to the symphony. I glide from tree to tree, becoming so lost in the music that I gasp when I realize I've played the note I need, two octaves higher than when Mom disappeared.

The portal opens, and Squeak grabs my arm.

She's going to stop me. The word "no" is almost to my lips, we have so little time before it closes. But Squeak doesn’t pull me away. She just holds on. My anchor.

I lean forward into the portal. The air becomes heavy like a blanket, so warm and enveloping that I want to sink into it, but Squeak holds tight from the other side, her fingers digging into my left arm with bruising force. The forest is almost the same on this side. Almost. The same trees, but shrouded in haze. The same patches of star-strewn sky, only gray like one of Squeak’s charcoal sketches. Above, the fuzzy blur of an owl darts in and out of view. The ostinato is here too, but muted, as if I’m hearing it while underwater.

Mom, though, is nowhere to be seen.

Something sharp hitches in my throat. Grief, I think. But no, the ache is external too. The portal is squeezing, thickening, and I can’t move. I force a sound, a gargle-like whimper. This is how I’m going to die. My head cut off by a magical, musical portal.

A yank on my arm, and I stagger backwards into Squeak, the sky above moonlit black instead of charcoal. I start to laugh in relief, but then the portal closes with a gentle chime.

Mom is gone.