Nellie shuts the door firmly behind her and steps out into the night. For a moment, she thinks about going back in, just to get a sweatshirt, but she shakes off the idea. She can’t turn back now! Even if it is just a few extra seconds—

Fine. She runs back in, grabs her sweatshirt, and runs back out again.

Eli might be the expert at mapping out routes through the woods, at finding landmarks and noticing all the things that Nellie misses, but Nellie is a pro when it comes to maneuvering through the trees. Even the slippery rain doesn’t slow her down. She climbs through the trees with expert ease, using the leafy cover around her to dodge the worst of the rain. Beside her, Squizzle moves even faster, his nonstop chitter as loud as the wind in Nellie’s ears.

She runs through a clearing and Squizzle hurries to catch up. “Do you know where he is?” Nellie asks him. Squizzle makes a noise that might be a yes and might be a I’m a squirrel, I don’t know anything, then races toward a few tightly tangled trees ahead. “You look like a rat when you’re all wet,” Nellie calls after him, and Squizzle scampers up a tree and knocks over a wet bunch of leaves onto Nellie’s head.

Nellie glowers at him and knocks it to the ground. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re annoying?” Some of the leaves have gotten stuck in her ponytail, and she yanks them out and throws them to the floor. “We’re in a crisis, you could at least— wait.”

On the ground, just under her clump of leaves, is the strange little magnifying glass from the treehouse she’d given to Eli earlier, before they’d fought. “Eli was here,” she says slowly.

She raises her voice. “ELI!” But she can’t hear anything over the rain and the wind.

She tucks the magnifying glass into her sweatshirt and finds other things in her pocket. That vine from the leaf pile is still there, and so is her map. Not that any of it was helpful.

She has to stay focused. Eli is still somewhere out here. And if Nellie doesn’t find him, then they’ll both be lost and alone. Being stuck in the woods during a hurricane is a terrifying thought, but it sounds a lot more like an adventure if she’s stuck with Eli.

She climbs up a tree, looking out at the woods beneath her. “Any ideas?” she asks Squizzle. Which is crazy, because she’s asking a squirrel for advice, but Squizzle really does seem to understand her. He lets out a sharp little sound and then bounds off, higher into the trees.

Nellie follows him. This is higher than she should be, where the branches get thinner and there’s a good chance that one might snap off in her grasp. But it’ll give her a good view of the woods — at least it would if it weren’t nighttime and pouring and impossible to see. “This is really unhelpful, little squirrel,” she says, and Squizzle yanks on her sweatshirt with his teeth in response. “Tell me you know where Eli is.”

Squizzle just jumps to the next tree. Nellie ducks a surge of rain and jumps after him.

When she drops to the ground, it’s in front of a huge tree. Below it, the ground looks recently stepped on — there are footprints in the mud — and Nellie is suddenly sure they’re Eli’s. “Eli! Eli, can you hear me?” No answer.

Squizzle chitters to her impatiently, and Nellie rolls her eyes at him and says, “You know, I think I can find Eli on my own. He’s my twin.” She imagines an invisible thread tying them together, linking them even when Eli feels far away. Where would Eli go after this tree? She turns in a circle and then picks a direction, and she’s sure that this is where Eli went — straight ahead, hoping to get out of the woods one way or another.

She walks ahead, ignoring Squizzle’s high-pitched bark of dismay, and she lets out a delighted sound when she sees the big rocks beside the brook. “Oh, he was definitely here,” she decides. “He would have followed the brook. Or crossed it.” She steps across the brook, nimble even in the rain, and makes her way to the other side.

There’s an opening, she notices suddenly, just beyond the brook. The ground slopes downward and widens into a rocky little hole in the ground, almost like the entrance to a cave. “No way Eli would resist a cave,” Nellie mutters to herself, and she slides down into the hole, finding herself underground.

It’s dark down here, much darker than it is outside in the storm, and Nellie looks around. She walks slowly, wary of snakes or spiders crawling around in the blackness. The cave is rocky and cool, and it’s also dry. The storm outside sounds far away, like a distant pitter-patter on a roof.

“Great,” she mumbles, walking gingerly. It’s a narrow cave — she can’t even extend her arms out all the way — but it seems to go on forever. She shudders when she thinks about what must be lurking in the dark.

When she finally feels the final wall of the cave — a bunch of rocks packed in so tightly that there’s no way through them — she sighs in defeat. She’d been so sure Eli had been down here. But she’s walked through the entire cave, and there’s been no sign anyone has ever been here before, let alone her brother.

She turns away in disappointment just as something light and fuzzy brushes past her leg. “Augh!” she shrieks, sure that she’s about to be bitten by a giant centipede. The creature lets out an irritable noise, and Nellie abruptly remembers her companion. “Squizzle,” she sighs, irritated. That squirrel is always in the way. “Don’t you ever just stop?”

Squizzle gives a chitter that sounds reproachful. Nellie glares at a black spot that she hopes is him.

And then she hears a muffled voice call from the other side of the rocks. “Nellie? Nellie, is that you?”

(Originally featured in Treoo, Issue 991)