Nellie pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and lays it out next to Eli’s. “Wait,” she says suddenly. “Turn yours around.”

Eli rotates his paper. The quarter-loop he’d thought might be the treehouse sits right next to another quarter-loop on Nellie’s map. Nellie moves them just under the new paper, where they match a half-loop at the center of the page. “Look. Together, it makes a circle. This is the whole map.”

Before their eyes, the papers — finally joined — seem to glow, and the lines between them disappear. The paper becomes a whole, giant map.

But that’s impossible. Eli turns to Nellie, his mouth gaping open. “Did you just see…?”

Nellie nods, her green eyes wide in delight. “Look,” she says again. “The circle at the middle… I thought it might be the treehouse, but it’s not. The treehouse must be this symbol, up here.”

Eli examines it. The symbol near the upper half of the map looks just like the treehouse, as Eli remembers it. But then what is the dark circle at the center of the page? It’s just beside the brook, behind a large tree —

Wait. He knows that tree, and that part of the brook! “It’s here. That’s this cave!” Eli studies the map for another minute. “But if that’s the cave, that means that the treehouse is just around this bend!” He drags his finger along the brook to the picture of the treehouse. “We’re so close to it!”

Nellie stands up. “We have to go there right now,” she decides. “I don’t care if it’s raining or dark. We’re not missing another chance.” She darts ahead, back in the direction where she’d come, and Eli and Squizzle hurry after her.

Eli flips the magnifying glass around. Now, instead of a laser, it lights up the whole narrow cave where they’re walking. He can see the way that the cave slopes upward, leading them back to the woods, and the way that Nellie’s hair bounces in its ponytail as she bounds toward the surface.

When they emerge from the cave, it’s still dark, but the rain has slowed to a drizzle. Nellie takes the flashlight and points it at the map while Eli studies it again. “This way,” he says, pointing toward the right. “We should walk until we reach those three trees that are right up against each other.”

Squizzle leads the way, Nellie just behind him. They both race through the forest, climbing over trees and dancing around bushes. Eli holds the map in his hand, watching their route to make sure that they don’t make a wrong turn. “Turn left now,” he says. “Just a little. The brook winds around over here, so we should reach it again right at the…”

He steps through the next cluster of trees and gasps. “treehouse,” he says, his heart racing.

And there it is.

The treehouse towers over them, camouflaged by the other trees that frame it, serving as its base. It’s as incredible as Eli remembers it. “There are the steps,” Nellie says, spotting them first, and she climbs up right away. Eli follows behind her. He wants to take his time and take everything in.

The first room looks like the perfect spot to sit out the rest of the rain, with its squishy cushions and cozy loft above. But Eli isn’t ready to stop now. There are so many rooms in the treehouse, so many places to explore.

The rain trickles down against the sides of the treehouse, but even though it looks old and broken in spots, the treehouse manages to keep out the water. Eli climbs up through the treehouse into a room that has maps and strange diagrams across the walls. “Do you think we need to solve something here?” he wonders.

Nellie is somewhere below him. “Look, Eli!” she calls back. “Look what I can do!” She is down in a room with vines, swinging and climbing her way into its dark bottom. “I wonder if this would take me underground if I go deep enough.”

Eli calls down to her. “Just make sure that you have a way back up,” he says, remembering the pit from earlier in the night.

“Please.” Nellie, quick and agile, hops down and climbs up through the treehouse, landing right next to Eli.

There’s a chittering sound nearby, and Eli turns, distracted. “What’s Squizzle up to?” He listens again and follows the sound of the squirrel to the room full of globes. Each one is lit up with a dim light, and Eli detaches the one from his flashlight and squints around, searching for a string without a globe. When he finds one, he holds the globe up to the string, and the string seems to absorb it, reattaching the globe without Eli tying or gluing it. “Wow,” he breathes.

“Eli, look,” Nellie says. “What’s your squirrel doing now?”

Squizzle has gotten tangled on one of the globes. He swings back and forth on it, rocking on the glass, and Eli and Nellie hurry to help him. “Careful, Squizzle!” Eli says, tugging him off of the globe. Inside the glass, he can see what looks like a snowstorm, ice and water and wind everywhere. It races around the edges of the globe, and Eli can almost feel the cold of it against his fingers. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to knock it loose and—”

Before he can break Squizzle free, the squirrel’s clawed foot nicks the edge of the string that holds the globe up. It tears, and the globe drops to the floor, too quickly for anyone to catch it.

It hits the wooden floor and shatters.

And then, abruptly, the wind is howling around Eli and Nellie and Squizzle. It whips around, fiercer and colder than anything they’d experienced during the hurricane.

Eli is thrown backward in a wave of rushing white and gleaming dust, and he sees Nellie opposite him — sees Squizzle, whirling in circles — and he lands on soft, white ground, without a tree or treehouse in sight.

“What?” he says aloud, twisting his head around to see where he is. He doesn’t recognize any of it — the vast and empty land, the cool blue skies that stretch on forever overhead, the thick layer of snow that lies underneath him. “What?” he says again.

What?

(Originally featured in Treeo, Issue 993)