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Even when we were kids, I knew that Johnny was different. He'd always found comfort in places that most deemed lonely, disappearing for hours without a word, and I would feel him go quiet. That stillness would settle right between my ribs, and when I couldn't stand it anymore, I'd go and find him lying on the hot roof of our cabin or tangled high in the branches of a sixty-foot tree. He'd been pulling away from the world for as long as I could remember, but when the photographs of the owls started popping up on his feed, I remember the cold sensation that filled me. He was drawn to them—the secretive creatures that only came out in the darkness. And deep down I knew that it was because he was one of them.

If you'd have told me when we were kids that Johnny would end up a photographer, I probably would have thought it was both surprising and not at all. Growing up, I was the artist. My hands itched for pencils and paintbrushes the way Johnny's mind itched for the quiet. In the end, both Johnny and I wound up trying to capture moments and people and places. Me with my canvas, him with his camera. But eventually, the drawings that filled my notebooks felt like the blueprints of a prison—a way for me to plan my escape. And eventually, I did.

Johnny had spent the last two years working remotely for a conservation project documenting five different owls in and around Six Rivers National Forest. The opportunity had seemed so serendipitous that I should have known there was something wrong with it. Johnny had never been lucky. Stars didn't align for him and opportunities didn't just drop into his lap. So, when I heard that Quinn Fraser, director of biology at California Academy of Sciences, was looking for someone to cover the Six Rivers area, it should have felt off. But only two weeks after I'd sent Johnny's work to Quinn, Johnny was hired.

I hadn't been able to shake the feeling that in a way, that made all of this my fault. The project was the first job Johnny ever had that wasn't logging, and at the time I'd thought that maybe, finally, it would be the thing that got him out of Six Rivers. But only weeks away from the study's end, Johnny was out on a shoot in Trentham Gorge when a rogue bullet from a hunter's gun slammed into his chest.

My fingers slipped from the steering wheel, instinctively finding the place two and a half inches below my collarbone, where I could still feel it. I rubbed at the phantom ache, pressing the heel of my hand there until the throb began to recede.

The image unfurled, replacing the view of the forest outside the windshield. In my mind's eye, tree limbs bent and swayed, creating blurred shapes of light that punched through the forest canopy high above—a flashing glimpse of the last thing Johnny had seen as he lay there on the forest floor. The rendering had been cast across my mind on a loop, making the connection between me and my brother more than just a sense or a feeling. Now, it was something that felt tangible and tactile. Now, it was too real.

Accidental firearm deaths weren't unheard of in the wilderness that surrounded Six Rivers, especially during the elk season that brought hunters from all over the country to town. I could remember more than one that happened when me and Johnny were kids. But I also knew that accidents didn't happen in that forest. Not really. There was almost nothing that was random or by chance because the place was alive—intentional.

It was that feeling that had compelled me to pack my bag and drive to Six Rivers. It had rooted down into my gut, twisting so tightly that it made it almost impossible to breathe. Because the link between me and Johnny wasn't just intuition or some cosmic connection. I'd felt the white-hot heat of that bullet pierce between my ribs. I'd seen the forest canopy swaying in the wind. I'd also felt that bone-deep sense that had been coursing through Johnny's veins. That despite what the investigation had uncovered about what Johnny was doing out in the gorge that day, he wasn't alone. More than that, he was afraid.

I returned my hand to the steering wheel, watching the blur of emerald green fly past the window. I'd grown up feeling like the trees had eyes, each tangle of roots like a brain that held memories. I could feel, even now, that they remembered me.

I read once, years after I left, that they could actually speak to one another. That they had the ability to communicate through the network of fungi in the ground over miles and miles of forest. And I believed it. They knew what happened the day my brother died. They'd watched as he grew cold, his blood soaking the earth. And that wasn't all they knew.

I forced my gaze back to the road and let my foot come down on the brake as the sign appeared in the distance.

SIX RIVERS, CALIFORNIA

4.5 MILES