A Snake Falls to Earth

Oli has acquired a map of lakes and rivers flowing out of the bottomless lake. He plans to visit the dammed city and start his search for his siblings there. Before Oli can put his plans into action, Ami begins to show signs of feeling unwell. Before Oli can figure out why he’s sick, Ami collapses and falls unconscious.

Paul reappears, threatening a variety of legal complaints that would result in either fines or the seizure of Grandma’s land by the municipal government. Nina’s grandmother is too poor to finish renovating the property’s wall or making all the other changes Paul insists on.

Nina learns that compasses act erratically in “crossing zones”—places like Grandma’s land, where the two worlds meet. She now realizes that this is why Paul was struggling with his compass when she met him—not, as he’d claimed, because there were iron deposits on the land. She suspects he’s a hunter looking for spirits, or else that he wants her grandmother’s land to sell the well of fresh water to a soft drink company.

Oli rushes through the forest with the unconscious Ami to the coyote valley for a healer. Brightest directs Oli through the forest. Risk and Reign meet Oli as he enters the village and, together with Brightest, accompany Oli to the healer. However, the village healer cannot heal Ami entirely. She explains that Ami’s species on Earth is going extinct.

For her vlog, Nina tells the story of a coyote girl trapping the world’s most beautiful song in a locket. There was a coyote woman, named Musical for her captivating singing, who was her pack’s unofficial leader. Musical’s eldest daughter was named Fearless and when she came of age and married, she joined her bride’s pack. However, Fearless began to miss her mother’s songs, so her bride gave her a locket so that Musical could trap a song using world-shaping.

Fearless returned to her pack briefly to have Musical trap a song in the locket for her. Opening the locket would allow her to hear Musical’s song, but the song would be lost forever after one use. The next winter, an owl delivers terrible news: Fearless’s mother has been slain by a mechanical monster. Fearless vows to become a monster hunter and track down the one that killed her mother.

Fearless never opens her locket but carries it with her throughout all her travels. Nina cries as she finishes telling the story.

Oli visits Ami in the hospital, where a healer warns Oli that Ami’s illness suggests his corresponding species on Earth is “irreversibly damaged.” Although Ami is unconscious, Oli promises to do whatever he can to help him get better.

Discussing this with Risk and Reign, Oli decides that they need to go to Earth. Risk suggests seeking help from the wolves who go to Nina’s family’s bookstore. They live in a series of complex underground tunnels and spend most of their time transcribing books from Earth before the books disintegrate. The only passage to Earth that Oli knows of is the pseudosun, but flying that high is difficult and dangerous. However, while visiting the wolves, the group encounters Zale, whose father goes back and forth from Earth frequently and who promises to tell them about a “secret route.”

Nina texts her mother about her efforts to decipher Rosita’s historia using Lipan and Jicarilla dictionaries. Nina reflects on the last school play she performed in, which neither her grandmother nor mother could attend. Her grandmother, sensing Nina’s disappointment, explained that she could no longer leave her homeland: Moving any sizeable distance away from her house made her feel incredibly weak and unwell. Nina forgave her grandmother but resents her mother, who was working halfway across the planet. She hopes that translating Rosita’s story will hold the key to curing her grandmother’s mysterious illness.

Oli’s group plans to travel to the fourth peak by way of Zale’s family truck. The trip takes a day, and Oli dreads every second that passes due to Ami’s condition. Brightest leaves briefly to ask the family of bear bounty hunters and investigators for help on their mission, as the bears supposedly know people on Earth and can help secure “human allies.”

Oli and the group discuss the Nightmare, sometimes called the King instead. The Nightmare is the last “originator”—the oldest of all spirits—human spirit left on Earth. Some human spirits decided to go to war to assert their supremacy over other human spirits and animal people, likely causing the separation of the two worlds and leaving only one human spirit to rule Earth.

After a year of translation, Nina learns that there was a spirit from the Reflecting World who visited Earth frequently and had children with a human woman. That spirit and their son were killed by the King and his knights, leaving the human woman alone with a daughter to raise by herself. That surviving child was Rosita.

As Nina cracks the code, hurricane season brings a deadly storm toward her family; it is projected to hit in three days. Her father leaves to help secure Grandma’s house against the storm.