Oliver Blackwell is twelve, plus-sized, brilliant, and Jamestown S'Klallam from the Salish Sea. He bikes through storms for friends who are avoiding him. He solves college-level calculus for fun. He held a rope with a burned arm in the dark at the bottom of a crevice and said I've got you. I am not letting go. He didn't let go. In a universe governed by real physics, Ollie turns out to matter more than anyone expected.

Abigail Winterhausen is twelve, tall, confident, and already knows what you're going to say. She walked into Ari's kitchen like she owned it and said we're here to rescue you from yourself. She was not wrong. She moved through four days in the Veil on a broken ankle in near darkness, reading the ground by touch. When Ari stepped through the gate she said two words. Come back. Just that. Because that is what she does. That is what she has always done.

His name is bigger than he is. Ari is twelve, lives alone in a house called Obsidian on the Salish Sea, and hasn't celebrated anything since his parents died two years ago. His father left him a book written in a language taught to him as a child — presented as a game between them. It wasn't a game. When Ari read it aloud, everything in the darkness that had been searching for three thousand years turned and looked directly at him. He just missed his dad. And the universe ans