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Tempest stared at the radio.

Fortune opened one eye and stared pointedly at Tempest.

“No,” Tempest said.

Fortune lowered her chin, doubling down and continuing to stare at Tempest.

“I mean it. I wouldn’t even know how to get to this place. And even if I could, I wouldn’t know what to say when I got there. You know how I am with public speaking, Fortune! I’d get up in front of a room full of people and I’d get so flustered I’d forget my own name.”

“Fortune favors the bold!” Fortune squawked.

“I’m serious, Fortune. I’m not built like that. Knowing the answers to trivia questions in my head, when I’m home alone, is not the same thing as knowing things in front of a crowd of strangers. I’d freeze up. I always freeze up. You know that.” She looked at the parrot. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Fortune kept looking at her like that.

“I mean it!” Tempest argued. “The answer is no.”

Suddenly the atlas fell off its stand.

It landed with a clean, gentle thump onto the rag rug she’d placed between the two front seats. The book was lying open on the floor. Tempest was almost too scared to look, for fear it was damaged, but she bent to retrieve it. And then she did a double take.

The first page was no longer blank.

It had been filled in with a map. Hand-drawn in ink that was neither black nor quite blue. The map had been illustrated as well. She didn’t need a legend to recognize the curve of the river she’d parked next to last night. There was a small mark that she supposed was the current location of the bus. From that mark, a route extended eastward, following the same road she was looking at through the windshield. There were small symbols along the way. A viewpoint marked with a tiny eye. A rest stop with churros. A field of wildflowers and a pretty tree that was due to bloom. And at the end of the route, which appeared to be somewhere in Boise, was a building that looked like a tiny tavern. There was a small cluster of three silhouetted figures and a motorcycle beside it.

Tempest stared at the page in disbelief. She stared at it for a long time.

Then she looked at Fortune.

“Fortune… Did you do this?”

Fortune shook her head, slowly and deliberately, side to side.

Tempest lifted the atlas and held it to her chest. Her hands were still bare, and she was bracing for whatever would come. She was almost looking forward to it. This had been her mother’s book.

Someday you’ll see.

Now that something had finally appeared on the page, she ought to be able to sense something. But she couldn’t feel anything.

She turned the book over and cracked open the cover, half afraid she’d find the page blank again. But the writing was still there. It even looked a little darker, bolder than it had before. Tempest placed her hand down on top of the hand drawn and illustrated map.

Finally, something came. Not a flood or a landslide, for once. There were no stray thoughts, or loose words. What she felt was more like standing in a patch of sunlight after a long time shivering in the shade. She smelled a scent too. Dried flowers and honey. She tasted sweet tea. She felt a gentle breeze rifle her hair.

She was immersed in these sensations for a moment and then they were gone, and she was back to sitting on the vinyl seat of the bus, staring at a ragged parrot and a lonely stretch of highway. She turned the atlas over in her hands and braced for more, for the usual onslaught of random facts, figures, flotsam and jetsam that washed over her when she touched a book. But nothing came. The atlas remained quiet, watery waves silently lapping against the corners of the cover.

She flipped through all the other pages, checking them out one by one to be sure there was nothing else there that she might have missed. Blank. Blank. Blank. The rest was still as empty as it had always been. Only the first page had changed to a map of sorts.

She went back to the beginning and ran a finger lightly over the inscription again. For my daughter Tempest. You’ll see.

“You’ll see?” Tempest asked aloud. She tapped her locket as if it might have something to add, some way of further explaining the message. But the locket just hung there, oddly cool against her warm skin.

“You’ll see!” Fortune echoed, but not mimicking Tempest. Her mother’s voice was so strange coming from the parrot.

Tempest closed the atlas and set it back on its stand. She dropped down and sat on the floor of the bus like a child, with her back against the front console and her knees pulled up tight against her chest. She looked up at Fortune who was preening herself on the headrest of the passenger seat. Fortune stopped what she was doing to stare her down with the single wide-open eye again.

“I’m just so afraid of getting it wrong,” Tempest admitted. “And not just with the trivia. With all the people. All the ‘what brings you to town’ and ‘where are you from?’ I know how to talk to people about books. I don’t know how to be in front of people when I’m not selling anything.”

Fortune hopped over to the bookshelf behind the seat. Then she hopped down and walked the full length of the bookshelves closest to the floor, taping at the spines with her beak, as if she were searching for something. Finally, she stopped in front of a specific book.