Finn was on the porch, holding a grey plastic case. He smiled when Sarah opened the door, and said, "Hi! Ready?"

"Yeah, I think so, come on in," she said. She led the way through the living room and kitchen, past where the vacuum cleaner was leaving even lines in the carpet, and into the garage. She clicked on the lights and pointed at her little table.

"Over there, Finn," she said. "I'll be right there, there's a couple of things up in my room to grab."

Sarah hadn't ever taken the bag of teeth to her workspace. After prom, she'd just dumped it into a desk drawer and more or less forgotten about them. She fished it out, shook it once, and considered the paper with a frown. It was old, folded, and used, and it felt like a good sneeze could blow it into pieces. She glanced around, but the only container she had handy that would do the job was the mason jar with Cuddles' ribs, and she didn't want to just dump them out. It was ok, Sarah could be careful.

She glanced around her room, looking for anything she'd need, shook her head, and went to leave. She got just outside her door before she turned around and went back in. With one hand, she fished under her mattress for the composition notebook and took that with her when she went downstairs.

In the garage, she found Finn playing with some of her leather cord. He had a couple of yards tangled up in his hands, and Sarah couldn't help but laugh. He had looked up guiltily when she opened the doors and stepped down the wooden stairs onto the cement floor, and when he held up his hands as though he was admitting guilt he had looked like a huge kitten caught playing with yarn.

"The spool fell off the table, it unrolled and I tried to catch it," he said.

"It's fine. It'll roll back up easily enough," said Sarah. "Scoot over."

He moved out of the way, and she set the paper bag down on the plywood surface along with her notebook. She shoved over the drill case he'd set down already, clearing a space around the vice she'd already placed at the edge of the table. She groaned and turned to leave again. She got a big shallow salad bowl from the kitchen that she could pour the teeth into.

As she came back out and set the bowl down, Finn spoke up again. "So, what are you planning?"

"I'm not sure, honestly," said Sarah. "The way they're shaped, and the way they're colored, It's going to be really hard to make it look good."

"Aren't teeth necklaces a thing, though?" he asked.

"Sure, if you're a Viking or a headhunter or something." Sarah poured the bag of teeth into the bowl and started idly picking through them. "If I'm going to put this sort of work into it, I'd like it to look at least sorta nice."

"All right, makes sense," he said, slapping his thighs for emphasis. "So what do you want me to do?"

Sarah started to answer but pursed her lips before she could say her first thought. After a moment, she said, "Could you maybe sort the teeth? By shape and size?"

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He nodded and grabbed a handful out of the bowl. He laid them down on the table and began shoving them around into lines, chewing on his tongue while he concentrated. Sarah rubbed her nose with one hand, then bent down and fished in a box she kept under the table. She pulled out a big square of plush fabric that she used for beads.

"Use this, so nothing rolls around," she said. She took the grey plastic case and laid the mat down. Putting the case on the ground, she opened it and saw that the drill wasn't quite what she'd expected when Finn had offered to lend it to her. Instead of the huge gun-shaped thing that she imagined when someone talked about power drills, this was just a straight cylinder, almost like a very fat pen. But it had the same mechanism to hold the drill bits that she was used to, and Finn hadn't been lying when he said he had all the teensy drill bits she wanted. She took one of the smallest and set it in the drill.

Then she glanced into the bowl and pulled out one of the more discolored teeth. If this didn't work, no sense wrecking a good one. She set the tooth in her vice and tightened it down for a good hold. Unfortunately, the steel clamp cracked the tooth before she got it really stable. She tossed the broken tooth and knelt back down to rummage in her bin. With a grin, she stood up, now holding tiny rubber sheets. They'd originally been stuck to something with glue, so one side of them was still just a bit sticky. But they'd fit in her vice and let it grip the little teeth better.

Sure enough, she was able to get the second tooth perfectly stable without breaking anything, and a whir later and she'd made a neat hole straight through it. She pulled the tooth out of the vice and held it up, examining it closely. Maybe she should be drilling long ways, instead of from side to side.

"Hey Finn," she asked. He had been pretty focused on organizing the teeth. The incisors and molars were each in separate piles, and he'd already put the canines in a row, ranked by size. "What do you think about everyone?"

"Who?" Finn looked up, blinking as he broke his concentration.

"Everyone we've met this summer," explained Sarah as she set another tooth in the vice, this time held so she could drill it from top to bottom. "People who can use the fog?"

"It's pretty awesome, isn't it?" Finn was grinning at Sarah. "I spent the day yesterday with Beck and Taylor. We mostly played football, and ran routes, Beck's got great hands, even if his parents wanted him to play soccer. And Taylor showed me this funky spiral thing she makes with her spirit that will actually freeze things. Like literally coat them with ice. We think that if we tweak it we can make a straight-up air conditioner."

Sarah put a hole through the second tooth. She said, "But aren't you worried? Or bothered? It's not just the three of us, there's more than ten now. And there's got to be more, doesn't there?"

"Sure there's going to be more," said Finn. "It's exciting, to meet more people. Just think, this time next year there'll be hundreds, or maybe thousands of us."

"Exactly, Finn," she said. She took the tooth out of the vice and looked around. She spotted an old mug on a shelf that usually rinsed out watercolor brushes, and dropped the tooth in with a clatter. She sat back down, not facing Finn, and said, "And what makes you so sure they'll all be as happy to be on your team as you are to be on theirs? Not to mention keeping secrets. I really don't want anyone to know about me, and that means they can't know about you, or Alexa, or anybody."

Finn turned and reached an arm around Sarah, "Hey, hey, it's fine. Everyone has had bad experiences talking about the fog, no one wants to go public or anything."

He squeezed her once and let her go, then he said, "But maybe you're right. It can't be a good idea to just let things go all it needs is some organization, some rules."

"Yes," said Sarah. Something unknotted in her stomach as he finally understood her point, and she felt herself breathing more easily as she drilled a hole through yet another tooth.

"But then that's tricky, because if we've got an organization and rules, then we need someone in charge too." He had been talking quietly, almost to himself, but then he spun suddenly, pointing at Sarah, and he almost shouted, "You should be in charge!"

Of course, he sabotaged his own declaration as his outstretched finger caught the edge of the bowl, sending the loose teeth spraying throughout the garage.