Then: “We go to the shoot.”
“Not all of us.”
A pause.
“Two?”
“No. One.”
“You want to play pretend again? Let her think we’re fragments of a single broken thing?”
I run my hands through my hair. The pressure builds behind my eyes. It pulses there, steady and sharp. She lit a match inside me, and now she’s waiting for the fire to find her.
“She said something about rafters,” I mutter.
“That’s such a broad statement. Could be anywhere.”
“She wants us to dig.”
“She wants us desperate.”
I smile.
We know desperate. We were born inside it.
“I’ll go,” I say.
“You went last time. It’s someone else’s turn.”
“Yeah. What he said.”
“Fine! We rock, paper, scissors for it.”
“She’s wearing a mask now,” I whisper. “She’s not hiding. She’s hunting.”
There’s a long silence.
“She wants us to scream louder than she did.”
One of us laughs.
“She thinks she’s in control now.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
“No one screams louder thanwedo.”
The air in the room stills. We sit in silence, tension winding between us. She didn’t give us enough. Not in the video. Not in the set. No slip-ups on the location.
“She’s too smart to just wander into an abandoned property with a camera and hope for the best,” I reason aloud. “She scouted somewhere. That takes time. Planning. She didn’t find the perfect slaughterhouse aesthetic in a day.”
“So we figure out where she’s been.”
“Which means we need to see her GPS history."
“She’s careful,” one of us murmurs, tapping the side of our skull. “Always calculating.”
“She can be distracted,” another replies.
