“Alright, Stalker.” He chuckles, raising an eyebrow at me, but I just roll my eyes and give him a stern look. He bites his lip to hide his smile.
The thorns take to my shirt like cats to a scratching post. I tread carefully, occasionally wincing when the sharp points pierce the thin fabric and mark my skin.
“Bastard.” Ryder curses as a spiked barb clings onto his thigh, the stems’ sharp teeth sinking into his trousers. He plucks it off carefully but launches it with agitation out of our path, then uses his blade to hack through the density, making it easier for us to pass through, though I’m not sure my hair will make it through still attached to my skull.
Every so often, a gust of wind blows my curls into a bramble; it only takes a second for the natural coil of my hair to wrap around one like a vice and cling on for dear life. I flinch every time one plucks from my scalp, but keep on moving nevertheless.
Gods, I wish I tied my hair up.
We are almost at the foot of the hill, my skin stings with blisters from nettles and scrapes from angry bushes, but we are nearly at the bottom, and the blonde boy is not too far away from us now. Though the brambles were a bitch they slowed him down drastically as well. Ryder gets onto flat land first, his feet shaking off the shrubs that stick like velcro to his shoes. He offers me a hand and pulls me through the last of the brush. I, too, pluck off the barbs of the forest that want to come with us. Ryder keeps me moving, his hand cradling my wrist again.
The blonde head has not stopped, he has not rested, even when the pollen made me sneeze, he didn’t turn back startled, and I was so sure he would. So sure he would snap out of his trance and realise that Ryder and I have been stalking him for the last fifteen minutes, but he hasn’t. Instead, he looks ahead, ramrod straight and continues his path through the clearing.
The sun barely lights up the landscape, its once bright white light is now plagued with deep reds and oranges, it makes an effort to shine through the sparse trees and cast away their shade, but the light is not strong enough to banish the darkness, and shadows feed out from the trunks onto the ground like phantom branches. We move through them, unobserved andunseen, like our bodies are made up of the shadows themselves, and for a moment, I forget that I am tangible. In the silence around me, I forget that I am not just part of the scenery. We have been overlooked for so long now, I feel oddly inferior, like my presence is nothing but a hallucination. I reach out to Ryder and brush my hand briefly with his to remind myself that I am more than just a mirage, that if my hands collide with skin, my fingertipswillmake contact and not sink through them like sand.
“When is this fucker going to stop?” My touch triggers his thoughts to surface. Ryder groans as the terrain becomes steeper again.
“I wonder where he is going.” My words lightly touch my lips in a whisper, the tip of my tongue still resting on my bottom lip. Silence becomes us again, our footsteps conforming with the atmosphere, each breath we take like the song of a distant bird.
Until the beacon is lost.
The blonde map we have been following disappears into a door frame. His features were swallowed by the darkness of a tall, derelict building. Ryder makes an audible exhale as his frustration ebbs off of him.
“This better not be a pointless pursuit.” He grits his teeth as he stealths closer to the building.
The air is heavy, thick with the metallic tang of rust and the sour rot of mildew. The building squats among the trees like a secret that never wanted to be found—an old warehouse swallowed by shadow and bark, hidden too well for comfort.
Dark wooden panels cling to one another, stitched together by corroded nails. Some boards splinter and warp, others sag away from their fastenings, barely held in place. Through the gaps, darkness seeps out—each hole in the wall like a twisted mouth caught mid-scream, warning me to turn back. I shudder,unease crawling beneath my skin, as Ryder and I duck toward a low window.
The glass is cracked, a spiderweb of fractures spreading across its surface like a disease. It catches my reflection and breaks it apart, distorting my face into a thousand jagged fragments. I barely recognise myself in the warped mirror.
My eyes narrow as I look beyond the shattered image and into the building itself.
I hold my breath.
“Is that?” I question myself.
“Yes,” Ryder affirms my suspicions.
Chapter Eleven
There is no free space in the warehouse. Not really. I wouldn’t even be able to pick out the blonde boy amidst the mass of heads, even though I have been studying each hair on his scalp for the last twenty minutes.
He is lost in a sea, drowned out by hundreds of other heads all facing the same way.
Not just students, but the teachers as well. I can see the spindly frame of the new headmaster, along with Mr Knight’s tattoos. They all stand shoulder to shoulder in rows, feet almost touching, and my stomach turns at the sight.
For a room full of people, it is quiet. Too quiet. No noise other than a barely audible hum fills the room. A sound that would be easily ignored in a normal setting, with normal movement and conversation, but now in the deafening silence of the warehouse, painstakingly obvious.
“River?” I question myself, my fingers still gripping tightly to the lip of the window ledge. I feel Ryder’s hand against the small of my back, and my eyes meet his.
Worry.
He stares back at me with furrowed brows and pursed lips, equally confused. His suspicions were correct; the twisted warning that churned in his stomach led him here—to River.
I recognised his varsity jacket first—the blue lettering stark against the thick black fabric. I’d always liked that jacket on him,the way it drew the colour from his eyes and made it brighter when he wore it. Then my gaze found the familiar curve of his dirty-blonde hair, the crescent swoop at the back of his head. His cowlick. That stubborn strand with a will of its own, defying every comb and every smear of gel, always springing free again—unchanged, unmistakable.
My heartbeat controls me, thumping so hard out of my chest it propels me to move to him, but Ryder’s arm halts me before the darkness of the building can swallow me up.
