“Ah, speaking poetry.”
“I can wax poetic,” Tosh said easily.
Zach’s line jerked. He stood and braced, a grin breaking across his face as the rod bowed. “First fish on.”
Silver flashed below the surface, then torqued away. The hook came back empty. Zach scowled.
“Guess not.” Tosh laughed. “Story of your life.”
“Damn, that was a big one.” Zach wiped his hands on his shorts.
“The ones that get away always are,” Tosh said. “Of course, you’re always catching what you don’t intend to keep.”
Zach didn’t rise to the bait. Tosh’s next cast cut clean through the quiet.
“What about you, Zach? You were with Heidi . . . and then she was hanging from the tower.”
Zach frowned, jaw tense. “I told the truth. I was with her, and then I wasn’t. I know how bad it looks, but there’s nothing I can do about that.” Despite trying for nonchalance, a flicker of desperation crept into his voice, as though he needed to convince both Tosh and himself that he had nothing to hide.
“I trust you,” Tosh said.
“That matters,” Zach replied.
Nothing made sense anymore, but loyalty was something to hang on to.
Zach’s phone buzzed, annoying him, breaking his rhythm.
He didn’t look. He tossed the phone to Tosh. “Read it,” he said. “If it’s nothing, I don’t want it in my head.”
He met Tosh’s confused gaze.
“What is it?” Zach asked.
“Damn. It says,Keep your tools handy.No number. No name.”
“How cute,” Zach said dryly. He then tucked his phone away with a shake of his head. “Someone thinks this is a game, and we’re players whether we signed up or not.”
The word tasted wrong in his mouth.Game. It sounded too much like the way the anonymous voice in those chapters described things: winners and losers, and the losers didn’t walk away.
“Life itself is a game.” Tosh’s tone was gentle and vicious at once. “Some of us just prefer different rules.”
“Like?”
“Like, maybe don’t kill.”
Tosh didn’t blink. Zach glanced away while rubbing the cut on his knuckle.
“Mary can be scary,” he said after a moment of silence.
“She scares a lot of people,” Tosh agreed. “Fear and guilt aren’t twins, though.”
“And Harmony?”
“She’s a mirror.” Tosh’s voice dropped. “People hate what they see.”
There were others, too, names Zach didn’t want to say out loud yet. Sometimes the quiet ones were the deadliest. It was impossible to pin anything down. For now, they were ants in a glass farm, everyone watching, sometimes, just for kicks, shaking the walls to see what they’d rebuild.
Zach’s next cast snagged and stayed there, line pulled taut, refusing to come free.
