“Were there any signs of foul play?”
“Are the cameras still rolling?”
“What are we supposed to do?”
Everyone is talking at once. Everyone except for me. It’s like my voice has been sucked into the void of dread blooming in my stomach.
“We don’t know any more than you do,” Damian says, moving toreclaim his seat beside Harmony. “It just looks like they up and left, and in a hurry.”
“Why do you think that?” Valeria asks, in a small voice.
“There was a half-eaten bowl of ramen on the table,” Kei says, sitting beside me, but not close enough for our bodies to touch. “Dishes in the sink, unmade beds. Stuff like that.”
“Did it look like—were there, like, signs of a struggle?” Giovanni asks, looking like maybe he doesn’t want to know the answer.
“No,” Damian says, shaking his head. “Nothing like that. All of their personal belongings were gone. Like, they packed up and left. Even the laundry hampers were empty.”
“And the canoes,” Kei adds. “They’re all gone. The lifejackets, too.”
I imagine them—Gabby, Tyler, Teddy, all the camera guys, and the rest of the crew—stealing away in the middle of the night, silently paddling, avoiding the path of the moonlight so they could remain clandestine in the darkness.
But why?
“Are we still being recorded?” Sue-Ellen asks. I look to the cameras mounted on stakes surrounding the fire pit. Their red lights glow in the blackness.
“The cameras are on,” Damian says. “But whether or not they’re being monitored…”
Sue-Ellen twists her body so she’s directly facing a camera. “This is really messed up, you guys,” she yells, maybe to no one. “Are you listening? This is not freaking funny.”
Trina makes a small noise, and then her face crumples. Her shoulders shudder with silent sobs. We all watch in stunned silence.
“They’re fine,” Kei says. “And they’ll be back. They’ll probably be here when we wake up in the morning.”
“Yeah, they’ll definitely be back,” Damian says, nodding a little too vigorously. “They said the lag in the production schedule was two days between shooting and airing, right? They have to come back tomorrow, or else the show will fall behind.”
“Couldn’t they be doing all that stuff remotely?” asks Sid.
“Maybe,” Damian replies. “But it’s not like they’re just going to leave us all here.”
“They already did,” Sue-Ellen says. “Seriously, if this was all above board, they would have said something. They wouldn’t have just left.”
She’s right. We all sink into despondent silence, each of us lost in our own darkness, as we watch the fire wither. Once it’s nothing but a few glowing embers, Sue-Ellen and Isa lead the exodus back up to the Bunkhouse.
In my bed, I pull the blanket right up to my neck and wait for Kei to return from the bathroom. When I hear him coming, I move over, marking a clear space for him in the bed. I prop myself up on my elbow, to signal I’m waiting.
“Night,” he mutters to me, as he climbs into the top bunk. Harmony’s eyes follow him, then turn to me, questioning. I shrug and fall back into bed.
I squeeze my eyes shut and take deep breaths to slow the torrent of questions flooding my brain. Where are the producers? Did something happen to them? Why is Kei acting like this? Have I ruined everything? What’s going to happen in the morning?
I kick the blankets down, suddenly too hot. I twist to my other side, searching for a cool spot on the pillow. The bed is too big for just me.
“Kei?” I whisper in the darkness.
“Mmm.”
“I can’t sleep.” I pause. “I’m scared.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything. But then the bed creaks, and his legs appear over the side of the bunk. He slides down and climbs in beside me. He lies on his back, staring up at the bottom of the top bunk.
