“That one?” Mariana suggested.
They hurried through the pines to an old, fat maple. Pressing against the trunk, they huddled together. Through the trees,Claire could see the lake as it was pelted with rain. It was falling so hard now that the air looked gray. Wind whipped through the forest, carrying rain with it.
We’re going to be soaked, she thought.
I’m already soaked.
All their supplies. All their clothes.
“We can’t stay out here,” Claire said.
“Not much choice,” Reyva said.
Claire’s hair was plastered to her neck, and she felt rain on her face flowing faster than tears. Her clothes stuck to her body. It wouldn’t be long before everything dry they owned was saturated. All the wood would be soaked as well. They wouldn’t be able to start a new fire to dry themselves.
“Maybe it’ll stop soon,” Mariana said.
“Or it won’t,” Claire said, “and the sun will set and we’ll be—”
“So what do you want to do about it?” Mariana snapped. “This sucks. I hate this.” She stepped out from beneath the tree and shouted at the sky. “You hear me? I hate this! Stop raining!Stop!”
It didn’t listen.
She stepped back under the tree.
“Feel better?” Reyva asked.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. There has to be somewhere we can go to get out of the rain before we’re so waterlogged we develop gills.”
Claire realized she was shivering, which wasn’t great.Hypothermia, she thought. Could you get that in summer? How longdid it take to set in? She looked up through the branches and flinched as rain hit her face. Squinting, she tried to guess how low the sun was. They’d spent several hours on the fire. Before that, they’d searched the house for a while.... “I can think of one place out of the rain, but you won’t like it.”
“Nope,” Reyva said.
“You didn’t even hear my suggestion.”
“Not the murder hole.”
“It will be dry,” Claire pointed out. “And the cage was empty.”
“We don’t know what was in that cave,” Reyva said.
“We don’t have to find out,” Claire said. “We stay in the bunker. Change into dry clothes. Dry out our wet stuff. And leave in the morning.” It was a sensible plan. Certainly more sensible than spending the night in a rainstorm. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to stop shivering. She wondered what the signs of hypothermia were. Certainly shivering.
“It can’t rain this hard forever,” Mariana said.
“Maybe not forever, but it can rain for hours,” Claire said. “Do you want to keep standing out here when there’s a nice, dry hole in the ground—”
“—with an ominous cage,” Reyva added.
“—with an empty, unused, old cage that has a bucket we can use to catch additional fresh water? We dry out, we sleep, and we leave in the morning.”
The wind whipped the rain into them so hard that Mariana staggered backward. “Fine! But we stick together, okay? No splitting up this time. That was profoundly stupid, liketeen-in-a-horror-movie stupid, and I make it a goal to never make the same profoundly stupid mistake twice. Like not measuring the cylinder and crankshaft carefully enough when you’re rebuilding your engine. Half a thousandth of an inch can matter. Never will screw that up again.”
“Agreed,” Claire said. She didn’t know what a crankshaft was, but the sentiment... “We stick together.”
“Let’s go,” Reyva said.
Clinging to one another, they tromped through the bushes, the ferns, and the muddy leaves toward the trail to the Lake House. Claire felt her sneakers squish, already soaked, and as they made their way up the trail, mud seeped in over the sides. It would be days before they dried properly.
