“Think about it,” Reyva said. “We walked away from the dock. Didn’t turn around. Kept to the shore. And we’re back where we started. It’s an island.”
It wasn’t an island.
Was it?
No one had ever told her it was an island.
If it was...
Why hadn’t any of them known? Their parents—her parents had never said it was an island. They’d said it bordered a national forest. Very remote. That was all. Claire sank down onto the rocks.
The lake lapped peacefully beside her.
The dock didn’t waver. It wasn’t a mirage or a hallucination.
“Could it be a different dock?” Mariana asked. “We don’t know it’s the same one.”
It looked exactly the same.
Mariana pulled Claire back up onto her feet. “At least let’s make sure. Come on.”
They trudged toward it, and the closer they got, the clearer it was. They saw the blue sparkle of Mariana’s abandoned suitcases, the site where they’d tried to light their first fire. Closer still, they saw the jars and the toolbox, still full of water.
Stopping, Mariana and Reyva both scooped up jars and began glugging water. But Claire walked past them without even a glance. She walked onto the dock, to the very end, and stood there, looking out across the lake. Water lapped beneath her.
Back where we started, she thought.
She glanced up at the sun, low in the sky, and then shivered. “If we were walking around an island in a circle... why didn’t we notice that?” Yes, they would have realized if they’d accidentally turned around and backtracked, but theyalsoshould have realized they’d switched cardinal directions. You couldn’t circle an island without changing your orientation to the sun. “We should have noticed the sun in the wrong position.”
“It’s been cloudy...,” Mariana said.
“But it still rose and set,” Claire said. “What’s wrong with the sun?” She heard her voice rising higher. “What’s wrong with us? What’s wrong with this place? There has to be an explanation.”
“It’s an island,” Reyva said. “That’s it. That’s the explanation.”
Mariana ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “Hunger. Pain. Exhaustion. It’s been cloudy. We’re not master navigators. We just assumed that if we followed the shoreline, we’d reach civilization. It was a logical assumption.”
Claire turned back to face the trail that led to the Lake House. She didn’t think that was it, that they’d somehow mixed up east and west and hadn’t noticed for miles and miles that they’d been walking in a circle around an island. There was somethingwrong. Wrong about the house, wrong about the cave, wrong about the forest and the sudden storms and the birds that fell quiet.
She cried out loud at the sky, the lake, and the forest, “Why won’t it let us leave?”
Twenty
They’d walked for days—days!—not knowing there was absolutely zero hope they’d reach their destination because the whole place was agoddamn circle! Claire wanted to scream, wail, cry. “I should have noticed.”
“None of us noticed,” Reyva said.
“It was cloudy,” Mariana repeated. “We’re exhausted. I was barely able to put one foot in front of the other half the time.”
Claire shook her head. Still...
“It’s no one’s fault,” Mariana said. “Maybe we should have used the compass, but we were following the shore. Seemed simple enough.”
“We shouldn’t have needed a compass! We have thesun!” Claire waved her hand at the sky as if it had betrayed her.
“Claire...,” Reyva began.
But Claire didn’t want to hear it. She knew exactly who was at fault here.Me. It’s my fault.“I should have noticed,” she repeated, more emphatically. “How could I not realize we were walking in a circle?”
