“Seriously?”
“I don’t do performative emotions,” Reyva said. “Yes, it’s terrible, but we can’t help her. We can’t call the police. We can’t call anyone. So what do we do?”
“Wedon’tstay here,” Claire said. Her heart was beating so fast and loud that it made it hard to think, even to breathe, but she tried to keep her voice steady and normal. The last thing she wanted was for them to notice how bad she was at holding herself together.
Reyva snorted. “Are you planning to swim home? It’s miles. Even farther on foot. You saw how ridiculously far it is around the lake. We’re talkingdays. Unless you’re an endurance athlete—”
Claire tugged on both Reyva’s and Mariana’s sleeves. “I mean, we can’t stay right here, right now, withthat.” She heard the shrillness in her own voice and forced it lower. “Come on.” Neither of them protested as she led them back through the woods.
Her heart was hammering as she waded through the bushes, and her skin prickled as if she were being watched by dozens of unseen eyes. She thought about switching off the phone light—it had to be visible through the trees—but she couldn’t make herself plunge them into darkness. She told herself they needed the light to find their way to the water, where they’d left their packs, where it wouldn’t feel as if the trees were closing in on them.
Count your steps, she told herself.Keep it together.One, two, three... Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight... She kepther eyes fixed on the beam of light and her mind fixed on the numbers.
Only when she saw the glassy blackness of the lake did she turn off her light.
“Mariana, turn your light off,” Claire said, her voice a whisper.
“What? No. Absolutely not.”
“She’s right.” Reyva reached over to grab Mariana’s phone, and Mariana clutched it to her chest. The beam swept up and illuminated her chin and nostrils, as well as the leaves on the branches that bent over the shore.
“It’s too visible,” Claire whispered. “We don’t know who could see it.”
Mariana stared at her, then turned it off. She whispered, “Sorry.”
Night folded over them. Claire was aware of the sounds: the lap of water on the shore, the wind through the trees, the loud chirping hum of crickets.
“If there’s someone out there...,” Mariana began, again a whisper.
“We don’t want them to see us,” Claire said.
“But we won’t see them either.”
She didn’t have a good response to that. But Reyva did: “We listen. One of us stays awake at all times, and we stay alert. Keep our backs to the water and face the forest. And when it’s dawn... we figure out what to do next. One hour at a time.” She sat down on the rocks.
Claire wished she could stop worrying about what would happen next, especially since the images that her brain wasoh-so-helpfully conjuring were nightmarish. She gathered up the tinder they’d collected, the bark and cotton balls and so forth, and tucked it into her pack. They certainly weren’t about to light a fire tonight.
“Okay, so what else?” Mariana whispered. She sat too, perched like a bird who was ready to take flight at a second’s notice.
“What else what?” Reyva asked.
“What else can we do to keep from beingmurdered in our sleep? Why do I keep having to spell everything out? These are not the kinds of things I’m supposed to be worried about! I’m supposed to be worried about whether anyone will like me, whether I’ll get along with my roommate, whether the food will be decent, whether the showers will have reasonable water pressure to rinse the shampoo fully out of my hair, whether I’ll have a summer romance that will have me pining away for whoever and listening to sappy songs on repeat.”
Claire had been thinking about that—about how else to keep them safe, not about a doomed summer romance. “Instead of sleeping exposed out here, we could hide ourselves in the woods.”
“There are dead people in the woods,” Mariana said.
“Only one we know of,” Claire pointed out.
“That doesn’t make it better,” Mariana said. “I’m not going back in there.”
“We could set a kind of alarm,” Claire said. “Something that if a...” She didn’t know what word to pick. Intruder? Killer? “... ifsomeonewere to approach our camp, they’d make a loud noise. Like a string of tin cans, if we had them. How about sticksthey’d have to step on?” If they made the sticks unavoidable, it could give them a few seconds’ warning, which was better than none.
Reyva seemed to like that idea. “Anyone have any wire? We can string it neck-high between the trunks.” She pointed to the nearby trees.
Excellent idea. Except Claire hadn’t packed any wire. “I don’t. Mariana?”
“You people are almost scarier than whoever is out there,” Mariana said. “How do you leap from seeing a dead body to instantly stringing up trip wires?”
