“Hah. Very funny. You’re right—I’m not sure about any of this, but I don’t think we have much choice. I’m not going to let it take either of you.”
“We won’t let it take you either,” Mariana promised.
They stared at each other for a moment.
As nice as it was to hear that she and Reyva felt the same way, Claire wasn’t certain that any of them would have a say in the matter. Either their plan was going to work, or it wasn’t. There weren’t too many options in between. Standing up, she looped the snares over her shoulder.
“You ready?” Mariana asked her.
“Nope.”
“You going anyway?”
“Yep.”
She thought of the days she’d spent here with Reyva and Mariana. She thought of her parents, back home, probably worried sick. She thought of Jack and the man who’d once been Arthur and how he must have felt when his friends abandoned him. She triednotto think of the odds. And then she climbed into the hole. Mariana’s phone was tucked in her back pocket so she could use its flashlight to set the snares when she reached the bottom. She didn’t want to waste the battery on the climb, so she descended into darkness.
It felt, she thought, like descending into hell.
She kept her eyes up, on the sunlight above, as she climbed down, feeling with her toes before trusting the rock with her weight. Dirt coated her, and she breathed in the stale air again. It felt as if it were clogging her throat.
She had to stop. Force herself to breathe evenly. Inhale and exhale.There’s air here, Claire told herself.Don’t freak yourself out.
The only enemy here was her own mind. The true enemy was up there, chasing Reyva. At some point, Reyva would run out of energy and time, or the pain would get to be too much, and she’d have to bring him back here, hoping that Claire and Mariana would be ready with the trap.
And so I have to be ready, Claire thought.
She kept climbing.
She didn’t remember it being so far the last time. It had been kind of a blur. She wished she’d counted as she’d climbed, then she’d have some idea of how far it was down. It felt like she was climbing into nothingness. She felt as if the darkness was closingall around her. The sliver of light from above was shrinking.What if it winks out?she thought.
Stop it, she told herself.That’s the sun. You won’t lose the sun.
He could obscure the sun.
That’s how they’d lost their way before, she was sure of it. He’d brought the clouds and the rain, and they’d circled the island without even knowing it. She wondered what else he was capable of and then told herself not to let her imagination run wild.
He had limits, she was certain—otherwise he would have captured them already.We can do this, she thought.We can outsmart him. We can win. There are three of us, and one of him.
Together, they could do this.
She had to keep thinking that. She wasn’t alone, even though she was alone. She pictured Reyva in her mind—the way she’d resist smiling, the way she sometimes burst out laughing, the way she could guess what Claire was thinking, the way she understood. And Mariana, who knew how to cheer them up, who knew how to open them up, who’d brought them together. Both of them were so strong.
And together, we’re stronger, Claire thought.Stronger thanit.
Her feet stretched for the next rock, and she felt pebbles beneath her. She lowered herself and felt with her feet. It was solid ground.
She took out Mariana’s phone, powered it up, and turned on the flashlight. For an instant, it dimmed, and she thought with dread that it wasn’t going to work, but then the beam brightened. She laid it on a rock so it shone across the cave and got to work.
The key would be to lay them everywhere so that wherever the wild man went, he’d step in one, dragging his broken leg, but she had to leave a route for herself to escape.
So, a pattern.
Claire began to lay the snares, tying the loose end of wire around boulders, wrapping them so they were tight and using cracks in the rocks to secure them. She laid them in a spiral pattern, memorizing exactly where each one was, before covering them in a thin layer of dirt.
She was nearly done when she heard Reyva’s voice. Her heart began to beat faster. Tucking the last snare into her back pocket, unset, she scooped up Mariana’s phone. Holding it to her chest, she danced across the spiral, avoiding the hidden snares, and positioned herself on the opposite side of all the traps. He’d have to cross them to reach her.
Taking a deep breath, she then did the bravest thing she’d ever done:
