The screams broke the silence, coming from the mouth of the canyon. Austin and I froze, and then I recognized that voice.
“Emmett,” I said.
Breaking free of Austin’s grip, I caught a glimpse of something on his face—something darkly angry swimming under the rush of everything else—but I couldn’t pay it any attention. I ran back up the slope, the scree twisting and sliding under every step, loose rocks scratching the supple leather of my new boots. Sometimes the rubble swallowed my feet almost to the ankle, and each step took more time and energy than I could believe. By the time I reached the path and the lodgepole pines, I was panting for breath.
The screaming had broken off, and the last of the echoes were racketing between the canyon walls. I stumbled down the path, sucking in lungfuls of air that smelled of sap and the powdered, bristly scent of dry animal spore. Ahead, the lodgepoles clustered together, their tops rubbing against each other in the breeze. It hadn’t seemed like such a long walk on the way in, but now, it felt like miles.
Emmett. The screams had been Emmett’s. There was no doubt about it in my mind. And he hadn’t been screaming in pain. Those had been cries of genuine terror. My skin prickled, and I blinked stinging sweat from my eyes.
When I skidded onto the gravel of the parking lot, Emmett was already crashing through the branches on the far side, plunging into the jumble of fallen trees and broken branches and saplings that made travel under the trees almost impossible. Almost, but not completely, because as I watched, he scrambled up a log and threw himself between a pair of springy white pines.
“Vie,” Austin puffed from behind me. “Wait up.”
Instead, I followed Emmett. Taking the same course, I raced up a fallen log, using it to jump between the close-set trees. On the far side, more piled-up tree trunks waited, forming a network between the still-living trees, almost like a highway. I landed, catching myself on a sapling that bent double under my weight, and then took off again. Emmett was already disappearing into the dense growth ahead.
“Emmett,” I shouted, and part of my brain registered the echo of Austin’s words. “Wait up!”
But he didn’t slow either. The chase continued for what felt like hours. In reality, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. As I broke past a dense screen of brambles, I slammed jaw-first into the lowest branch of a stout ponderosa. My feet kept their momentum, whipping up in front of me and planting me solidly on my butt. When I saw what was in the clearing, though, I had the distinctly clear thought that being knocked on my ass by a tree had saved me the trouble of falling down in shock.
Emmett stood in the center of the clearing. Thick grasses grew to his waist, and a trail of trampled stalks showed his path. He leaned forward, standing on the balls of his feet, as though ready to fight—or run. His face had lost all its color.
Crouched at the base of a bushy juniper, wearing a turquoise cocktail dress that barely reached her thighs, the fabric torn in a hundred places and covered with dirt and stains, was Makayla Price.
At that point, my heart stopped. Until a few days ago when I saw her arrive in a private plane, I had believed, along with everyone else, that Makayla Price had been murdered. Seeing her arrive in that airplane had been a shock, and it had been even more of a shock to learn that—somehow, impossibly—she was working for a powerful criminal syndicate. But why was she here, dressed like she’d gone out for dinner and dancing, in the middle of the Bighorns?
“No,” Emmett screamed, his voice hoarse. “No. You are dead. You’re dead!”
Makayla crouched, wrapping her arms around her head, as though flinching away from a physical threat.
I got my legs under me as Austin scrambled free of the trees, and he grabbed my arm to keep me on my feet. “What the fuck—” he began.
Kaden and Colton emerged next. Kaden’s face went white. Colton’s eyes went wide, and he took a step backwards.
“Hold on,” I said, shaking off Austin’s grip. I waded through the grass towards Emmett.
“No,” he said, swinging his arms as he paced a circle. He ripped up handfuls of grass, his breathing coming in hitches, as he chanted, “No, no, no, no, no.”
“Hey,” I said, my voice pitched soft and even. As he swung around in his circle, I settled my hand on his chest. “Hey.”
“No,” Emmett said, his eyes flicking to mine. I knew what black holes were. I knew the concept, at least: collapsed stars sucking everything into them, even light. His eyes, liquid and dark and troubled, had that kind of gravity, like they could rip the skin off my bones and then swallow the bones too. “No, I already did this shit once. No. No way.”
“Emmett,” Makayla said. When I’d seen her at the makeshift landing strip, her tight blond curls had been immaculate; now they made a ragged curtain through which she peered at us. “Emmett. Oh my God. Emmett.” She started to sob, and she rocked forward, collapsing onto her knees. “Oh thank God.”
It didn’t make any sense. Why was she here? What was she doing? Before I could structure the questions, before I could say anything, Makayla turned towards the tree line behind her. “Oh thank God,” she repeated. “Hailey, it’s all right. You can come out now.”
As though we were at the Bluelight Modern Theater in Vehpese, with the curtain pulled back and the lights dimmed, Hailey Van Hoyt stepped out from among the trees. Like Makayla, her hair was in disarray, snarled with twigs and leaves, and her slinky black dress was ripped and stained like she’d had a nasty fight with a couple of blackberry bushes. But it was her eyes that stopped everything in my brain. Her eyes were dead, and she moved like she had strings pulling her arms and legs. A week ago, Hailey Van Hoyt had been one of the most popular girls in school. Today, she looked like she’d been dragged out of the grave.
“Jesus Christ,” Kaden said.
“What happened to you?” Colton said.
“No,” Emmett said, slapping my arm away and charging past me. “No fucking way.”
“Stay with him,” I said to Austin. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”
Austin gave me a worried glance, but he nodded and followed Emmett back towards the lot.
Turning my attention back to the two bedraggled girls, I opened my third eye, and my inner sight overlaid the world with thick texture. Hailey’s face might have shown the world an emotionless mask, but inside, underneath a cold, waxy shell, her emotions were a black and red riot: hot and cold, hurt and furious, and terror running through all of it like moonbeams spun into thread. Whatever had happened to her, it had been awful.
Makayla Price was crying into her hands, but when I looked at her, I knew immediately that something was wrong. It was like staring through infrared-vision goggles and catching sight of something hot: in contrast to everything else around her, Makayla Price glowed with a sickly, yellow-green light, the color of old age and long sickness and petty viciousness. And there was something else there, too, something I could almost see if I looked close enough.
Then that sense of pressure returned, the same sense of pressure I had felt at the high school, as though I had the Pacific Ocean settling onto my chest. My inner eye snapped shut, leaving me shaky and exhausted, and I couldn’t open it again no matter how hard I tried. And Makayla, pulling her hands away from her face for a moment, grinned at me through her tangled curls. It lasted only a moment, and then the weeping and the disguise returned, but I had seen it in her eyes: an insane glee.