One Was Lost(10)

“They’d be calling for us,” Emily says. She’s not wrong.

“There are three of them,” Lucas says, still staring at the number in the ground.

“We should hear them,” Jude says, tipping his chin to Lucas. “Madison would be bleating your name like a goat.”

It’s true, and the absence of said bleating is suddenly pressing fear into me. There are three of them. But the number on the dirt makes me wonder. Are there still three?

“OK, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Lucas says. “They probably took off when we didn’t answer. Maybe they think we left without them. Or that we need help.”

“He’s right. They could have even given up earlier when we were still unconscious. We’ll figure it out when we get there,” I say.

“I don’t want to go back to the water,” Emily says.

I don’t need to ask why. The terror is obvious in her tone. She’s afraid of what we’ll find there. A cold prickle in my center tells me I’m afraid of that too.

My eyes drift to Mr. Walker’s tent. We left the flap open so he’d stay cool, and I can see the faint rise and fall of his olive-green undershirt. But he’s still too pale. Worry pricks at my throat. He should be awake by now.

So why isn’t he?

I lick my lips. God, I’m thirsty. “Let’s try to wake him up, like Emily suggested. Just one more time. Can’t hurt anything, right?”

I must look desperate. Either that or Emily and I aren’t the only ones hesitant to return to the water alone.

We close in near his tent door, calling his name softly and then louder. Lucas even shifts him a little closer to the edge of his tent.

Hope springs through my chest when he groans. He’s waking up! Everything will be all right! It will make sense! But his eyes don’t open, and no more sound comes from his lips. I snag the front of his shirt, desperate.

We shout his name, grab at his arms and hands, but it’s worthless. He’s back out quickly, head tipped to the right and a pool of saliva glistening at the corner of his slack lips.

How the hell is he drooling? I don’t think I could spit if someone offered to pay me. My eyes fall to the empty water bottles beside him. Two empty bottles. The rest of us only had one.

The rest of it rolls through me—my groggy wake-up, Jude’s puking. Did someone put something in our water?

“Did you drink the water last night?” I ask suddenly.

Lucas and Emily nod, and Jude’s brow puckers. “Yeah, why?”

I hold up Mr. Walker’s empty bottles. “I think we felt drugged because we were drugged.”





Chapter 5


No one argues about going to the river now. Mr. Walker isn’t waking up, so we’re out of options. We lumber to our feet carefully and search for the path we used to get up here. Everything is trees and heat and misery now, yesterday’s rain leaving the air thick and sticky. Maybe we went the wrong way. Maybe the forest swallowed up the trail overnight. Or maybe—

We find it, a narrow strip of mud that will lead back to the river or—if we head the other way—to the dirt lot with Ms. Brighton’s car. That’s the end of the trail, but it’s also a three-day hike from here.

Jude steps on the path, but Lucas lifts a hand and frowns.

“Hold up. Are all these footprints ours?”

“There are footprints everywhere,” I say, gesturing at the muddy tracks all over the path.

“Yeah, but if they’re not ours, maybe they belong to whoever did this.”

A chill runs through me as I look around. It makes sense. Someone who wasn’t us was in here, unzipping our tents, destroying our supplies, writing on us. I catch a glimpse of the word on Lucas’s wrist and swallow hard.

“Should we check the camp too?” I ask.

“What does it matter?” Jude asks. “Knowing who it is doesn’t make it unhappen.”

He’s right, and frankly, I have no idea how forensic crime people do this. I can barely tell what smears and indents are footprints, let alone actually pick them apart and assign them to different members of our camp. But I look around anyway, hoping I’ll miraculously spot a boot print with Bad Guy imprinted somewhere in the tread.

“I have no idea what I’m looking at,” Emily confesses.

Lucas snorts. “Me either. OK, bad idea. Let’s go.”

I fall into step behind him, but my eyes drag back to Mr. Walker’s tent. He hasn’t roused again, and I’m afraid to leave him. If anything, he seemed more deeply asleep. That can’t be good.

“I wish I knew what they used to knock us out,” I say, but I mean him. Mr. Walker is the one who isn’t waking up, so he’s the one I’m worried about.

Lucas swats at a cloud of gnats around his head. “That’s the thing. Mr. Walker had the water in his pack the whole time. Who could have gotten to it before we drank it?”

Behind me, Emily scuffs her foot at the ground. “We left all the packs by that overhang when we checked out that gorge yesterday. It was raining, remember?”

“Right,” Lucas says. “Because he didn’t want the packs to throw off our balance with it being so slippery.”

“So this is all thanks to his poor decision-making skills,” Jude says with a sneer.