The Outliers (The Outliers, #1)(47)

It’s dark still. Nighttime, but not pitch black. Pale-gray light comes from the window. Moonlight, maybe. Scratchy fabric under my hands. I’m lying on a couch—dusty, mildewed, lumpy. The cabin, Camp Colestah, Cassie—it all snaps back to me. Her underwear here. Her somewhere else.

“You blacked out.” It’s Jasper. When I push myself up on my elbow, my head sings. Jasper is sitting on the floor a couple of feet away, back against the wall. He’s staring at me. Worried. No, worse than worried. He looks scared. “You hit your head on the side of the bureau.” He points to a big piece of furniture not far from the door. “I tried to grab you, but I didn’t make it in time. Are you okay?”

“I pass out sometimes when I get really stressed,” I say, trying to make it sound like no big deal. “It hasn’t happened in a while. Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“Oh.” He glances down, away. “I don’t think you cut your head or anything.” He points to his own scalp. “I, um, checked. But there’s a big bump.”

My cheeks feel hot thinking of Jasper lifting me onto the couch, his hands inspecting my head. It’s humiliating. And, yes, also sweet.

“Okay, thanks,” I say, wincing through the throbbing in my head as I roll up to sitting. “Wait, where’s the—” I look around. I can’t remember his name. I wonder for a minute how bad I hurt my head. “The police guy.”

“I don’t know,” Jasper says quietly. In the pale light, I see him turn toward the door. “As I was running to you, there was this loud sound behind us. And then the door slammed shut. I guess someone could have maybe grabbed him or—”

“Grabbed him?” The pain in my head is worse with each word. “He’s a police officer.” Like that alone means nothing bad could ever happen to him. Then I remember Officer Kendall’s stutter, how it vanished. I think about telling Jasper this, but I’m afraid saying it aloud will wind me up again. And maybe it was the rush of adrenaline that smoothed out his voice. Officer Kendall could be like me: better in an actual emergency. Except that seems the opposite of likely.

“Maybe they’re so high they didn’t even realize he was a cop?” Jasper offers, but not like he believes that. Frightening, too, that this is our best option: people so high they can’t see straight.

“I think maybe the stuttering was an act,” I say. “Did you notice? He stopped right before we came into the cabin.”

“Are you sure?” Jasper asks, and like he actually thinks maybe I imagined it. I wonder if this is how it is going to be now that I’ve told him about my dad’s call to the police. Will Jasper doubt everything I say? “Why would he do that?”

“I have no idea.”

He’s still looking at me like he’s not buying it. “I think we’ve got a bigger problem at the moment anyway.”

“What?” I swallow over the lump trapped in my throat.

“The door is locked.”

“Locked?”

I push myself to my feet and lurch for the door. No, no, no. We cannot be locked in this dark and terrible place. The knob does turn a little bit, and for a second I think I’m about to prove Jasper wrong. But the door sticks hard when I push, like there’s a bolt across the outside. Bam, bam, bam, goes my heart as I head over to the window next to where Jasper is still sitting on the floor. Panes of clear glass fill the window frame. I think of all the peeled-back screens in those other cabins as I put my hand flat against the cool glass. Not even cracked or dusty. Actually, the window looks brand-new.

Jasper looks up at me. My hand is still on the glass, his face half-sunk in shadow. I push up on the window, but it doesn’t budge. “That one’s locked,” Jasper says as he gets up to head to the other window on the opposite side of the room. It won’t move either when he tries to open it. Neither do the two in back. He peers closer to the last one. “I think they’re nailed shut from the outside.”

“Then we should break one,” I say, as Jasper comes back to stand next to me.

And this does seem like something the emergency-me could actually do. Shatter glass, scramble through broken shards. Run again through the dark and tangled woods.

But Jasper is already shaking his head. “Look.”

What I mistook for one of the thin, easily-torn screens on the other side of the window, I can see now, is actually much thicker wire. Like a chain-link fence. We are not just trapped in a cabin. We are locked in a cage.

“What the hell is this?” I whisper.

Jasper takes a deep breath, like he’s steeling himself. “Okay, there has got to be another way out,” he says, not answering my question. Maybe he is trying to think positive again. And I hope so because every single thought I have is dark and terrible and ends in doom. Our doom.

Jasper heads to the back of the cabin, poking his head into what looks like a closet. When he reaches overhead and pulls a string, a single bulb goes on. It leaves a slanted gold rectangle on the floor around his feet, brightening the cabin a tiny bit. I feel relieved, but only for a second.

“There’s electricity?” I ask. Should that make me feel better? Because it does not. “I thought this place was abandoned.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure weird.” Jasper waves me over to the closet. “But not as weird as this.”