Neverworld Wake(65)

The three of us paused, looking around, apprehensive. It was totally overgrown and wild, more than I remembered. The tempo of the crickets’ screeching began to quicken as if it were the pulse of the night itself, terrified, on edge.

There didn’t appear to be anyone here.

Not Jim. Not anyone.

Suddenly, a wave of nausea came over me, and I was sick all over the ground.

“Poor Bee,” said Whitley, brushing away the hair stuck to my cheek. “Maybe we should forget all this and go back.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be fine.”

Ignoring her worried glance, I stepped past her into the grass. It took a few minutes for us to find the cement pipe, some thirty feet long, only a few feet from the edge of the quarry. As I stepped toward the precipice, I was afraid the ground would start to crumble underneath me, but it held. I stared out, my chest tightening from the shock of how abruptly the ground gave way to total nothingness.

It was a three-hundred-foot drop, the crater stretching out, a stadium of rock, a vast sky littered with stars, and far below the lake, dark water glistening in the moonlight.

“Sister Bee,” whispered Kip, stepping up beside me. “I have a funny feeling death will be like this.”

His voice, eerily flat, sent a surge of fear through me. I wondered numbly if he was about to push me in.

“It’ll feel like falling, but on and on, never stopping. You know?”

He was staring at me with a thin little smile. I swallowed, barely able to breathe.

“Look,” said Whitley.

Turning, I saw she was leaning against the pipe, pointing at something. High in the wooden tower of the Lookout, a tiny green light was visible in a window. It belonged to the oil lamp some student had smuggled up there years earlier.

None of us spoke. The conclusion was obvious: Someone had been up there. Or they were up there now.

“I’ll go see who it is,” said Whitley.

“No,” I said.

“Why not? I want to see if it’s Jim—”

“He’ll see you. If you interfere, we won’t know what really happened—”

“Then let me just see if I can find his bike.”

“Don’t.” I grabbed her arm.

“Bee, what’s the matter with— Stop it!”

She yanked it loose, about to take off, but suddenly the sound of someone yards away fighting a path through the brush made her stop dead.

None of us moved as we watched the top of a dark head bobbing toward us.

It was Jim. A wave of horror choked me.

The grass trembled and shook. Martha stepped out.

We gaped at her. Her neon-blue hair was gone. She was her old self from Darrow, dark hair in a careless ponytail, oversized Oxford shirt.

“What hole did you just crawl out of?” asked Kipling.

“We thought you ditched us,” said Wit.

“Yeah. Sorry about that.” She adjusted her glasses. “For some reason—I think it was because I was thinking of the map of the entire quarry before the wake—I ended up waking not by the south fence with you guys, but by the east fence behind the Pancake House. I had to hike the mile along the quarry road to get here.” She took a deep breath. “Seen anything yet?”

“Only that light,” said Whitley, indicating the Foreman’s Lookout.

Martha squinted up at it. She seemed unsurprised.

“Did you see anyone along the road?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

It was then that I noticed she was drenched in sweat. Her shirt clung to her. Her hair was plastered to her forehead. Walking along the quarry road wouldn’t have exerted her to that extent. She was lying.

Noticing my stare, she smiled thinly and slipped past me to the pipe, wiping her forehead.

“Now what?” she whispered.

“Now we wait and see,” I said, moving beside her.



* * *



—

The car arrived at one-thirty.

We heard it coming before we saw it. A loose hubcap. Radio blaring. The four of us fell silent, standing shoulder to shoulder along the pipe. Gold headlights swept across the grass. Then a red Nissan slowly rounded the quarry road, bouncing and clanging along the uneven ground before stopping right beside the Foreman’s Lookout. I couldn’t see who was driving, though I could make out a For Sale sign in the back window.

“Vida Joshua?” whispered Whitley, incredulous.

The engine idled, white moths whirling in the headlights. The radio switched off. There was a moment of silence. Then the driver’s door opened, and someone climbed out.

When I saw who it was, chills electrocuted my spine.

Cannon.

He dressed in jeans, his old gray hacker’s hoodie. He fought through the grass and disappeared into the old mapping office, a sagging shed with a tin roof, though after a minute he reemerged, agitated. He clambered back to the car, texted someone, waited for a response, crossing and uncrossing his arms. As I watched him, I wondered how Cannon of all people had come to be driving Mr. Joshua’s car, a car that usually remained parked behind the music school when Vida wasn’t using it. Then I remembered how he and Whitley had always stolen things around campus. He had stolen the car to drive out here to meet someone.

“Hello?” Cannon called. “Anybody here?”