Hide(25)

* * *



—

“Why would you tell us that?” Rebecca wraps her arms around herself. “That’s terrible.”

LeGrand is rocking back and forth. The sullen writer is fiddling with his notebook. Mack is silent. She should have gone to the showers with Ava.

Jaden leans back, folding his arms. “I told you so you’d all understand how intensely fucked up it is that the sole survivor of the Hide-and-Seek Massacre is competing in a hide-and-seek tournament. Isn’t that right, Mackenzie Black? I knew I had heard that name somewhere.”

As everyone exclaims at once, Mack stands and goes to her cot. She’s ready for bed.

She can hear beautiful Ava and Rebecca and even the writer guy pestering Jaden with questions. Clipboard and Brandon murmur. The voices rise as Ava comes out of the shower. She’ll know, too. They’ll all know.

At least it will make the competition simple again.

Someone kneels next to her cot. Brandon drops an armful of her preferred supplies into her bag. “I hope you win,” he whispers.

She doesn’t hope anything anymore. When she closes her eyes, she’s back in that space. Curled up. Staring down at Maddie, who stares up at her with teary accusation in her eyes.



* * *



—

Atrius doesn’t mind the dark. It’s when he usually works, anyway. But here’s what he’s wondering: He’s spent two days on the move, painting and tagging and trying to get a handle on the layout of this place. And he hasn’t seen anyone in the park with them. He climbed all the way up the Ferris wheel today, and the view proved what he suspected: It is a maze. Which makes him wonder if the game is less about not being found and more about doing the finding. Linda said that weird thing about a book. What if that’s the actual goal? It’s hide-and-go-seek, after all. Maybe that’s the twist—they have to do both.

He’s running low on paint, but he marks his path as he goes through the maze. He saw a building—white, with pillars like the spa—in the exact center. He’ll get there. First.

Eventually, though, he gets too tired and hungry. He’s close, he knows he is. He’ll find the building and the book tomorrow. His paint, like bread crumbs in the moonlight, will lead him back here.

Eyes on the ground, he doesn’t see the child’s shoe, but he does notice the sensible pumps discarded under a bush. Weird.

He gets back to camp to find a dying fire. Jaden’s cot has two occupants. That’s not the only weird sleeping arrangement, though. The spooky chick with eyes too big for her face is sleeping on her cot, but curled on the ground next to it is the military chick.

The whiny writer’s notebook has fallen off his cot. Atrius picks it up to make sure it’s not the book he’s looking for. But no. Just a notebook. And more than that, it’s blank. Ian’s been pretending to write this whole time.

Bored, Atrius showers and eats and then takes an empty cot for a couple of hours of sleep. He’s going to get to the house in the morning.





DAY THREE


Atrius leaves before dawn.

He finds the temple.

And it finds him.



* * *



—

Mack is surprised when she wakes up in the morning to find Ava sleeping on the ground next to her cot. It’s still the soft predawn light, enough time to get to a good spot. A new spot. She won’t use yesterday’s again, not after that snuffling sound. That searching. She tries to cobble together an image of the person it was, but it’s never a person her brain settles on, and she recoils from the monstrous shape longing to form itself if she’ll only look right at it.

She won’t. She’s good at closing her eyes and her ears and pretending away the horror.

She’s so distracted that she doesn’t notice that Ava is coming with her until she steps out of the camp and onto one of the trails that litter the park. Ava walks quickly, gait uneven and confident.

“Come on,” Ava says, as though she didn’t learn last night that Mack is tainted, broken, haunted. “I saw this place the first day. It’ll be perfect. We’ll be hidden, but we can see the ground if we want to. If we hear something again.”

It’s not lost on Mack that Ava said something, not someone. Maybe her imagination is having a hard time filling in the blanks, too.

Mack wants to ask about it, wants to ask why Ava is still with her, but more troubling than either of those is the sheer relief Mack feels with Ava at her side. She shouldn’t feel relief. She shouldn’t feel anything. And she shouldn’t have to fight the impulse to reach out and take Ava’s hand in her own as they walk down this path together.

Mack deliberately shuffles so their steps aren’t quite so in sync.

But it’s too late to hunt for a better solo hiding place. That’s why she stays with Ava, she tells herself. Just this last day. And then she’ll be alone again, and it will be better. And if it’s not better, well, at least it will be safer. For which of them, Mack isn’t sure.

Ava leads them through twists and tangles of shrubbery, skirting around a few old rides and leaning structures that definitely don’t seem safe. She points to a wide, squat tower with several slides circling it. All the slides have huge gaps, places where entire sections have fallen, and each slide spits the rider out onto a different path. “Hid there the first day. It was a bitch to climb. It’s called a helter-skelter, like the Beatles song.”