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But as she puts her first leg in, she looks down and sees a dull glint of silver. She knows that necklace. It looked so pretty on Rosiee. She had envied what a specific, clear sense of self Rosiee conveyed with her heavy silver jewelry. She crouches down and picks up the necklace. The clasp is broken.
Rebecca looks closer. There’s a black mark on the clasp. Sticky, and actually not quite black. Very dark red. If Rosiee’s necklace caught and dug in hard enough to draw blood, surely Rosiee would have noticed.
Rebecca slowly withdraws her leg. Looks closer at the opening.
There’s a scrap of cloth, torn. She recognizes it from Rosiee’s shirt. A few steps backward, bumping into one of the skeletal horses, grinning sightlessly at her. There, a boot. How hard would Rosiee have to be struggling to lose a boot? It isn’t like it’s a pump, or a slip-on. There are deep gouges in the boot, too, scrapes where it must have been dragged against the ground. Trying to find purchase.
Rebecca stumbles off the carousel platform, heart racing, eyes searching wildly. This is not a rom-com.
This is not a rom-com.
The sun cuts across the treetops, flooding the carousel with light. There are dark smears of what could be rust. Oil. Black water. Blood.
“Fuck this zombie shit,” Rebecca whispers. “Hey!” she shouts, hitting the nearest path. “Hey! Help! I need help! I think something bad happened to Rosiee! If anyone is watching, I don’t care if I’m out! Something is wrong! Something is seriously wrong!”
She runs into the hedges, pushing through toward the camp. With her shrill cries fading and muffled by the eager green, it’s as though the carousel has never been disturbed. All except for the glints of silver left behind, winking a code in the sunlight no one is there to decipher.
* * *
—
Mack feels the tension as Ava hears it, too. Whether the person shouting is near or far is hard to tell, with the structures and the trees and the general chaos of the park breaking up the sounds, flinging them haphazardly through the air.
Ava shifts and pushes her eye to the ivy. Mack does the same, only because she can’t bear not to.
They don’t see anything.
“Sounds like Rebecca,” Ava whispers.
Mack hisses in response. Someone got set up to lose yesterday. That had to be what the ringing metal was. This is probably another trick.
The shouting cuts off abruptly, and Mack nearly lets out a sigh of relief, but it catches in her ribs, static and terrible, as a single scream careens through the park, echoing and being torn apart as it looks for purchase in their ears. In any ears.
Ava moves. Mack’s hand shoots out, grabbing her arm.
“No,” she whispers. “It’s a trick.”
Footsteps, then. An awkward, uncoordinated run. LeGrand hurries past them in the direction of the screams. He’s an idiot.
He’s not an idiot. Mack knows it. She knows the difference between a horror movie scream, a scream meant to imitate human agony, and the real thing.
She turns and sees a single tear trace down Ava’s face before Ava squeezes her eyes closed and turns her head so she can’t see down anymore. Ava knows the difference, too. “Jaden,” Ava whispers, reassuring herself or Mack or neither of them. “I’ll bet it’s him, setting everyone up.”
They both stay where they are, trapped in the prison of silence left in the wake of an unanswered scream.
* * *
—
The sheer, mindless boredom of the passage of the sun, written on their bodies in dappled secrets, feels like it’s mocking the panic and fear the beginning of the day offered. Mack has nothing to do but wait, wonder, and replay the scream over and over in her head until it blends and bleeds into the other screams that have been a constant soundtrack in her life.
Until she can convince herself that she was hearing what she wanted to. What she didn’t want to. Whichever. It wasn’t a real scream. She’s primed to expect terror, to hear pain. That’s all.
Ava is silent and still next to her, and whatever her thoughts are wrestling with, Mack is not privy to them. She’s glad for it, too. She’d rather be alone in her own head. She shifts, infinitesimal movements so as not to shake the trellis or make the ivy whisper betrayal. Pressing an eye against a gap in the leaves, she stares down at the park.
She isn’t looking for anything, not hoping for anything, utterly incurious. But a neon slash catches her attention. Everything else in the park is time-faded, sun-bleached, rust-rotted, mold-claimed. This strip of paint is like a blinking Vegas sign.
Atrius. She follows the line of it, and at the edge of her vision she sees another, this one formed like an arrow. A path. A path to what, though? What was Atrius doing? Trying to keep track of where he was going or where he had been? Trying to lure them into a trap? Or just being an asshole with a can of spray paint, marking his presence on a place utterly indifferent to it? Why anyone would want to leave traces of themselves everywhere they went is beyond Mack.
But then it clicks. It’s a maze, he’d said, and she assumed he was being a pretentious artist. But he was telling her about the park itself. She turns her head to whisper her revelation to Ava, but Ava’s eyes are squeezed shut, and even this close, she seems impossibly far away. So Mack does what she does best:
Nothing.
At last, the sun sets. Mack lets Ava climb down first, leaning precariously far over the edge to keep one of Ava’s hands to steady her. Then she follows. They don’t talk on the way back to camp, but Ava moves with an urgency she didn’t have yesterday. She’s nervous. She wants to know what happened.