These Deadly Games(97)

But Zoey kept typing. “Let me turn off the password.” She clicked around for a few seconds. “Huh.”

My pulse sped up. “Huh? What’s huh?” What had she found?

“Well … there aren’t any files on here.”

My stomach dropped. “Wait, what?”

She spun the laptop around to face me, showing me the main C drive files. Or lack thereof. “It’s a wiped drive.”

“What programs did he have installed?”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing.” He could’ve been using web-based apps the whole time, which he could access from either of his laptops or his phone.

“What about the web browser?” I asked, panicked. “Anything in the history?”

She swiveled the laptop back around. Sanchez looked conflicted, like he wanted to snatch the laptop and follow protocols. Zoey clamped her lips together tightly as she clicked around. I narrowed my eyes. “Nope,” she said, “history’s been cleared out. Looks like Chrome’s the only browser installed…”

Over her shoulder, out the window, I saw Mom’s car pulling into our driveway. Oh, God. How was I going to explain all of this to her? This would destroy her—

But then I saw something that made my heart go still.

Someone was in the passenger seat. Someone shorter than Mom. Someone with two long braids that swung behind her as she leaped from the car.

Caelyn.

Alive.

“Oh my God.” Before anyone could stop me, I was out the front door, sprinting across the yard. “Caelyn!”

She spun and spotted me. “Crystal! Oh my God, you’ll never believe what happened!” It was like a story was bubbling up inside her, ready to burst. She was free. Free. But her eyes widened in fear when she saw the police chief following me. “Uhm, what—”

I barreled into her, my hug cutting off her question, sobbing into her hair, clutching her tightly. She was here. Really here. She smelled like strawberry shampoo, and her huge earring dug into my cheek, and she was real, alive, alive. I released her from my embrace to cup her cheeks, taking in all the little details—her slightly bugged hazel eyes behind her thick glasses, her button nose with a smattering of freckles, her full pink cheeks. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said as I examined her arms. No gashes. No cuts. None on her neck either. Huh. She giggled like I’d tickled her and yanked her arms back. “Dork. Are you okay?” Her smile dissolved again at the sight of Andrew’s blood on my hands, and she gasped. Caelyn wasn’t covered in any blood at all. Her hair was frizzy as always, but in double plaits, which I knew she couldn’t do herself; we always had to braid each other’s hair. And she was wearing black leggings, but yesterday she’d worn jeans. And those earrings … I didn’t remember those.

Mom slammed her door. “What’s going on?”

“Mom?” My voice was strained. “Where did they find her?”

But I knew. I knew, I knew, I knew.

“What do you mean?” said Mom. Sanchez merely watched, arms crossed. “I just picked her up from school. I almost had to take one of her new friends home with us, too. Tessa, was it?”

Caelyn nodded distractedly, still staring at my bloodied hands. “You were right, Crystal … about laughing it off…”

“You took my advice,” I said. Her bully. Tessa. I’d told her to laugh off her insults, her pranks. And now, somehow, they were friends.

Because Caelyn had been at Frost Valley this entire time.

She’d never been kidnapped at all.

“What the hell is going on—” Mom’s words evaporated as a high-pitched buzz filled my ears, and brown spots speckled my vision as I fell to my knees. Someone caught me before my head could slam into the ground—maybe Sanchez—but it might as well have split into a million pieces.

I killed Matty for nothing. I set a SWAT team on Randall’s dad for nothing. I nearly killed Akira—and maybe permanently injured her—for nothing. I tied up Zoey like some monster for nothing. All of it was for absolutely nothing.

Had I made the whole thing up? Was Dylan—Andrew—even real? Or was he a figment of my imagination—a way to grapple with the guilt of killing Brady after Zoey blackmailed me? Was I so desperate to keep our secret, so traumatized that I sought revenge on my own friends? Had my brain concocted this wild scenario with An0nym0us1 to justify my actions?

The voices around me merged, and I shook my head, like that would somehow fit the scrambled pieces back together. Sanchez was on his knees in front of me, gripping my shoulders and trying to keep me upright, saying something, but I couldn’t hear the words. I scanned everyone’s faces until I found Zoey’s. She covered her mouth as tears streamed down her face. Even Randall’s eyes watered.

“You guys…” I finally said. “Dylan was real, right? Tell me he was real.”

“Of course he was real,” said Zoey. Of course. Zoey knew who he was, too—so did Randall and Sanchez. He was real. An0nym0us1 was real. It had all really happened. I didn’t do this myself. That was only what Dylan—Andrew—wanted me to think.

He’d framed me. He’d faked Caelyn’s kidnapping somehow. “I swear to God, he did this. Somehow, he did this. There’s a tracking device!” I pointed to the gravel where I’d tossed the tracker. “He was tracking me, but I found it on my car…” But Andrew had been in my driveway earlier. He probably picked it up and took it with him … and it went up in flames with the rest of the evidence. Just as he’d planned all along.