He checks his flanks. He folds his arms across his chest and brings his heels together, making his body as small as possible. He asks, “She might shoot again?”

  I shrug.

  Grayson looks either puzzled or pissed, but he’s not paying attention to me. He’s eyeing the ground near Gus. He knows that’s where the shot came from. Maybe he already knew I took his rifle, or maybe he’s figuring it out at this very moment. If he finds it—when he finds it—there will be hell to pay. One way or another.

  As for Logan . . .

  “Look at you,” he says to Gus between gasping breaths. “You’re . . . okay. When I heard these guys had you . . . I thought . . . I thought . . . I thought . . . they’d toss you in the firebox. Kill you . . . like we did to Cole.”

  For Gus, these words might as well be another gunshot. They nearly knock him over. “You did wh-wh-what to Cole?” he says, his body shuddering but staying put.

  “It’s all good, Boyatee,” Logan says. “We got your . . . your revenge. Made the world a . . . safer place. If you have the . . . the . . . the . . . stomach for it . . . look in the hole. It’s your old frenemy. Not pleasant but . . . but . . . but necessary.”

  Gus’s eyes are so wide right now. He looks so scared, even more scared than he was in the sugarhouse. A tear slips down his face.

  “Settle down, everyone, there’s no one in the hole,” I say, because Logan must not be able to see what Grayson and I see. Which is pure and utter emptiness.

  “Sure there is,” Logan responds, and he closes his eyes and smiles. “Cole’s . . . in the hole. It even . . . rhymes . . . rhymes . . . rhymes . . .”

  As Logan’s voice fades out, Grayson’s busts in. “Holly’s right. Cole isn’t dead, and he sure as hell isn’t in that hole.”

  Grayson is holding the horseshoe in his hand and he’s shuffling his feet through drifts of nearly knee-high snow. Clearly, he’s searching for the rifle. I should probably look for it too. Grab it before he does. But I’m too focused on Gus. What is he doing here?

  Gus’s head slowly turns until he’s facing the hole, which is illuminated by the tractor lights. When I last saw the kid, he was in that van, heading in the opposite direction from where we are now.

  “I thought you went to Cole’s trailer,” I say to him.

  He nods, but he doesn’t look at me. He wipes the tear from his face and keeps his gaze locked on the hole. His voice is soft and distant, almost like he’s in a trance. He says, “Cole wasn’t there. And that didn’t seem right. The server was gone. Stuff was rotting. Esther was worried, so she called the police. Tweety didn’t like that, so he left. I asked him to bring me here.”

  “Esther called the cops?” Grayson says, stopping his search for a moment. “Why would she do that?”

  “She didn’t say anything about any of you,” Gus says quickly. “It was about the smell. And the server.”

  “You mean Cole’s Heart?” Grayson asks as he glares at Logan.

  But Logan doesn’t do anything. His eyes are closed. His body is slumping.

  Gus, on the other hand, nods and says, “Cole called it his Heart, yeah, but it was more important than that. It was the server for the Cavalry. He had me set up a device to send texts if the server was ever disconnected. Twenty-four hours later. Distress beacons. That’s how I got those coordinates. They directed me here. So if anything ever happened to the server, the Cavalry’s legacy would live on.”

  “The Cavalry isn’t just Cole, though. It’s your legacy as well, isn’t it?” Grayson says. “You posted on that trash site too, didn’t you?”

  Gus doesn’t answer.

  And I see another one of my “Cole is alive!” walls crumble. If the texts from Cole went out automatically twenty-four hours after the Heart was disconnected, then that means Cole wasn’t actually sending them. It was a failsafe. Like a dead man’s switch on a train. The conductor dies, the train stops; the server is stolen, the texts are sent. Which leads me to wonder about what other mechanisms Gus might have set up.

  “How is content uploaded to the Cavalry?” I ask Gus.

  He doesn’t answer.

  So I peer into the dark woods behind him, hold up a hand, and call out, “Meeka, if you want to take another shot, then—”

  “Cole has full control of the server and the Cavalry,” he blurts out. “He puts some content up manually, like the stuff I send him. The Emperor Augustus posts. But a lot of it goes up automatically. I built a system for him. Whenever something new landed in certain folders on the server, it posted to the Cavalry with the Dank Lord of Memes watermark. It was supposed to inspire memes and lead traffic back to the site. Put a bunch of content out there and hope that a small percentage of it catches on. Sort of like panning for gold. Most of it was mud. But a tiny bit was shiny.”

  “Is that what happened to Logan’s GOTCHYA?” I ask.

  Gus nods again. “His pics went into a folder. Then went online with the watermark. Like I said, ‘panning for gold.’”

  “And his videos?” I ask, because that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

  “Too big to upload automatically,” Gus says. “They live on the server, but only screen caps go online. Like the thumbnails on YouTube videos.”

  “Jesus,” I say, because Jesus! There goes another wall. Crumble, crumble, crumble. If the screen cap was an automatic post, then it’s possible that no one else has actually seen the confession, especially if Gus didn’t have access to the Heart. It’s possible that he’s as clueless as he’s always claimed to be.

  It still doesn’t explain why the Thule is empty, though. Cole is still out there somewhere.

  “Can I get what I came here for and go?” Gus asks, though he’s not asking me, or Grayson, or Logan. He’s asking the woods, where he thinks Meeka is hiding with a rifle.

  Of course, she doesn’t respond.

  But I do. “Depends. What’s in that box, Gus?”

  At this point, he probably realizes he has no other choice but to tell us everything, because he sighs and says, “It’s the backup for the server. It’s the only one. Cole didn’t trust clouds, for . . . obvious reasons. So he made a physical backup once a week and hid it. I should’ve guessed it was in the wall. This place is special to him.”

  “Did you steal my Heart? Good thing I’ve got another,” Grayson growls. He’s quoting the beacon, the text that was sent to Meeka, and he’s looking at Logan.

  Again, Logan doesn’t respond. Either he’s passed out or he’s ignoring Grayson. In either case, I’d be willing to bet he lost the Heart.

  Lost the Heart. Boy oh boy, isn’t that a perfect metaphor for everyone and everything right now? I’ve lost the heart too. I don’t care about these people. They don’t care about me. Why not let Gus have the backup to his nasty little website? What does it matter? Unless Cole came back here and replaced it in the last week, it’s probably too old to have our confession on it. And even if it does, that confession doesn’t mean anything. Some walls have come down, but my argument still stands. Cole is out there somewhere. Probably conspiring with my former best friend. Like Grayson has been insisting. I hate that he’s right, but he is.

  “Stand down, Meeka,” I shout into the woods.

  And relief crashes over Gus. His shoulders fall. He puts a hand on his chest.

  “Wait a sec,” Grayson says as he sweeps his foot through the snow again. “I don’t think we’re done here.”

  “I think we are,” I say. “Take your precious little box, Gus.”

  Gus pauses for a moment. Then bends over to pick up his mask. Which . . . whatever. I don’t even care why he was wearing that ridiculous thing. He’s a weird kid. We’ll leave it at that.

  Gus shakes off the mask and stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket. Then he reaches back into the snow to search for the toolbox.

  Ding.

  Ding.

  Ding.

  Ding.

  Logan’s phone is hidden by the snow that covers his body, but messages light it up. It’s like a fallen star in his lap.

  He doesn’t reach for it. He doesn’t move at all. Neither do the other two. So I go for it.

  I grab Logan’s phone because I need it to be messages from Cole, telling us the game is over. No one wins. It’s a tie. We can all walk away.

  It’s the opposite of that. The messages are from Esther Green.

  I’m not sure how to tell you this.

  But you were his friend so I think you should know.

  Cole Weston is dead. The police found his body behind his trailer.

  I’m so sorry, Logan.

  As my last wall crashes down, I notice Gus’s hands stop searching.

  Grayson’s foot stops too.

  Gus bites his quivering lip.

  Grayson drops his silly horseshoe.

  They both found something. And I’m going to have to do something about that, aren’t I? I pocket the phone.

  “What is it?” Grayson asks.

  I don’t know if I can tell them, but they’re going to find out soon enough. “They found Cole,” I say. “He’s . . .”

  “He’s what?” Gus asks.

  “I don’t know what Meeka did, but we’re . . . we’re—”

  I can’t finish my thought because, suddenly, someone is laughing. Loudly.

  It’s Logan. His eyes aren’t open, but he’s awake. And he’s laughing and coughing and sounding like he’s completely lost it.

  “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” he says. “Fucked, fucked, fucked . . . Gus. Get it? Get it?”

  We stare at him.

  And he keeps laughing and laughing and laughing.

  MEEKA

  NO ONE CAN SPEAK FOR ME.

  Not Logan. Not Grayson. Not even Holly. Sure as hell not Cole. They try. He tried. Failures, each and every one of them. They think they know what I want. But have they ever truly listened to me? Of course they haven’t. It’s not that my voice isn’t loud enough. It’s that they choose not to hear. They assume they know better, and so they try to speak for me.

  I’m sitting in my dad’s Herman Miller Aeron chair, at his desk, with the lamp and the iMac filling the book-lined office with a soft yellow glow. Cole’s Heart sits on the desk but it isn’t beating. It’s blinking. Its little light flashes on and off. Blue, then black, blue, then black. I plugged it into the iMac as soon as I got home.

  It was a fluke that I found it. Some people might’ve called it fate, but fluke works fine for me. As I drove, slip-sliding my way home along the snowy Malvern Loop, I saw a splash of red in the middle of the white, like blood on a clean sheet. I got out, reached down, and picked it up. I held the Heart in both hands, fingers wrapped around it, dumbfounded by my dumb luck. Well, lookie here, isn’t that something?

  I set it on the back seat and drove it home, as if it were a stray I planned to nurse back to health. Plugging it in didn’t scare me, because I wasn’t afraid of Cole. I never have been. Maybe I should’ve been, but that doesn’t matter now. It was the others who feared him, and that’s why they murdered him. They like to say they did it for me. But come on, who are we kidding?

  The Heart is a server. Duh. The brand name is on the bottom; it’s called a Strawberry microserver. To gain access to it, I needed a password. It took me about five seconds to crack it. The name of the server is “MY HEART BELONGS TO” and its password is “ME.”

  Short, maybe not so sweet, but oh so obvious. At least to someone who knew Cole.

  Cole used to tell me, “My brain belongs to the world, my soul belongs to you, but my heart belongs to me.” I always figured he was trying (and failing) to be poetic, but what he was really doing was grasping for the last word.

  You see, that’s what the beacon was about. When we were in the sugarhouse and Grayson saw those coordinates on Gus’s phone, I put it all together. Logan unplugged the Heart, and after a designated amount of time, automated messages fluttered out into the world. Like pigeons with messages on their feet. Flappity-flap. One to me, blaming me and telling me that stealing his server was a useless endeavor. Another to Cole’s former best friend and partner-in-slime, sending him to find . . . the backup?

  Make sense? Sure it does.

  So what’s on the Heart? The Cavalry, obviously. That’s why the site hasn’t worked since it was disconnected. Within the Cavalry is GOTCHYA, which is nothing more than a folder containing Logan’s pictures and videos. The apps and site that Logan used as a cloud did nothing more than redirect his data here. Simple.

  Beyond that, there are some programs designed to capture and steal information, to post and share the mountains of garbage Cole put out into the world. All lazy and instant, the way he liked things. And there are plenty of other files and photos here too.

  I’m looking through a slideshow of pics right now. It’s called Cavalry Leaders, and it’s scored to classical music, the type with lots of drums that plays in movies when soldiers shuffle off to war. But the pictures aren’t of soldiers. They’re of Cole and Gus, from when they were awkward, and slightly more innocent, freshmen. I’m guessing Cole’s mom, Teri, was the photographer.

  The two boys are trying out a variety of poses as they stand near the woods next to the trailer. They’re both aiming for manliness and landing on ridiculous. In half the pictures they’re wearing rubber horse masks. It’s beyond embarrassing.

  Cole loved those horrible masks; he even asked me once if he could wear one while we were fooling around. That was a big “no” from me, thank you very much. The Cavalry was a part of his world that didn’t interest me, in any way, shape, or form. Why open that can of worms when life was wormy enough as it was?

  But obviously the Cavalry was important to someone. Earlier today, when we were in the sugarhouse, Gus mentioned he was trying to get revenge, and so he made and spread the meme. It makes sense. It made sense, and that’s why I thought Gus was behind everything. That was my mistake.

  He wasn’t behind everything. Hell, he was hardly behind anything. Only the first meme that sparked our paranoia. But he certainly had the motive to torture me and the others. Because he hates me. He hates everyone I associate with. He believes I stole Cole away, and ruined his silly little site. Which is a bunch of horseshit. The reason the Cavalry was never popular is because it sucked ass, with or without Cole. And I suspect Cole realized that. Though I don’t know for sure.

  The one thing I do know for sure (because it was a point of pride for Cole) is that the whole Cavalry thing started when they posted a humiliating video of Gus. It was from when he was a kid. He was a singing a song. Oh, my goodness, it was terrible, so bad that I’ve never been able to watch it all the way through. It was far more sad than funny. But it got views. It went viral to a degree. And they tried to ride that wave by becoming . . . I don’t know. Political? They were never skilled at it. They could never capture the world’s attention unless it involved humiliation. That’s why Gus tried to humiliate me, with his weak-sauce meme. All the while, he didn’t understand the power he was actually wielding. Because he didn’t know the awful thing my friends were guilty of. Kinda tragic, come to think of it. But here we are.

  Here I am. I didn’t ask for this, any of it. Decisions were made and carried out without my express written or oral approval. If actions speak louder than words, then the others were screaming on my behalf. What I wanted was whispers and solutions that didn’t involve parking lots and drugs and vomit and death and burials and interrogations. Yes, I wanted out. But they saw to it that I’m thoroughly and completely still in this shit.

  And I might be even deeper in now. I sincerely hope not. A few minutes ago, I heard a gunshot coming from the woods. A single gunshot—Bam!

  One gunshot usually means an accident or a warning. Maybe a suicide. You don’t shoot once if you intend to hurt another person. You make sure you finish that job. And as far as I know, there’s only one person out in those woods. Grayson.

  When he stopped by earlier, he “borrowed” the tractor, with the backhoe attached. I watched him drive it toward the grave. That backhoe is probably cutting into the ground and searching for Cole’s body right now. Maybe Grayson has already found the Thule, and out of frustration, he shot his rifle into the air, or into the ground, or into the plastic. (I hope not into himself, though that would be very unlike him.)

  But frustration fits. Frustration makes sense. Especially if he dug, which means he didn’t find Cole’s body. Because that’s not where I left it.

  The night after we buried Cole, I attached that backhoe to the tractor, and I returned to the stone wall and unearthed the Thule. I used the tractor to carry the whole thing and dropped it into the bed of my dad’s pickup. Then I dumped Cole’s body where it should’ve been dumped in the first place—behind his trailer.

  I erased the phones (including Cole’s!), smashed them to bits, and scattered the pieces on the bottom of the hole like I was planting silicon seeds. I wasn’t sure of the best way to get rid of the Thule, so I tossed it back into the hole too, buried it once more. I never thought anyone would have any reason to dig there again. Because I always figured the police would’ve found the body by now. It’s not exactly hidden. It’s near the propane tank I made a point of emptying. Maybe it’s half-eaten by animals. It’s certainly rotting. We could already smell it when we went back there on Sunday.

  When they do find the body, the investigators will perform an autopsy. They’ll conclude that Cole ODed, just like his mother. They’ll notice the propane tank is empty and maybe they’ll come up with a theory. Cole got high, decided to cook something, or turn on the heat, and when those things didn’t work, he went outside to check on the propane, and that’s when the drugs hit him. Down he went.

  They’ll assume he died alone, because why would they assume otherwise? He’s got a little dirt on him? So what? He’s been outside for days. If they find fibers from the tarp on his body, that’ll be easily explained by the tarp I put in the trailer.