There were pads in the bathroom. They might have abandoned camp, but that doesn’t mean camp’s not still there.

  She doesn’t know where she is, though. Jaden well and truly fucked her in so many more ways than he knows. Her sense of direction has never been great, and even though she can tell east because of the rising sun, knowing east does her no good when she has no idea where the camp is relative to her current position.

  She stops, catches her breath, tries to figure out where she is. She doesn’t deserve this. Not the betrayal, not the humiliation, and not the ever-increasing sense of wrongness, of dread, of fear pricking at the back of her neck.

  A branch snaps somewhere behind her, and Ava takes off like a frightened rabbit, certain that, whatever’s there, she doesn’t want to see.

  * * *

  —

  It’s day now, so Mack’s awake, but it feels like she’s sleeping. She has that floaty sensation she craves, that she sleeps just to find: hovering between conscious and not, weightless and warm and free.

  Maybe it’s Ava curled against her on one side and Brandon’s cheerful presence on the other. Maybe it’s the fact that this is a genuinely good hiding spot, and for this day, at least, she thinks they’ll be safe. This day is all she’s thinking about. This hour, this minute, this second, this moment. She can float here, exist here. She’s safe.

  A ticking noise filters through the flimsy, dry wood separating them from daylight. It drags her back into reality, back into the passage of time. Tick, tock, time’s almost up.

  No. Not a ticking noise. A clicking noise. LeGrand. Ava hears it, too. She tenses, then shifts to crawl to the exterior wall. Mack and Brandon do the same. The nice thing about being in a building that could fall apart at a strong breeze is that there are plenty of cracks and holes they can press their eyes to, seeing outside without being seen themselves.

  “What—” Brandon whispers, but Mack jabs him hard in the side, and he cuts off his question.

  Mack holds her breath and keeps her eye on the path beneath them. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for, but it’s going to be bad. She knows it will, because she was happy, and what right did she have to feel that way?

  She half-expects screams like with Rebecca, so it puzzles her when it’s only beautiful Ava, stumbling silently past. Then beautiful Ava glances behind her shoulder, revealing a face contorted into a mask of silent horror. Of absolute, devastating fear so complete no sound can hold it, no breath can expand to fill the void of terror ripped into the soul of a person.

  Her face is bleeding, dark trails already soaking down to her shirt, and there’s a streak of blood down the inside of one leg, too. She continues past their hiding spot, oblivious to their observation.

  “Shit,” Ava breathes.

  “Could be a trap,” Brandon whispers, but he doesn’t sound certain. He shouldn’t sound certain.

  Ava grabs Mack’s arm, so hard it hurts. Mack puts her own fingers over Ava’s. Not to peel them away, but to increase the pressure. To keep Ava here, to be the one to make her stay this time.

  “If it’s a game, win,” Ava says, her voice fierce. “And if it’s not, survive.” Ava turns in their tiny space, her shoulder slamming Mack into Brandon.

  “No,” Mack hisses.

  “Keep her safe,” Ava commands Brandon, and then she slides out of their spot. Mack is frozen. She wants to follow. Not to help beautiful Ava, but to stay with her own Ava. Whatever happens, to be with Ava, to not be left behind again, hidden and safe and alone.

  She’s already survived alone once, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

  Mack turns around so she can scoot toward the exit to their wooden womb. It’s harder to maneuver in here with Brandon sprawled out, inadvertently blocking her. He still has his eye pressed against the crack in the wall.

  Ava, already outside, shouts, “Stay where you are!” either to LeGrand or to Mack and Brandon, or maybe to all three. Mack reaches for the edge of the platform, but Brandon’s hand grabs her ankle, his grip a vise.

  “Let go,” Mack whispers, but his grip is so tight it’s shaking. No. Brandon is shaking, trembling all over, his face still pressed to the wall, his whole body seized up with whatever it is he’s witnessing.

  “Don’t move,” he whispers. “Oh god, please, please don’t move, oh god, oh god, oh god.”

  The tone of his voice is exactly how she felt when she heard what was happening in the family room, tucked away safely in Maddie’s hiding spot. It sounds like someone who knows death is right there, praying that somehow, some way, it will miss them.

  Mack doesn’t move.

  * * *

  —

  Ava has a thick pipe in hand. The contours of it fit her palm exactly right, the heft and weight of it comforting. She’d prefer a gun, but this works, too.

  “Stay where you are!” she shouts, waving the pipe in the general direction of where she thinks LeGrand is hiding, an overgrown stand of trees. If she’s getting out now, fine, but one of her friends is going to win.

  Mack.

  She wants Mack to win. Or survive. And she knows Mack will do it, too.

  “Ava!” she shouts, running after the other woman. Ava Two is ahead of her on the path, a stumbling shamble of a run, like someone who’s been bitten by a zombie and still thinks they can outrun the infection. Blood trails down her leg, though it’s a smaller path than the blood from her head, soaking into her shirt so thoroughly Ava can see it from behind, now, too.

  Ava Two twitches when she hears her name, a puppet with the wrong string pulled, but she doesn’t stop moving. “No,” she moans. “Run! Hide!”

  Ava looks over her own shoulder. There’s nothing back there. Nothing. But there—the crunch of a dead leaf. And there, a shuffle of dirt over the cracked and pitted pavement.

  The tiny hairs left on the back of her neck rise, and, for the first time in years, she wishes she had hair there, irrationally longs for the false sense of protection a curtain of hair would provide for the base of her skull, the skin at the back of the neck, a cover for the sudden overwhelming sense of her own absolute softness and vulnerability.

  Her hand tightens on the pipe. Fuck that. Ava is not vulnerable. Ava is a fucking warrior, and anyone who tries to hurt her or Ava Two or anyone on her watch is going to find that out the hard way. A pipe-to-the-face hard way.

  Ava puts on as much speed as she can, her leg screaming in protest. Her knee doesn’t bend much anymore, and her ankle is basically soldered in place, so running isn’t really an option. Fortunately, Ava Two isn’t moving very fast, and Ava catches her, puts a hand on her shoulder.

  Ava Two stops so suddenly Ava loses her balance and falls flat on her ass. She holds her hand up to the other woman for help standing, but Ava Two doesn’t even seem to see her.

  Ava Two is staring back at where they came from. A low groan, an animal sound of terror escapes from her mouth, and Ava wants to vomit. She knows that sound. She made it when she looked down and saw her leg crushed, and looked to the side and saw Maria gone, body still there but vacant eyes where Ava would never again see herself reflected back in love.

  Ava doesn’t want to look at what the other Ava sees, but she does anyway.

  There’s nothing.

  Nothing is there.

  The winding walkway behind them, curved so they can’t see the Lovers’ Hideaway anymore, is empty.

  But.

  Ava scoots backward on her ass, fingers around the pipe scraping and bruising on the ground, eyes locked on the path. The ivy trailing down from an overhanging tree drapes across something, hanging as though suspended by the wind, or pulled aside like a curtain.

  But there’s nothing there.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” Ava Two breathes.

  “What is it?” Ava demands, her voice high and tight with panic. “I don’t see anything. I don’t see it. Can you see it?”

  The other woman’s gore-painted face turns, and she looks down at Ava as though only now realizing she’s not alone. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t want you to get found.”

  And then Ava’s world breaks neatly in half, tipping her sideways out of reality and into something new, something worse.

  Nothing picks the other Ava up.

  Nothing pierces her torso so it blooms with blood as the other Ava screams, a sound like being torn apart.

  And then the woman’s head disappears.

  Ava’s mind rebels against it, telling her she’s not seeing what she’s seeing. But the other Ava’s head is gone, her scream cut off, her neck gushing blood, her whole body still somehow suspended in the air, and there’s no head, there’s no head, there’s nothing.

  Ava scrambles to her feet, watching as the rest of the woman disappears. And still, there’s nothing. Nothing there, and now no body, either. Only the other Ava’s blood on the ground, fresh and hot, so much Ava can smell it.

  That’s not all she can smell, though. There’s a musk, something far older than fresh blood. Left to rot day in and day out, a layer of putrescence beneath the smell of the world around her.

  Ava grips the pipe. She knows what death smells like, and it’s here for her again, at last.

  She opens her mouth and screams defiance, then swings at nothing.

  * * *

  —

  They hear both screams.

  There’s no question which Ava is which.

  And there are no more questions, really. At least not about the nature of the competition.

  Mack struggles free of Brandon, slides out of their hiding spot, and bursts into the sunshine. It feels wrong, already, moving around in the open during the day. How quickly she’s been trained.

  Brandon shuffles out after her. There’s something off about his face, something missing that was there before, but now that it’s gone Mack can’t say what it was.

  “Which way?” Mack demands.

  Brandon shakes his head. “It’s too late,” he whispers.

  “No, we can—”

  LeGrand walks toward them, his expression resolute and settled, some truth confirmed. He is no longer haunted. Whatever Brandon saw broke him, and whatever LeGrand saw either gave him strength or broke him so completely he came out a new shape.

  “What was it?” Mack asks. Because LeGrand ran to help before, and if he isn’t running now, it means he doesn’t think there’s any possibility of help. Mack clutches her stomach, wanting to cry or scream, to run after Ava. Join her, however that’s possible, whatever that means. She can’t help but wonder, if she wasn’t here, would Ava still be? Did Mack make this happen? She cracked the shell, her protective shell, she let hope in, she let Ava in, and now this.

  Now this.

  “What was it?” she repeats.

  LeGrand shrugs, twitching to the side with the movement as though he has something on his shoulders he’s trying to get off. “I don’t know.”

  “It was the devil.” Brandon’s voice cracks on the verge of tears. He keeps jerking his head, looking at the other building near them, checking to make certain the old rusted frame of a demon is still where it should be. His eyes are wide, too wide, like he can’t close them. Whatever he saw has opened them to something they never considered before, and he can never shut it out again, never blink away the truth.

  “What does that mean?” Mack demands. Brandon needs her to be gentle, but she has to have answers.

  “That’s two.” LeGrand’s tentative features have shifted, a subtle change that rewrites him. He still has a baby face, but gone is the expression of a lost child. “So we have until tomorrow morning. We need to get out.”

  “What do you mean, the devil?” Mack presses.

  Brandon rubs his eyes as though trying to physically remove an image. “It’s a monster. The devil. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Mack looks to LeGrand. He nods in silent agreement.

  They’re not making any sense, but Mack can’t dwell on it. It doesn’t matter. Ava matters. “We have to look for Ava.”

  LeGrand doesn’t argue. Brandon shakes his head. “It won’t help,” he says, but he drifts in the direction he saw Ava run anyway.

  It’s not hard to follow the trail, even for three people inexperienced with such things. Beautiful Ava’s drops of blood are fresh enough they catch the light, a thread of violence unspooling to lead them to what they need to see. To the final destination, the end of Mack’s infant hope. A new thing, so fragile, drowned in the pool of death they stop at.

  “Can someone survive after losing that much blood?” LeGrand’s deep voice is soft but practical. He’s not asking it hypothetically, or hopefully. He’s asking whether they should keep looking. He’s letting Mack make the decision.

  Mack stares at the only evidence remaining that a few minutes ago, she was happy. There’s nothing around the blood. No drag marks. No sense that someone ran, that they made it out, that anything happened here other than two violent, final ends. It’s an exclamation mark of blood, not an ellipsis. And certainly not a question mark. The story is ended.

  There isn’t any more.

  Beautiful Ava is gone. And so is Mack’s Ava. The first person who became a person to her since her family died, the first person who made Mack wonder if there could be more in her life. If there could be life in her life.

  It’s over now. For Mack, at least.

  She looks at LeGrand. Sad, haunted LeGrand, who Ava wanted to protect and help. “Why are you here?”

  He doesn’t seem to consider her line of questioning odd given the circumstance. Perhaps none of them will ever find anything odd again, as long as they live.

  The smell of blood and something older, more decayed, wronger, is overwhelming. As long as they live is feeling like not a very long time at all.

  “I was banished from my family for trying to get a doctor for my sister. It’s against the rules to go outside the compound.”

  “Compound?” Brandon asks.

  “My father’s the prophet,” LeGrand says.

  It doesn’t answer Brandon’s questions—raises far more of them—but Mack understands as much as she needs to. LeGrand was a prisoner. He broke the rules to help. That makes sense for the type of person who runs toward the sound when someone is screaming. He’s here because he was trying to save his sister. Mack is here because she didn’t try to save her sister. Because she hid and did nothing while her world was cut apart.

  “If you get out,” LeGrand says, looking toward the trees where the fence looms somewhere in the impenetrable, winding green, beyond the ever-present stone pathway walls, “will you help her? I’m from Zion Mountain in southeastern Colorado. Her name is Almera. She can’t talk or walk, but she likes bubbles and the color yellow. They won’t give her the care she needs. You’ll have to kidnap her.” LeGrand nods, as though he’s made up his mind about something. “It’s the only way. I should have done it that way.”

  Mack looks at Brandon. Brandon’s eyes are filled with tears, and she can’t imagine him kidnapping anyone. “Give us the details of how to break in and find Almera, just in case. But LeGrand gets to win,” Mack says to Brandon. “If there’s such a thing as winning. And if there’s not, he’s the one who gets out.” She’s afraid Brandon will disagree, that he’ll insist it’s not fair for them to decide on LeGrand without discussing it.

  Brandon swallows hard and nods. “Anyone but Jaden.” His voice cracks and Mack can’t help it. She laughs. Anyone but Jaden.

  Her laughter breaks the spell of the blood, releasing them. They walk on, like Ava would have wanted, like Mack wants. She has one goal now, one goal only: Get LeGrand out. Let him go save his sister, because he still has one, and he can.

  Get LeGrand out, and whatever happens after, she will accept with open arms this time.

  * * *

  —

  It’s almost over. Two more days, and Linda can close her family’s journal and not have to open it again for seven years. Well, six. They do have to plan these things well in advance to make certain everything is in place. And she shouldn’t have to open it again at all, but she will. She knows she will.

  She taps her manicured fingers—an abrasive coral that she thinks looks youthful but that makes her skin look dead—against the leather cover of her family’s book. How long has she kept it? How long have the Nicely women kept everything running? And does she really trust Chuck Callas of all people to take over when she’s done?

  She prefers to think done rather than dead, teasing herself and others with plans to retire to Florida and leave all this behind. But she knows she won’t. Even if Chuck does take over, nominally, she won’t trust it to him alone. It’s too important, and she likes that. Likes that she’s important, likes the feel of the weight of generations who depend on her, likes that she took up the mantle from her parents and their parents. She likes to think of how proud her grandparents would be, that they might not have been the venerated Callases who started it all, but that it was their daughter, and then their granddaughter who safeguarded their gift.

  The thick, heavy journal, far larger than that other book, stolen and lost now, sits on her coffee table next to a stack of Good Housekeeping magazines. No one reads it. After all, Linda knows the stories by heart, the other family representatives know them by reputation, and the rest of the town and everyone it feeds doesn’t know them and doesn’t want to. Linda’s own daughter doesn’t want anything to do with it. That’s what hurts the most—the lack of gratitude, the lack of respect. That her daughter is as selfish as the rest of them. Angry at the very thought, Linda takes her family’s sacred history and puts it in the special hidden shelf of her china hutch.