She looked up to see the sun scooting behind a cloud, and the air turned gray as she looked around, trying to get her bearings. Through the trees she saw a large, boxy brown house, like something from the Colonial era, not more than fifty paces away. That’s weird, she thought. I thought this part of Ascension was uninhabited. Seeing an unfamiliar landmark suggested to Skylar that she was lost, and she thought about turning around, retracing her steps, and trying to find a different path. But she quickly talked herself out of it. The woods weren’t that big, and the party site had to be around here somewhere.
The trees were casting shadows now as the sun dipped lower in the sky. Their branches looked like fingers, poking their way down, grabbing at her. She tripped on a root but caught herself against some bark, rough and sandpapery.
She was less sure all of a sudden. This wasn’t right; she’d been walking for too long. She was lost. What if the owner of that house back there came out and got her in trouble for trespassing? But there was light up ahead—another clearing. She would check it out. If that wasn’t it, she would turn around.
Suddenly she found herself by a pond, where drooping, dead cattails ringed water that glistened with a paper-thin layer of ice. Larger pine trees stood around it, sentinels of this small woodland oasis. There were no benches here, no wooden signposts—this wasn’t a popular watering hole, just a tiny, dark body of water.
Sitting on top of that thin sheet of ice was a red flower—just like the one Skylar had worn at her party. The one Meg had given her. A shiver went through her from head to toe, and she balled up her hands inside her pockets. Memories came flooding back—how Em’s eyes had widened in fear when she’d seen the flower, how she’d grabbed it from Skylar and thrown it into the fire. And now here it was, or one that was almost identical, shimmering red among dead brown reeds and grasses.
As Skylar made her way over to it she felt as though she was walking through a dream. There was something not right about the flower, about the day, about the pond, but she felt unable to change course.
She stopped at the bank, her boots sinking into the slushy muck. The flower was just sitting there, as if it had grown out of the ice. And then, as she reached to grab it—it was just within her reach—her foot hit something solid in the reeds. Something that was not water, mud, or ice.
She kicked at it. It was dense and firm, kind of like a wet, decaying log. She bent down and swept aside the thick growth of tall, sun-bleached grasses.
It didn’t quite register at first. She found herself stumbling backward, almost like her body understood what it was before her mind did. Her stomach heaved and bile came up her throat.
It was a leg. She’d tripped on a leg that was not a log and was lodged in the mud at the edge of the pond.
A leg.
A leg attached to a body.
Both of the corpse’s legs were askew and washed up mostly on the bank; its torso and head were submerged, barely visible beneath the murky water and chunks of floating ice. But she could see enough to know that she was looking at a male face, which stared up at her from just below the surface.
She lurched again, still heaving. The sour taste of fear and nausea filled her mouth. Once she could stand, she backed up again, until she hit something—someone.
Skylar screamed, a high-pitched, frantic scream.
“It’s okay, Sky. It’s just me.”
Meg was standing right behind her. She looked back and forth impassively between Skylar and the body.
“There’s a—” Skylar blubbered. “I found a—”
Meg wrinkled her nose and cocked her head to one side. “Dead as a doorknob, huh?” she said, and Skylar realized she had already noticed the corpse. “Thank goodness we saw your bike out there. We wouldn’t want you out here alone!”
“How did you know that was my . . .” She trailed off, noticing that Ty and Ali were there as well, the three of them arranged like the three points of a triangle.
The air went out of Skylar’s chest. For the first time, she saw Meg—her lustrous hair and cupid’s face, her red choker, her thin fingers—and was frightened. Who was this person, seeing a dead body and observing it calmly as if it was something you see every day?
Ty and Ali weren’t any better. All three of the girls looked . . . blank. Skylar shivered as she was overcome by another wave of nausea. She leaned over and retched.
“Sad, isn’t it?” Ty said placidly, shaking her head like she was watching a disappointing news report. “I think he worked at Ascension. I recognize him.”
“Was he a . . . teacher?” Skylar said, wiping her mouth, still shaking. She found herself wondering what his face had looked like when he was alive. What his mouth had looked like when he talked. What his eyes had looked like when they weren’t frozen in terror.
Ali tossed her blond hair over her shoulder and giggled, a jarring sound that made Skylar’s toes curl in her boots. “Well, you could certainly learn a lot from him.”
Skylar narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about? Why are you laughing?”
Meg came up and put her hand on Skylar’s back, rubbing it in small circles. “Come on. You’ve had a shock. We’ll take you home.”