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.
Mack decides she would rather not. She deliberately slows her pace, lets Ava leave her behind. But to her frustration, Ava keeps slowing, looking over her shoulder.
“Come on, Mack,” she huffs. “I want to pee in a toilet.”
Mack can’t argue with that, so she rejoins Ava, letting her eyes track the trail Atrius left. The neon is holding on to the last glow of twilight.
Mack wonders what would happen if she followed it. If she let herself be swallowed by the night, by the maze. Would the arrows point her deeper and deeper into the park until she never returned? Or would they disappear, leaving her alone, aimless, directionless? Lost.
It doesn’t feel like a bleak option. It feels familiar.
They reach camp after a solid twenty minutes of walking toward the spotlight. Ava has an uncanny sense of direction, which is useful for now, but overall bad news for Mack. She has to remember that. Ava isn’t her friend, she’s her competition. The money seems nebulous; even the nature of the competition somehow burned away as the sun crawled overhead. It feels like Mack has always been here, like she will always be here. The idea that there’s an end point, a goal, is gossamer floating on the air, sparkling and ephemeral.
Is any of it real? Is she still up in the rafters, staring down at the shelter?
Is she still up in the pantry, staring down at the pool of darkness seeping slowly across the floor?
She reaches out and lets her fingertips brush the back of Ava’s shirt. She presses her fingertips against her own heart. The only breathing noises she hears are her own. Not the wet, gasping breaths of a dying life.
Mack closes her eyes. Her head aches. She might have heat stroke in spite of the shade. Doesn’t matter.
Ava strides into camp toward the sullen writer and Brandon, the only two back so far, and ignores the bathrooms in contradiction to what she said earlier.
The table is absolutely laden with food and water. Four or five times as much as was there before. Why?
Doesn’t matter. Bathroom. Mack nearly cries at the pain of relief.
When Mack comes out, Ava is standing on the edge of camp, her arms folded, her eyes narrowed. “They didn’t hear anything,” she says, as though Mack asked. Mack did not ask. Mack will not ask.
“Do you think something is really wrong?” Brandon joins Ava, his kind freckled nose wrinkled in concern. “Maybe she got hurt. It would have been Rebecca, right?”
“Or the other Ava,” Ava says.
“I am not the other Ava,” a voice snaps from the darkness. “You’re the other Ava.” Beautiful Ava staggers into the camp and flings herself at the table, chugging a water bottle so fast it drips down her throat. Her eye makeup has drifted downward, leaving dark hollows beneath her eyes. Lines of either sweat or tears have created a strangely striped effect through her foundation. Jaden prowls in after her, sweaty and dirty and struggling to maintain his cooler-than-thou expressions.
“What did you do to her?” Ava folds her arms over her chest. It accentuates her not-negligible biceps, whether she intends it to or not.
Mack wanders away. She doesn’t need to know. She doesn’t want to know. She wants to sleep.
Jaden smiles.
“Listen, asshole, if Rebecca doesn’t come back tonight—”
“Wait, Rebecca?” beautiful Ava interrupts. “I thought we were talking about Sydney.”
“You’re helping him?” Ava says, shaking her head in disgust.
“Why would we be talking about Sydney?” Brandon asks, innocently confused.
“Because they were the ones who got her out,” Ava says.
Jaden shrugs, a smug mask descending over his face. “All’s fair, et cetera et cetera.” The way he enunciates et cetera sets Mack’s teeth on edge. It sets Ava’s fists on clench, as well. “I would think you’d know at least about the war part,” Jaden continues, “if not the love part.”
Ava laughs. It takes Jaden by surprise, cracking his deliberately posed face. Then she moves so fast toward him that he stumbles back, bumping into the table. “Stay the fuck out of my way or you’ll wish we never met.”
Jaden tries to recover with a laugh, but it’s as empty as beautiful Ava’s discarded water bottle. “Too late for that.”
Ava turns to Mack, but Mack is already heading for the showers. She’s not on Ava’s side. She’s not on anyone’s side. She forgot, today. She can’t forget again.
* * *
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