We close in near his tent door, calling his name softly and then louder. Lucas even shifts him a little closer to the edge of his tent.
Hope springs through my chest when he groans. He’s waking up! Everything will be all right! It will make sense! But his eyes don’t open, and no more sound comes from his lips. I snag the front of his shirt, desperate.
We shout his name, grab at his arms and hands, but it’s worthless. He’s back out quickly, head tipped to the right and a pool of saliva glistening at the corner of his slack lips.
How the hell is he drooling? I don’t think I could spit if someone offered to pay me. My eyes fall to the empty water bottles beside him. Two empty bottles. The rest of us only had one.
The rest of it rolls through me—my groggy wake-up, Jude’s puking. Did someone put something in our water?
“Did you drink the water last night?” I ask suddenly.
Lucas and Emily nod, and Jude’s brow puckers. “Yeah, why?”
I hold up Mr. Walker’s empty bottles. “I think we felt drugged because we were drugged.”
Chapter 5
No one argues about going to the river now. Mr. Walker isn’t waking up, so we’re out of options. We lumber to our feet carefully and search for the path we used to get up here. Everything is trees and heat and misery now, yesterday’s rain leaving the air thick and sticky. Maybe we went the wrong way. Maybe the forest swallowed up the trail overnight. Or maybe—
We find it, a narrow strip of mud that will lead back to the river or—if we head the other way—to the dirt lot with Ms. Brighton’s car. That’s the end of the trail, but it’s also a three-day hike from here.
Jude steps on the path, but Lucas lifts a hand and frowns.
“Hold up. Are all these footprints ours?”
“There are footprints everywhere,” I say, gesturing at the muddy tracks all over the path.
“Yeah, but if they’re not ours, maybe they belong to whoever did this.”
A chill runs through me as I look around. It makes sense. Someone who wasn’t us was in here, unzipping our tents, destroying our supplies, writing on us. I catch a glimpse of the word on Lucas’s wrist and swallow hard.
“Should we check the camp too?” I ask.
“What does it matter?” Jude asks. “Knowing who it is doesn’t make it unhappen.”
He’s right, and frankly, I have no idea how forensic crime people do this. I can barely tell what smears and indents are footprints, let alone actually pick them apart and assign them to different members of our camp. But I look around anyway, hoping I’ll miraculously spot a boot print with Bad Guy imprinted somewhere in the tread.
“I have no idea what I’m looking at,” Emily confesses.
Lucas snorts. “Me either. OK, bad idea. Let’s go.”
I fall into step behind him, but my eyes drag back to Mr. Walker’s tent. He hasn’t roused again, and I’m afraid to leave him. If anything, he seemed more deeply asleep. That can’t be good.
“I wish I knew what they used to knock us out,” I say, but I mean him. Mr. Walker is the one who isn’t waking up, so he’s the one I’m worried about.
Lucas swats at a cloud of gnats around his head. “That’s the thing. Mr. Walker had the water in his pack the whole time. Who could have gotten to it before we drank it?”
Behind me, Emily scuffs her foot at the ground. “We left all the packs by that overhang when we checked out that gorge yesterday. It was raining, remember?”
“Right,” Lucas says. “Because he didn’t want the packs to throw off our balance with it being so slippery.”
“So this is all thanks to his poor decision-making skills,” Jude says with a sneer.
Lucas glares at him. “My guess is this is all thanks to a psychopath who gets his jollies from messing with the heads of privileged asshole out-of-towners like yourself.”
“Careful, Lucas.” Jude’s voice is pure derision. “Your Dangerous is showing.”
“Can both of you knock it off?” I ask. When it goes quiet, I can hear the stream, and a few paces after that, I can see glimpses of it between the trees. I feel like someone’s watching us.
“Do you see something?” Emily asks, voice small.
“No,” I say, “but we should hear them. I have a bad feeling.”
“You’re full of ideas and feelings about this, Sera,” Jude says. “Maybe we should wonder if you aren’t leading us into a trap.”
His eyes are narrow, and the tip of his chin points at me like a finger.
Emily’s shoulders hunch, and she tucks her gaze away.
My laugh hacks like a cough. “You seriously think I had something to do with this?”
“You did say you didn’t want to come,” Emily says softly. “Back at the school.”
“Right, so instead of backing out and going with a different project, I just suffered through this crap for two days and then…drugged you? Are you even listening to yourselves? Do I look like a girl who drugs people?”
“She didn’t drug anybody,” Lucas says.