I jerk my hand back and press it to my own chest. My heart is thumping at a crazy rate. Too fast. “It’s a chemical thing because of the danger. Jude says so.”
He laughs. “What?” I don’t know how to explain, but he steps back, and I feel cold. “Last chance. We split off now and run. Will you come?”
I wince. “I can’t just leave them. Not Emily and Jude.”
He grits his teeth, shakes his head once. He won’t argue with that. Things are different now. “You’d better have Emily look at that hand.”
Emily can’t do anything for my hand, but it’s a good enough way to end the conversation.
Dawn is just starting to smudge pale prints on the gray sky when we reach Hayley. She’s by the river, propped up on what looks like a sleeping bag. That’s what hits me first—
They have some of their stuff. They might have called for help.
“It happened yesterday,” Madison says. She’s sounding a lot less crazy now that we’ve given her some water. Or maybe it’s because we’re back with Hayley. “We followed the stream, and it started winding north. I remembered from the map that it followed the trail pretty closely.”
“Did you try to call?” Lucas asks.
“No phones. We woke up with a lot of stuff missing, and Ms. Brighton…” She stops, looking stricken before she goes on. “We had to leave a lot behind when we woke up to all that blood. We tried to scream for you guys, but no one heard us.”
“Because we were drugged,” Lucas says. I can tell Madison wants to ask, but he waves. “We’ll fill you in soon. Go back to how you got over here. What happened to her?”
She nods, and for a moment, that manic gleam flashes over her expression. “I figured there had to be another bridge. Something. A way. We found a zip line.”
“A zip line?”
“It seemed like it would work. I got across OK. It was bumpy, and I lost our water, but I made it. But when Hayley went, it broke. She fell.”
I tear my mind off the possibility of a phone and try to figure out what happened to Hayley. Emily’s crouched over her now, and Jude’s beside Emily, so I can’t see much. When he finally steps to the side, I wish I hadn’t tried so hard.
Hayley moans and turns her head on the wadded-up sweatshirt serving as a pillow. Her pale hair is soaked to the sides of her face, and the flesh under her eyes looks puffy and bruised.
My body goes cold when I see her injury. It’s not good. Her left arm is strapped across her torso in a makeshift sling—a pretty good one from the look of it, but one glance tells me it won’t help.
I don’t think a registered nurse could help on this one. She needs a hospital. Probably surgery. Her hand is the color of a plum, and though the splint has her lower arm wrapped, I can see the misshapen lump in the center of her forearm. I can see the stain of blood too. Her bone has broken through the skin.
“It’s a compound fracture,” Madison says. “I tried to splint it to keep it steady. It broke when she fell.”
Lucas startles. “Wait, how close is the river?”
“Not far. Maybe a twenty-minute walk. I wanted to go farther. I was hoping to hit that road on the map. I figured if the stream was heading north, we’d already cut out some of that distance.”
I blink, surprised at how smart she suddenly sounds. That sing-song lilt is gone from her voice, and shaken as she is, she sounds completely calm.
“We’re trying to get to the road too,” Lucas says. “Do you have a map?”
“No, but I don’t think it should be much farther. I wanted to keep going, but Hayley had to stop.”
“The sling looks great,” Emily says, clearly reaching for something positive. “It’s what I would have done too.”
“Did you check for Ms. Brighton’s phone?” I ask.
She shudders. “No. When we woke up that morning, ours were gone. And she was—we were too afraid to go near her tent. There was a trail of blood, and I saw the edge of something in the bushes. She wasn’t moving. I know it sounds bad, but we just ran.” Madison twists at the edges of her hair with filthy fingers. In the growing light, I can see the smudges and streaks all over her are blood. Hayley’s blood, most likely.
“You actually saw her?” Jude asks.
“Barely. I could just see something…”
“Something that looked skinned, right?” Lucas asks.
I flinch. I didn’t see that clearly, and now I’m grateful. My stomach rolls itself into a hard ball. He’s been holding this in. All this time, he’s had to live with that vision.
“I couldn’t see much, but yes,” Madison says.
“Me too,” Lucas says. “Looked like her back.”
“Where were you?” she asks, and for the first time since we got here, her voice wavers to that crackling edge that scared me before. “We screamed and screamed. We thought he killed you. We were sure he must have killed you just like her.”