I take in his words, struggle to wrap my head around what he’s saying. Because the last time I checked, girls don’t fall ten, twenty, thirty feet and then just walk away without a word. They scream, they call for help, or they are dead.
And the dead don’t walk away at all.
“You sure have a twisted version of the term good news.” I pull one shoe from where it rests near Lonan, shake out the excess sand. Repeat. Slip them on, press into the soles where most of my wounds are—good enough.
Finnley’s disappearance: it’s a carrot, dangling from a string, and we are hungry white rabbits.
Our treasure hunt expands with every hour.
Phoenix, Cass, Alexa. Hope, Lonan, me. We are an army of six: six wounded, six grieving, six compromised. Six determined. Six against too many, and too many unknowns.
I’m convinced now that Lonan’s right—that whoever’s here on this island wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble unless they had something major to hide. We’ve come too far to give up, too far to turn back. We will find the lab. We will find answers.
On the platform outside this new cave, Cass submits himself to having one arm bound up into a sling made from braided reeds—he is, in fact, the one who suggests it. “I fell hard on it,” he tells Hope and Alexa. “Felt something pop.”
But Phoenix already has the sling braided and ready to go, as if he and Cass discussed it privately before mentioning it to the group. Lonan leans discreetly toward me and says, in a low voice, “He doesn’t trust himself.”
“Because the cave may be another trigger?”
Lonan nods. “Because anything could be another trigger.”
I take one last, long look at the net. It is too bright, too clean. Too empty. “Am I a horrible person,” I say, testing the words in my head before I let them escape, “if I admit I’m the tiniest bit relieved that she isn’t with us right now?”
I am a contradiction. Because how can you grieve someone and at the same time feel relief at their absence? How can you feel relief at your own shot at survival when it’s at the expense of someone else’s?
His eyes are cool and calm as they search me. “All I see in you is empathy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” He offers me his hand. “Ready to go? They’re waiting on us.”
I hesitate.
It doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about Birch—just that Lonan’s trying to be there for me. That I’m trying, after all this time, to trust enough to let someone in. Right? What am I afraid of?
Finally, I put my hand in his. His skin is warm, yet it sends shivers coursing through me as he pulls me to my feet. We find ourselves, once again, at the back of the group.
I should pull my hand away, I tell myself. I should loosen my grip, at the very least. But the message doesn’t make it to my fingers, which shift and curl until they’ve woven between his. We’re locked, linked.
He doesn’t pull away, either.
The cave is black inside, where no one can see the flush of my cheeks. I hardly know Lonan at all—what business do I have holding on to him this tightly? He held me earlier, on the roof of the cave, but that was different. That was one human holding another one together. It was wax pressed into the veins of a cracked clay jar in order to keep it from bleeding itself dry.
This is different. This is a choice, one we continue to make every second we don’t let go. Despite everything I don’t know about him, and everything I do, I choose this present comfort. I trust him just enough.
A more highly evolved version of the boys’ beach lantern blooms to light, the same torch used to illuminate our first cave. Twigs and sticks and the remains of a match burn in the basin of a glass jar, which Phoenix holds by its twisted-wire handle. His hair looks especially red in the glow of the fire, his cheekbones especially sharp where there are shadows.
This cave is nothing like the other. Its roof is so low I could touch it without standing on my toes, and the tunnel is narrow and sloping steeply downward. Further confirmation that we are Alice’s white rabbit, on a mission.
Memories strike without warning: my collection of glass apothecary bottles, all shapes and colors and sizes, inspired by the DRINK ME scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I wonder how much dust they’ve collected on my bathroom shelf. I wonder, too, about the tea set we used at my sixth birthday party, and about the blue-and-white dress my mother sewed for the occasion. And the book itself—what I wouldn’t give to hold it again. The thought alone brings back the smell of my mother’s shampoo, of nail polish remover, of honey and warm milk: her bedtime routine and mine for so many months, that year before the accident.
Lonan tightens his hand in mine, pulls me out of myself. “You okay? You slowed down.” He’s close at my back, so close I fear he might be able to feel my heart slamming in its cage.
I shake my head. “I’m good. Sorry.”
He must know I’m lying—or trying to talk myself into a truth, at least—because his hand stays just as it is. “We can talk later, if you’d like.”
I just nod, like some brainless bobblehead on a dashboard. Because what is there to say? Everyone has lost someone. Everyone is homeless. No one can rewind time and go back to the days where our biggest problems amounted to spilled nail polish and broken teacups. Dwelling on it won’t help anything, especially not today.
FIFTY-FOUR
BIRCH AND I were fourteen when he first held my hand.
It was three years to the day after my bee-sting birthday party. The parents had just finished forcing us, and Emma, to pose for pictures until their smartphones ran out of memory; our hair was sweaty and matted from being stuck under graduation caps for too long inside the stuffy gymnasium. I remember thinking it was stupid to celebrate something as unremarkable as completing the eighth grade. At the time, I expected I’d have a normal graduation from high school to look forward to. Everyone did.
The rain snuck up on us. Silver-gray clouds rolled in and poured buckets of water on everyone’s repurposed Easter dresses and fancy shoes. All the parents tucked their picture-loaded phones away and darted off to retrieve their luxury SUVs, while all of my classmates huddled together under the not-quite-sufficient awning outside the school.
Birch gave me his jacket. Then he gave me his hand. And even though we eventually had to let go, for practical purposes—we did live in separate homes, after all—it felt like nothing could ever come between us.
That feeling never did go away. Not even when he died.
No one is more surprised than I am that my hand fits so well in someone else’s.
FIFTY-FIVE
WE MAKE A sharp right turn, and the sloping ground of the cave levels out. A patch of white light spills across the dirt at the very far end, where Phoenix’s lantern won’t reach for a while. Lonan and I trail behind the rest of the group. They’ve been mostly quiet until now, save for the brush of shoes on stone, but up ahead, one of the boys mutters something. It’s hard to make out whose voice it is.