Indigo woke up before anyone else.
That was normal. It had always been normal — her brain refusing to stay asleep past a certain point regardless of what time she'd gone to bed, dragging her back to consciousness whether she wanted it or not. At home she'd lie there scrolling her phone until the world caught up with her. Here there was no signal worth speaking of so she just lay still, listening.
The forest was loud in the morning. That surprised her. She'd expected quiet — the kind of deep rural silence people described when they talked about getting away from it all — but instead the trees were full of sound. Birds she couldn't name, leaves moving in a wind she couldn't feel from inside the tent, the distant sound of water she hadn't noticed the day before. The world doing its thing completely indifferent to the six of them sleeping in the middle of it.
Jett was still asleep beside her, one arm thrown over his face, breathing slow and even. She watched him for a moment in the pale morning light that came through the tent fabric — the way his chest rose and fell, the particular stillness of him when he was properly under. He slept like someone who had made peace with sleep. Indigo had always slightly envied that.
She pulled on her jacket as quietly as she could and unzipped the tent.
Outside the campsite looked entirely different in daylight. Smaller somehow, more ordinary. The firepit was a ring of cold grey ash. The logs around it were just logs. The hooks on the trees — and there were more of them than she'd counted yesterday, she noticed now, dotted between the trunks at varying heights — caught the early morning light and did nothing sinister with it whatsoever.
She stood there in the quiet for a long moment, hands in her pockets, and breathed.
Last night felt distant already. The figure on the path, the torch beam, the sprint back to camp with her heart trying to exit her chest — in the flat honest light of morning it was almost embarrassing how scared she'd been. He was an actor. He was doing his job. She'd paid a thousand pounds for exactly that experience and then reacted like she'd never agreed to it.
She almost smiled.
Almost.
Nico was the next one up, emerging from the large tent approximately forty minutes later looking like a man who had been briefly buried and recently excavated. His hair was doing something that defied both gravity and explanation. He stood at the entrance to the tent, looked at Indigo sitting on a log with a cup of instant coffee from the camp stove, looked at the forest, looked back at Indigo.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
He sat down heavily on the log beside her. She handed him the second cup she'd made without being asked. He accepted it without comment. They sat in silence for a while, which was unusual for Nico — silences were things he typically felt personally responsible for filling — but it was a comfortable silence, the kind that had built up over years of knowing someone well enough to not need words in it.
"Good night's sleep?" she asked eventually.
"Elizabeth snores," he said.
"Elizabeth does not snore."
"Elizabeth absolutely snores. Like a — I don't even have a comparison. Like something with a very small airway."
"Don't tell her that."
"I would never." He sipped his coffee. "She'd kill me."
By nine o'clock all six of them were up and the campsite had that particular comfortable chaos of a group of people sharing a small space — bags half unpacked, jackets draped over logs, someone's boots placed inexplicably in the middle of the path. Elizabeth was eating something directly from a packet with the focused energy of a person who considered breakfast non-negotiable. Anastasia had walked a short distance down the trail and was standing very still looking at something in the trees that nobody else seemed interested in.
Jett came up behind Indigo and handed her a cereal bar, pressing a kiss to the top of her head in the same motion.
"Sleep okay?" he asked.
"Fine. You?"
"Great." He sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched. "You were gone when I woke up."
"I'm a morning person."
"You're a pre -morning person. It's a different thing."
She broke the cereal bar in half and handed one piece back to him. He took it without question. That was the kind of relationship they had — the kind made up of a thousand small automatic gestures that neither of them thought about anymore because they'd long ago become just the way things were.
She thought about what it would be like to not have that. Then she stopped thinking about it.
The wood collecting was Jett's idea, which surprised nobody. They were going to need fuel for the fire tonight and the campsite's designated pile was running lower than he'd like. He said this with the calm authority of someone who had grown up doing this and therefore felt entitled to an opinion on it and honestly Indigo felt he'd earned it.
They split up loosely — not deliberately, just the way groups naturally arrange themselves. Jett and Nico moved further into the trees where the fallen timber was thicker. Elizabeth and Anastasia stayed closer to the campsite. Indigo and Addison ended up somewhere in between, moving through the undergrowth in a comfortable parallel, picking up branches and testing their weight.
"You think it'll actually be scary tonight?" Addison asked. She was studying a branch, turning it over in her hands, deciding.
"Elizabeth seemed pretty convinced last night," Indigo said.
"Elizabeth is scared of moths."
"Fair point."
Addison set the branch aside and kept moving. She had a quality to her — had always had it — of someone operating on a slightly different frequency to everyone else. Not cold exactly. Just contained. Like there was a version of her that existed slightly behind the version you could see.
Indigo had always assumed that was just Addison. Some people were open books and some people weren't and that was fine.
"You were genuinely scared last night," Addison said. Not unkindly. Just observationally.
"I was startled."
"You ran."
"I jogged, " Indigo said. "It was a controlled jog."
Addison looked at her sideways and something that was almost a smile crossed her face. "Right."
They walked in silence for a moment, leaves crunching underfoot, the morning light filtering pale and clean through the canopy above them.
"It's a good place," Addison said then, quieter. She was looking at the trees rather than at Indigo. "This forest."
Something about the way she said it made Indigo glance at her. Not the words — the words were completely ordinary. Just the tone. Like she was saying something else underneath them.
"Yeah," Indigo said. "It's beautiful."
Addison nodded slowly. Kept walking.
They ate lunch around the firepit at half twelve — sandwiches assembled from the supplies they'd packed, slightly crushed from the bags, tasting better for it. The wood gathering had been successful and there was a satisfying pile of it stacked near the pit that Jett regarded with visible pride.
The conversation wandered the way it always did. Elizabeth was in the middle of a long story about something that had happened at her weekend job that had the kind of escalating implausibility of true events — each detail slightly more unbelievable than the last, delivered in her completely deadpan way that made it funnier than it had any right to be. By the time she reached the ending Nico was laughing hard enough that he had to put his sandwich down.
Indigo sat and watched them and felt something settle in her chest. The warmth of it. The specific texture of being with people you had known long enough that their laughter sounded like home.
She thought sometimes that she didn't appreciate it enough. That she moved through these moments — lunches and car rides and evenings that would later seem important — without properly registering them. You never knew which ones were going to matter until afterward.
She registered this one. Deliberately, quietly, while Elizabeth finished her story and Nico recovered himself and the afternoon light moved slow and golden through the trees.
She registered it and held onto it.
It was Anastasia who saw him first.
They were sitting around the dead firepit at around three in the afternoon — the sun lower now, the shadows longer, the temperature dropping enough that Indigo had added a second layer — when Anastasia went very still in the way she sometimes did, like an animal that had heard something.
"Don't all look at once," she said, in a completely normal conversational tone. "Treeline. Left of the big pine."
Naturally everyone looked at once.
He was standing about forty meters into the trees. Far enough that the shadows half swallowed him — the dark jacket, the pale fur trim, the burlap mask a pale smudge between the trunks. Completely still. Just watching.
"Oh," Elizabeth said. Very quietly.
Nobody spoke for a moment. The figure didn't move. Didn't advance. Didn't do anything except stand there between the trees in the middle of the afternoon like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"It's only three o'clock," Nico said. "They said midnight."
"Maybe he gets overtime," Jett said.
Indigo stared at the figure. It was too far away to make out details — just the shape of him, the stillness. The way he seemed to fit into the forest like he'd always been there. Like the trees had grown up around him.
"He's good," Anastasia said thoughtfully. She'd gone back to the same tone she'd used when they'd chased him off the path last night. Interested. Almost appreciative.
"Should we wave?" Nico asked.
"Absolutely not," Elizabeth said.
They sat there for another thirty seconds watching him and him watching them and nobody moving and nobody speaking and then Jett stood up, stretched, and said he was going to start getting the fire going for tonight. The spell broke. People started moving. Indigo looked back toward the treeline.
He was gone.
She stared at the space between the trees where he'd been. Just dark and bark and shadow now, the same as any other part of the forest.
"You alright?" Jett said, appearing at her shoulder.
"Fine," she said. "Yeah. He's just — he's good, isn't he. The actor."
"That's what you paid for."
"I know." She pulled her jacket tighter. "I know."
The evening came in slowly, the sky above the canopy shifting through orange and then a deep bruised purple before settling into proper dark. The fire was going well — Jett's stacked wood catching clean and burning bright, the heat of it reaching all six of them where they sat arranged around it in a loose circle.
They'd eaten — pasta from the camp stove, slightly undercooked but hot, which was the only qualification that mattered — and now the plates were pushed aside and the conversation had softened into the particular register it reached late in evenings like this. Lower, slower, more honest somehow. Like the dark made things easier to say.
Elizabeth was describing the house she wanted to live in someday — very specific, very detailed, a place she'd clearly thought about often. A garden with a wall around it. A kitchen with a big table. Somewhere quiet.
"You've clearly thought about this a lot," Anastasia said.
"I think about it when I can't sleep," Elizabeth said simply. "It helps."
Indigo looked at her across the fire. Elizabeth was sitting with her knees pulled up, chin resting on them, the firelight catching her face in warm gold. She looked younger than seventeen somehow. She looked like exactly who she was — a person who was a little scared of most things and showed up anyway.
"It sounds like a good house," Indigo said.
Elizabeth looked at her. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. The wall especially. Everyone needs a wall."
Elizabeth smiled. Not her usual deflecting funny smile but a real one, small and genuine, and went back to looking at the fire.
Jett's hand found Indigo's in the dark between their logs. She turned her palm up and laced her fingers through his without looking at him. Beside her she felt him shift closer.
Later she would think about that moment. The fire and the dark and all six of them still there, still whole, Elizabeth talking about her house with the wall around it. She would think about how none of them knew. How completely and totally none of them knew what the next few hours were going to ask of them.
How she'd been holding Jett's hand and thinking about nothing except the warmth of the fire and the sound of her friends' voices and how this — exactly this — was enough. Was more than enough.
How she hadn't held on tighter.
She would think about that for a long time.
By eleven the fire had burned lower and the temperature had dropped properly. One by one they added layers, pulled hoods up, shifted closer to the heat. The conversation had thinned out — not uncomfortably, just naturally, the way evenings wind down.
Midnight was coming.
Nobody said it. They were all thinking it.
Nico threw another log on the fire and a spray of orange sparks rose up into the dark above them and vanished. Elizabeth watched them go.
"Right," she said eventually, into the quiet. "Let's see what we actually paid for then."
Nobody disagreed.
They sat in the firelight and waited.