Run

The glass came in before any of them moved.

Not the whole window — just a single sharp impact near the latch, a spiderweb of cracks spreading outward from a fist sized hole, and then a hand coming through it. Reaching for the lock. Finding it.

Nico moved first this time. He grabbed the curtain rod off the wall — it came away from the bracket on the second pull — and swung it hard at the arm. Connected. The arm withdrew. There was no sound from outside. No reaction. Just the arm pulling back through the broken glass like it hadn't felt anything.

"Go," Nico said.

They went.

The landing was chaos. Four people in a narrow space all moving at once, someone's elbow catching Indigo in the shoulder, Anastasia already at the top of the stairs going down fast, Jett right behind her. Indigo was third. She heard Nico's footsteps on the floorboards behind her and then she heard the window go fully and she didn't look back.

The stairs were the worst part. Too narrow, too steep, the wood screaming under their weight, and at the bottom the hallway opened up and Anastasia went left toward the back of the house and the rest of them followed because there was no time to decide anything better.

The kitchen. The window they'd come through — still closed, latch still popped. Anastasia hit it first and it swung out and she was through before Indigo had crossed the room. Then Jett. Then Indigo, one hand on the frame, swinging her legs out, dropping onto the wet ground outside.

She landed and turned immediately. "Nico—"

He was right there. Coming through the window behind her, feet hitting the ground, stumbling slightly, catching himself on the wall.

"I'm here," he said, breathless. "Go."

They ran.

The garden behind the house was overgrown and dark, knee high weeds catching at their ankles, no clear path in any direction. Anastasia had her torch out and low, barely enough to see by, and they moved in a tight cluster around that small pool of light like it was the only solid thing left in the world.

Indigo's brain was doing two things at once. The surface part was just running — putting one foot in front of the other, keeping Jett in her peripheral vision, tracking the sounds behind them. The other part, the part that had been running quietly underneath everything since they'd found the house, was trying to think.

The visitor centre man. The waivers. The schedule he'd given them — midnight to four, like a hunting window. The way he'd walked them through every piece of equipment on the site like he was showing them a menu.

She pushed it down. Later.

They cleared the garden through a gap in the back fence and hit a path — dirt, narrow, heading roughly north by her reckoning though her reckoning was based on nothing except the position of the moon through the canopy and she was aware that was almost useless.

"Where does this go," Addison said. Not panicked. Just asking.

"Away from there," Jett said.

"That's not—"

"It goes away from there. That's enough for now."

Addison didn't argue.

They followed the path.

They walked for maybe twenty minutes before the adrenaline started to wear thin enough that their bodies began sending other messages. Indigo's legs ached. Her shoulder where she'd been elbowed on the landing had stiffened up. Her mouth was dry and she was aware she hadn't had water in hours. Beside her Jett was favouring his left side slightly — she didn't know when that had happened and she made a note to ask him when they stopped.

When they stopped.

She kept that as a fixed point. When not if. Small distinction. Important one.

Nico had gone quiet. That was the thing she kept noticing. Not the scared quiet of earlier or even the fighting it down quiet from the sitting room — this was a different kind. He was walking at the back of the group and not saying anything and whenever Indigo looked back at him he was looking at the ground.

He and Addison hadn't spoken since the house.

She filed that away with everything else.

The path opened up after a while into a wider clearing — bigger than their campsite, less tended, the kind of space that felt like it had been cleared once and then left to half reclaim itself. On the far side a structure she could make out as a storage shed of some kind. To the left a stack of something covered in a tarp. And along the tree line — she saw them immediately, the way she'd started seeing everything now, cataloguing it, noting it — a row of heavy iron hooks driven into the trunks at head height.

Same as the ones near the campsite.

Same size. Same height.

She looked at them for a second longer than she meant to and then looked away.

"In there," Anastasia said, nodding toward the shed. "Just for a minute. We need to stop and think."

Nobody had the energy to disagree.

The shed was unlocked. It was the kind of building that existed purely to hold things — tools along one wall, shelving units holding old tins and coiled rope and things Indigo couldn't identify in the dark. A workbench along the back wall. And leaning against the far corner, almost casual, two axes. The kind used for splitting wood. Heavy handled, the blades dark with age.

Nico looked at them.

"Can we—" he started.

"They said no weapons on site," Addison said.

Everyone looked at her.

"We went through a metal detector," she said. "It's in the waiver. They're serious about it."

"There's a man in a mask killing our friends," Jett said. "I don't think the waiver applies anymore."

Addison opened her mouth and then closed it.

Jett crossed the shed and picked up one of the axes. Tested the weight of it in both hands. Set it back down after a moment, decision unmade, and stepped back.

"We need to talk about what we actually know," Indigo said.

They looked at her.

She sat down on an upturned crate. "The man at the visitor centre. He's the only person outside this group who knew everything about tonight. The layout. The schedule. Where the equipment was." She looked around the shed. "We can't find the waivers because they're back at the campsite. We don't know his name. We don't know if the company is even real."

"The website looked real," Anastasia said.

"Websites take about twenty minutes to make."

Silence.

"So what are you saying," Nico said. His voice had an edge to it she hadn't heard before. "You think the whole thing was fake? The whole experience, the other group we saw leaving, all of it—"

"I don't know," Indigo said. "I'm saying we don't know enough. And the one person who could answer all of it is the man whose name none of us can remember."

"I remember his face," Anastasia said quietly.

"His face doesn't help us right now."

"No." She paused. "But it helps me."

Indigo looked at her. Anastasia was staring at the middle distance with that expression she got — the cataloguing one, the one that had been running since they'd seen the Woodsman in the treeline that afternoon like she was filing everything away somewhere.

"What does that mean," Jett said.

"It means I'm going to remember his face," Anastasia said simply. "When this is over."

The shed went quiet.

It was Addison who said it. Indigo had been waiting for someone to and she'd half expected it to be Nico but it was Addison, sitting on the workbench with her legs drawn up, looking at the floor.

"We don't actually know it's him."

Nobody answered immediately.

"The visitor centre man. We don't know it's him. We're assuming." She looked up. "It could be anyone. It could be someone connected to the site, someone who knew the schedule but wasn't the person we met. It could be—" She stopped.

"What," Jett said.

"Nothing."

"Addison."

She looked at him. "It could be someone connected to one of us. Someone who knew we'd be here because we told them."

The shed felt smaller suddenly.

Indigo watched it happen — the thing she'd been trying to prevent since the sitting room, the sliding of eyes, the recalibration of every person in the room as both ally and question mark. She felt it happening inside herself too and hated it.

"We've all been talking about this trip for months," Jett said carefully.

"I know."

"Anyone could've known."

"I know that too."

"So that's — that's not pointing at anyone specifically, that's just—"

"I'm not pointing at anyone," Addison said. "I'm saying we don't know. That's all. We don't know."

Another silence. Different to the others. This one had edges.

Indigo looked at Jett. Then at Anastasia. Then at Addison. Then at Nico who was still standing near the door looking at the ground.

"Nico," she said.

He looked up.

"You okay?"

He looked at her for a long moment. Something moved across his face that she couldn't fully read — grief, she thought, and exhaustion, and something underneath both of those that she almost had a word for.

"No," he said. "Not really."

She nodded. "Me neither."

They stayed in the shed for the better part of an hour. Long enough for the cold to properly settle in, for the torches to start losing their edge. They talked in circles mostly — the visitor centre man, the waivers, the schedule, whether the other group they'd seen leaving had been real or staged. Whether there was a way to get a signal if they moved to higher ground. Whether the main trail was safer than the paths or more dangerous because it was obvious.

Indigo sat through most of it and said less than she usually would have and felt the gap where her normal self would have been. The version of her that directed things, that moved people from A to B, that was good in a crisis — she could feel that version of herself operating, doing the job, making the right noises. And underneath it something else entirely. Something that kept pulling at her like a current.

Elizabeth asking someone to take it out.

The way she'd gone quiet.

Indigo breathed through it. In, out. Later.

At some point Jett sat down beside her on the floor with his back against the wall and his shoulder against hers and she leaned into him slightly and he leaned back and neither of them said anything about it. She was aware of how much she needed that contact and equally aware that needing it felt dangerous — like if she held onto it too hard it would become a thing she couldn't survive losing.

She held onto it anyway.

It was Nico who said he needed air.

"Two minutes," he said. "Just outside the door. I can't—" He gestured vaguely at the shed, the four walls, the low ceiling. "I just need two minutes."

"We stay together," Indigo said immediately.

"I'm not going anywhere. Just outside the door. You'll see me through the window."

She looked at Jett. He looked back. The window above the workbench looked out over the front of the clearing — if Nico stood just outside the door he'd be visible from it.

"Two minutes," she said.

He nodded and went out.

She watched through the window as he appeared in the small rectangle of dark outside, hands in his pockets, head tilted back. Just standing there breathing. Like he'd said.

She looked away. Back at the others.

"The hooks," Anastasia said quietly.

Indigo frowned. "What about them?"

"The ones on the trees outside. Same as the ones near the campsite." She paused. "There are six of them."

The number sat in the air.

"It's décor," Addison said. "That's what they said. The whole site is dressed."

"I know what they said."

Indigo looked through the window. Nico was still there. Hands still in his pockets. Still breathing.

"We should go in the morning," Jett said. "First light. Main trail. All of us together. We don't stop for anything."

"And if he's on the trail," Addison said.

"Then we deal with that."

"How."

Jett looked at the axes in the corner. Didn't answer.

Indigo checked the window again.

The space outside the door was empty.

She was on her feet before she'd fully processed it — crossing the shed, hand on the door, pushing out into the cold air of the clearing.

"Nico." She swept her torch across the front of the shed. The path. The tree line. The row of hooks along the trunks catching the torchlight.

Nothing.

" Nico. "

Jett was beside her. Then Anastasia. Then Addison in the doorway.

The clearing was empty. Just the dark and the trees and the hooks and the path running off in two directions and no sign of him in any of them.

"He said two minutes," Anastasia said.

Indigo was already moving.

She found the torch first.

His — the one he'd taken from the shed — lying in the dirt about forty meters down the eastern path, still on, the beam pointing at nothing useful. She picked it up without stopping and kept moving and the others stayed close behind her.

The path narrowed. The trees pressed in. She was doing the thing she always did now — cataloguing, tracking, eyes moving constantly — and that was how she saw the scuff marks in the mud where the path bent left. Something had gone off the path there. Two sets of marks. One purposeful. One not.

She pushed through the undergrowth.

The hollow was maybe thirty meters in — a low dip between two fallen trunks, dense enough that sound would die in it, dark enough that you wouldn't see it until you were standing in it.

Nico was standing at the far end of it.

For one lurching second she thought he was okay — just standing there, back to her, looking at something in the trees. She opened her mouth to say his name.

Then she saw the Woodsman.

He was on the other side of the hollow, maybe ten meters from Nico, completely still. Just standing there in the dark between the trunks looking at him. No weapon visible. Just watching. And Nico was frozen — she could see it in the set of his shoulders, the particular stillness of someone whose body has made the decision to stop before the brain has caught up with why.

The Woodsman moved.

He reached down without looking away from Nico and picked something up from the ground at his feet. An axe. Not one of the ones from the shed — older, the handle worn smooth, the blade dark. He held it loosely at his side for a moment like he was thinking about something.

" Nico— " Indigo started.

The Woodsman swung his arm back and released it underarm in one clean motion, low and fast, the axe turning once in the dark.

It hit Nico underneath the chin.

The sound it made was nothing like what she expected and everything like what she would never forget. Nico's head snapped back. He didn't fall immediately — he stayed upright for two, three seconds, arms dropping to his sides, the axe buried deep in the soft place beneath his jaw. Then his knees went and he went down sideways against the fallen trunk and the blood came — dark, too much of it, spreading fast down his jacket, across his chest, soaking into the fabric, dripping into the mud below him.

He didn't make a sound.

Indigo's torch was shaking. She realised distantly that her hand was shaking and the torch was in her hand and that was why.

Behind her Anastasia made a sound she'd never made before and would never make again.

The Woodsman looked at them across the hollow. Stood there for a moment in the dark between the trunks, unhurried, the same way he always stood. Then he turned and walked into the trees and the forest took him and there was nothing left except the hollow and Nico against the log and the torch beam shaking over all of it.

Jett grabbed Indigo's arm.

She couldn't move. She was looking at Nico's jacket, the way the blood had already soaked through to the collar, the way his hand was still loosely curled on the ground like he'd just set something down and would pick it up in a moment.

" Indigo. " Jett's voice was low and cracked and close to her ear. " We have to go. Right now. We have to go. "

She looked at Nico for one more second.

Then she turned and ran.

She didn't stop until they hit the main path. Then she stopped because her lungs made her and she stood bent over with her hands on her knees and breathed. Jett was right beside her. Anastasia. Addison behind them.

She straightened up.

She looked at what was left of the group. Jett. Anastasia. Addison.

Four of them.

She didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that the dark wasn't already saying better.

She turned and walked and after a moment she heard the others follow and that was all there was. Just footsteps on wet ground and four people who were not the people they'd been forty eight hours ago walking through the dark trying to remember what morning felt like.

They didn't go back to the shed.

Indigo didn't decide that consciously — it just happened, her feet taking her past the turning without stopping, and nobody said anything about it. The shed was where Nico had said he needed air and the shed was where she'd looked away for three minutes and the shed was a place she was done with.

They walked until the path widened and the trees thinned slightly and the ground levelled out into another clearing — smaller than the last, rougher, but with a low stone structure at one end that turned out to be some kind of old equipment store, half collapsed on one side, open to the sky above the far corner.

Along the treeline at the edge of the clearing the hooks were there again. Seven of them this time, evenly spaced, the iron dark against the bark. Head height. The same as all the others.

Indigo looked at them.

She counted them without meaning to.

Seven.

She looked away.

The four of them went into the stone structure and sat down in the part that still had a roof over it and nobody spoke for a long time. Jett sat close enough that their arms touched. Anastasia pulled her knees up and put her chin on them and stared at the entrance. Addison sat slightly apart from the others with her back against the wall and her eyes closed and her face doing nothing at all.

Outside the forest was quiet.

Inside Indigo was anything but.

She was thinking about Nico laughing at the bow and arrow yesterday afternoon. She was thinking about Elizabeth's story about her job. She was thinking about six people in a car four hours ago with music on and nowhere to be but here.

She was thinking about the hooks.

She was thinking about the man at the visitor centre whose face she could remember and whose name she couldn't and what that meant and whether it mattered and what she was going to do about it when the sun came up.

She was thinking about the way Jett's shoulder felt against hers and how she needed to not think about that.

She sat in the dark with three people she'd known most of her life and felt more alone than she ever had and breathed through it.

In.

Out.

Morning. Just get to morning.