Nobody said anything for a long time after Addison.
They just walked. The three of them on the path in the afternoon light, not talking, not looking at each other, just moving because moving was the only thing left that made sense. The forest around them was doing its usual thing — birds, wind, light through the canopy — completely unbothered, completely unchanged, the same forest it had been on Friday afternoon when they'd walked in the other direction laughing about Nico nearly reversing into Jett's car.
Indigo kept putting that thought down and it kept coming back.
The path took them gradually uphill, away from the clearing where they'd left Addison, away from the fence line and the visitor centre and the actor lying in the undergrowth. Away from all of it. She didn't know where they were going exactly and for the moment she didn't care. Away was enough. Away was the whole plan.
Jett was beside her. She knew his footsteps well enough now that she could have identified them in the dark — the particular weight and rhythm of them, slightly uneven since whatever had happened to his left side in the house. He hadn't mentioned it. She hadn't asked. They were both carrying things they hadn't mentioned and probably wouldn't.
Anastasia was behind them. She'd been quiet since the clearing. Not the resolved quiet of this morning or the cataloguing quiet of the nights before — something different. Smaller. Like something in her had gone out.
They stopped at a flat section of path where a fallen tree made a natural seat, wide enough for all three of them. Nobody suggested it. They just stopped, the way you stop when your body has been making the decisions for a while and has finally run out of ideas.
Indigo sat down. Jett beside her. Anastasia on the other end, a small gap between her and Jett, knees together, hands in her lap, looking at the ground.
The afternoon light was long and golden through the trees. It would have been beautiful on a different day. On this day it just meant time was passing and they hadn't figured anything out yet.
"We need to think about who," Indigo said.
Jett looked at her. "Who."
"Who did this. Who paid for—" She stopped. Reorganised. "Someone organised this. Someone knew we'd be here and hired someone and—"
"I know what you mean," Jett said.
"So. Who."
He was quiet for a moment. She watched him think — really think, not just sitting in the silence but actually going through it, the way he did when he was taking something seriously. She'd always liked that about him. The way he didn't perform thinking. He just did it.
"I don't know," he said eventually.
"Neither do I. That's why I'm asking."
"I mean—" He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've thought about it. Since last night. I've been going through everyone I can think of and I can't—" He shook his head. "I can't land on anyone. Like I can think of people who don't like us. People we've had problems with. But this—" He gestured at the forest around them. "This isn't — this isn't a thing people do. Normal people. People we went to school with."
"Someone did it."
"I know someone did it. I'm just saying I can't make it fit anyone I know."
Indigo looked at the ground. A beetle was making its way across the dirt in front of her boot, moving with the focused purpose of something that had somewhere to be. She watched it for a second.
"Danny Marsh," she said.
Jett looked at her.
"He hated us. Year nine. After what happened with the football team and—"
"Danny Marsh is in Leeds. He moved two years ago. His mum posted about it."
"I know. I'm not saying it's him. I'm saying he hated us. I'm trying to think of people who hated us."
"Okay." Jett thought. "Tyler Reeves."
"Tyler Reeves doesn't hate us he's just unpleasant."
"What's the difference."
"One of them is personal."
Jett accepted this. "Grace Holloway," he said.
Indigo looked at him. "Grace Holloway."
"She had a thing with—" He stopped. Glanced at the space between him and Anastasia and then back at Indigo. "She had reasons."
"Grace Holloway cried at a film about a dog last year. She's not doing this."
"People surprise you."
"Not like this they don't."
They went quiet again. The beetle reached Indigo's boot and navigated around it without breaking pace.
"What about someone we don't think of as hating us," Jett said slowly. "Like someone who we just — didn't think about enough. Someone on the edges of things who we never really—"
"Everyone hates someone they feel invisible to," Anastasia said.
They both looked at her.
She was still looking at the ground. Her voice had come out flat and strange, different to her normal voice, and when she looked up her eyes were red in a way Indigo hadn't registered until this exact moment.
"Ana," Indigo said carefully.
"I'm just saying. That's a whole category of person. Someone who felt like we looked through them." She looked back down. "We probably did. Look through people. Everyone does."
"You think it's someone like that," Jett said.
"I don't know who it is." Her voice wobbled on the last word, slightly, and she pressed her lips together hard. "I don't know. I can't think. I've been trying to think since last night and I can't — my brain keeps—" She stopped.
Indigo waited.
"My brain keeps going home," Anastasia said. Very quietly. "I keep thinking about my mum's kitchen. The way it smells in the morning. The specific sound the boiler makes." She laughed, short and humourless. "That's stupid."
"It's not stupid," Jett said.
"It is. We need to be thinking about—"
"It's not stupid, Ana."
She looked at him. Her jaw was working. Her hands in her lap had gone tight, knuckles pale, and Indigo watched her hold it together through sheer force of something — will, stubbornness, the particular strength of someone who had been the steady one for too long and was very close to the edge of it.
Then she stopped holding it.
It came out all at once, the way things do when you've been keeping them down for too long — not clean crying, not quiet, but the kind that takes over completely, the kind that sounds almost angry because the grief is too big for the body it's in. She put her hands over her face and her shoulders went and she made a sound that Indigo felt in her chest like something physical.
Jett moved immediately. Closed the gap between them and put his arm around her without saying anything and Anastasia turned into him like a person who had needed exactly that for the last twenty four hours and hadn't known how to ask.
Indigo sat on the other side of her and put her hand on her back and didn't say anything either because there was nothing to say that was bigger than what Anastasia was feeling and she wasn't going to insult it by trying.
They sat like that on the fallen tree in the afternoon light for a long time.
Eventually the crying slowed. Then stopped. Anastasia pulled back and wiped her face with her sleeve and took a long unsteady breath and let it out slowly.
"Sorry," she said.
"Don't," Indigo said.
"I've been—"
"Don't apologise. Seriously."
Anastasia looked at her. Her eyes were swollen and red and she looked exhausted in a way that sleep wasn't going to fix but she also looked, Indigo thought, slightly lighter than she had. Like something that had needed to come out had come out.
"I miss them," Anastasia said. Simply. Just that.
"Yeah," Indigo said. "Me too."
They sat with that for a moment. The forest held its usual indifferent silence around them and the light continued its slow shift toward evening and somewhere far off a bird called once and then stopped.
"I keep thinking about stupid things," Anastasia said. "Like — Elizabeth's thing about the house. With the wall around it." Her voice was steadier now, just. "I keep thinking she never gets to have that house. Someone took that from her and it was such a — it was such a specific, particular thing she wanted and now—" She stopped. "Sorry."
"Stop apologising," Jett said.
"It's a reflex."
"I know. Stop it anyway."
Something that was almost a smile crossed her face. Then went.
"She would have had a really good house," Indigo said.
"Yeah," Anastasia said. "She would have."
They tried again with the list after a while. Went through people methodically — school, neighbourhood, family connections, anyone either of them could think of who'd had a problem with any of them. They went back years. Primary school grievances, falling outs, the messy overlapping social drama of growing up in a small place where everyone knew everyone and nothing was ever really finished.
The list was longer than Indigo expected and shorter than she needed.
There were people who didn't like them. Of course there were — there always were, that was just being a person in the world, occupying space that other people sometimes wanted or being in the way of things people wanted. But none of it connected. None of it added up to this. Every name they put forward fell apart under basic scrutiny — wrong temperament, wrong resources, wrong everything.
"It doesn't feel personal enough," Jett said at one point.
Indigo looked at him. "Four of our friends are dead. It feels pretty personal."
"I mean the method. Like — if someone hated us specifically, hated us enough to do this, you'd expect it to feel more—" He struggled for the word. "Targeted. Like they'd want us to know it was them. They'd want credit."
"Unless they just wanted us gone," Anastasia said. "Without the drama."
"Why though. What do we have that someone wants gone."
Nobody had an answer for that.
The truth was — and Indigo could feel them all arriving at it without saying it — they were ordinary. That was the horrifying thing underneath all of it. They were seventeen and ordinary and went to a normal school and had normal lives and there was no reason, no sensible reason, that anyone should want them dead badly enough to pay for it. It didn't fit. None of the shapes they tried to press it into held.
"Maybe we're missing something," Anastasia said. "About ourselves. Something we did or know or—"
"We're not missing something," Jett said. "We're seventeen. We haven't done anything."
"Everyone's done something."
"Not something worth—" He stopped. Gestured at the trees.
Anastasia looked at the trees. "No," she said. "Probably not."
The afternoon was properly fading by the time they started moving again. The gold had gone out of the light, the shadows stretching long between the trunks, the temperature dropping in that particular way it did in forests as the sun went — faster than you expected, more complete.
Night three.
Indigo kept that thought at the front of her mind and tried not to examine it too closely. Night one had been Elizabeth. Night two had taken everyone else. Night three was tonight and there were three of them left and the Woodsman was somewhere in those trees and they still didn't know who had sent him or why and none of that had changed.
What had changed was her.
She was aware of it in the same quiet way she'd been aware of things all weekend — cataloguing it, noting it, filing it somewhere. The version of herself that had stood in the car park of the visitor centre two days ago and felt a flicker of genuine excitement about being scared had been replaced by something she didn't have a clean word for yet. Not brave. Not fearless. Just — done. Done being the thing that was hunted. Done waiting for the next thing to happen and reacting to it.
She didn't know what she was going to do about that yet. She just knew it was true.
They found the shed as the last of the light was going.
It was set back from the path behind a rusted gate, bigger than the one they'd sheltered in last night, the wood of it dark with age and weather. A proper outbuilding — the kind that belonged to a working property, not a campsite. One of the private structures dotted around the site that they'd been warned about on day one.
Nobody mentioned the warning.
Jett pushed the gate and it swung open without resistance and they went through and crossed the overgrown ground to the door. Unlocked. Inside the air was close and smelled of old metal and wood and something earthy underneath both of those. Indigo swept her torch around.
It was full.
Not cluttered — organised, the way a working shed is organised, everything with a place and mostly in it. A full tool wall on the left, hooks and brackets and the shadows of things that had been taken down and not replaced. Shelving units along the back with tins and coiled wire and boxes she couldn't identify in the low light. A workbench running the length of the right wall, solid, heavy, the surface scarred with years of use.
And on the workbench — rope. Good rope, thick, several lengths of it coiled neatly. Cable ties in a box. A heavy duty torch, bigger than the phone torches they'd been using, sitting in a bracket on the wall above it.
Indigo looked at all of it.
Her mind was very quiet all of a sudden. The kind of quiet that comes just before something clicks into place.
"Okay," Jett said, looking around. "Okay this is — there's stuff in here."
"Yeah," Indigo said.
"We could use some of this."
"Yeah," she said again.
Anastasia had moved to the tool wall and was looking at it steadily with that expression back on her face — the cataloguing one, the one that meant she was thinking harder than she was showing.
Outside the last of the light was going. Through the single small window above the workbench the sky had turned the deep bruised purple of a night coming in fast and the trees beyond it were already black and shapeless and the darkness was settling in around the shed like it had been waiting all day for permission.
Night three.
Indigo stood in the middle of the shed with the torch in her hand and looked at the rope on the workbench and the tools on the wall and the heavy torch in its bracket and felt something settle in her chest that had been loose and rattling since Friday night.
She looked at Jett. Then at Anastasia.
Neither of them said anything.
They didn't need to.