The shed felt different at night.
In the last of the daylight it had felt like something — possibility, resource, the first time since Friday that the world had handed them something useful instead of taking something away. Now with the dark fully down and the single small window showing nothing but black it felt like what it was. Four walls. A door that didn't lock. Thin wood between them and whatever was outside.
Indigo sat on the floor with her back against the workbench and her knees up and tried to think.
Jett was beside her. Close enough that their arms touched, their shoulders, the side of his knee against hers. She was aware of every point of contact the way you become aware of things when some part of you knows it needs to pay attention. She couldn't have explained that. She just knew she kept noticing it. The warmth of him. The specific weight of him next to her.
Anastasia was near the door, sitting with her back to the wall and her torch off, listening. She'd been listening since they came in. Head slightly tilted, eyes moving to the window and back to the door and back again in a slow rotation that never stopped. She reminded Indigo of something — an animal, maybe, the particular quality of alertness that meant every sense was running at once.
Outside the forest was doing nothing. That was the worst version of it. When it made sounds you could track them, process them, tell yourself it was wind or an animal or nothing. When it was completely silent there was nothing to argue with.
"We should sleep in shifts," Jett said quietly.
"Yeah," Indigo said.
Neither of them moved.
"I'll take first," Anastasia said, without looking at them. "You two sleep."
"I'm not sleeping," Indigo said.
"I know. Try anyway."
Indigo looked at the window. Black and still. She looked at the rope on the workbench above her head, the coils of it, the weight. She'd been looking at it on and off since they'd come in and her mind kept doing something with it that she hadn't fully formed into a plan yet. Just the shape of one. Just the outline.
"Hey," Jett said.
She looked at him.
He was watching her with that expression he got — the one that meant he'd been paying attention when she thought he wasn't. He'd always done that. Seen things she hadn't announced.
"Come here," he said.
She leaned into him and he put his arm around her and she closed her eyes and for a moment — just a moment — she let herself not be in the forest. Let herself be somewhere else entirely. His kitchen. The back seat of his car on the way home from somewhere. Anywhere that wasn't here.
It lasted about thirty seconds before her brain pulled her back.
She didn't fight it. She just stayed where she was anyway, his arm around her, her head against his shoulder, and breathed.
They'd been in the shed for maybe two hours when he said it.
They'd talked quietly for a while — not about the list, not about who might have done this, they'd exhausted that conversation on the path and it had given them nothing. Just talked. About ordinary things, the way you do when ordinary things are the only alternative to the thing you're both not saying. He talked about his family's camping trips, the ones he'd mentioned on the first day — a specific one when he was twelve where his dad had gotten them comprehensively lost for six hours and pretended the whole time it was intentional. She talked about her mum. The kitchen. The morning of Addison's birthday party, the plaits, the toast, the radio on low.
She didn't know why she told him that. It just came out.
He listened the way he always listened — properly, not waiting for his turn, actually there. When she finished he was quiet for a moment and then he said "I didn't know that about your mum" and she said "what" and he said "that she's funny. You talk about her but you never told me she was funny."
"She's hilarious," Indigo said. "Quietly."
"Yeah," he said. "That tracks."
She looked at him. The torchlight was low and indirect, pointed at the wall, just enough to see by, and in it his face was all shadow and familiar angles and she thought about how she'd looked at this face ten thousand times and still wasn't done with it.
"Jett," she said.
"Yeah."
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to and they both knew it. He turned slightly and pressed his mouth to her forehead and held it there and she closed her eyes.
"We're getting out of here," he said, against her hair. "Tomorrow. Both of us."
She didn't answer.
"Indigo."
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah we are."
Anastasia heard it first.
She was still by the door, still in her rotation — window, door, window — when she went completely still. The particular stillness that meant something had changed in the information coming in.
Indigo was on her feet before she'd consciously registered why. "What—"
Anastasia put her hand up. Wait.
They all listened.
Nothing. The forest doing its nothing again. The silence that had weight and texture and gave you nothing to work with.
Then — movement. Not close. Somewhere beyond the shed, off to the left, the sound of something moving through undergrowth. Unhurried. Steady.
The three of them looked at each other in the low light.
It stopped.
Ten seconds. Twenty.
Then it came from the right.
Different direction. Same pace. Same steadiness. Like whatever was out there was circling. Taking its time. Not sneaking — not trying to be quiet, not exactly — just moving with the patience of something that knew it didn't need to hurry.
"He's outside," Jett said. Very low.
"He's been outside," Anastasia said. "For a while I think."
Indigo looked at the door. The window. The thin walls of the shed and what was on the other side of them.
"We stay in here," she said. "We don't open that door."
The movement stopped again.
Silence.
Then something hit the wall of the shed. Not hard — not trying to break through — just a single impact, deliberate, like a knock. Like an announcement. Like something saying I know you're in there in the only language it used.
Nobody moved.
Another impact. Other wall this time. Then nothing.
Indigo's hand had found the rope on the workbench without her deciding to. She was holding it. She made herself put it down.
"Torch off," she said.
Anastasia clicked hers off. They stood in the complete dark and listened and the forest outside was completely silent and that was somehow worse than the sound had been.
It went on for twenty minutes. Maybe more. Time had stopped behaving normally somewhere around day two and she'd given up trying to track it accurately. They stood in the dark shed and the Woodsman moved around the outside of it and occasionally made himself known and mostly didn't and the three of them breathed and waited and didn't speak.
Then he stopped.
Properly stopped. No movement. No impacts. Just gone, the way he always went, and the forest filling back in around the space he'd left.
Five minutes. Ten.
"Is he—" Anastasia started.
"I don't know," Indigo said.
"Maybe he left."
"Maybe."
She didn't believe it and she could tell from Anastasia's voice that she didn't either. But they both needed a moment where it was possible so they stood there and let it be possible for a little while.
It was Jett who moved first.
"I need to see," he said.
"No," Indigo said immediately.
"If he's gone we need to know. We need to think about moving while it's still—"
"Jett. No."
He looked at her. In the dark she could just make out the shape of his face, the direction of his eyes.
"I'll just look," he said. "Window. I won't open the door."
She wanted to say no again. She opened her mouth to say it.
He was already moving to the window.
She watched him lean across the workbench and put his face close to the glass and look out. His back to her. The outline of him in the dark. She watched and waited and the shed was silent and the forest was silent and for ten seconds everything was fine.
He pulled back from the window.
"I can't see anything," he said, turning back. "It's too—"
The door came in.
Not slowly. Not carefully. Just — in, the latch giving way like it was nothing, the wood swinging hard and fast and the cold air of the forest flooding through it and then the Woodsman was in the doorway and the shed was suddenly very small.
Everything happened fast.
Anastasia went left, back against the shelving units. Indigo went right, the workbench behind her, hand scrabbling for something — anything — on the surface behind her. The Woodsman came through the door and he went for Jett.
Jett didn't run.
That was the thing. He didn't run, didn't back up, just planted his feet and got his arms up and took the impact of the Woodsman reaching him like someone who had decided. Like someone who had made a choice in the half second between the door coming in and the collision and the choice was to be between Indigo and what was coming for her.
They went into the workbench hard, Jett and the Woodsman, the whole bench shuddering, something clattering off the surface onto the floor. Jett got one arm free and swung it — connected with something — but the Woodsman barely moved. Just absorbed it and came back and his hands went to Jett's throat.
" Jett— "
Indigo moved. She was off the wall and crossing the shed and something was in her hand from the workbench — she didn't look at what — and she swung it. Caught the Woodsman across the shoulder. He turned. Just slightly. Enough to look at her.
In that half second Jett got a hand free and grabbed the Woodsman's wrist and threw his weight sideways and both of them crashed off the bench and into the shelving and the whole unit came down — tins, boxes, coiled wire, all of it — and Indigo lost sight of them in the chaos of it.
She heard Jett's voice.
" Run. "
Not to both of them. To her. She knew it was to her.
" Indigo. Run. "
"I'm not—"
" Go. Now. Both of you — go— "
Anastasia grabbed her arm. Hard. The grip of someone who had made a decision and was not negotiating about it.
" He's buying us time, " Anastasia said, directly into her ear, low and urgent and cracked at the edges. " He's buying us time and we have to take it — Indigo we have to— "
The sound of something falling. Jett's voice again, wordless this time, and then the Woodsman's hands back at his throat and Jett's hands at the Woodsman's wrists and the two of them down in the wreckage of the shelving unit and Indigo stood there for one second that lasted longer than any second had a right to last and looked at him.
He looked back at her.
" Go, " he said.
Anastasia pulled.
Indigo went.
They went out the door and into the dark and ran and behind them the shed was lit by the fallen torches throwing wild shadows through the single window and Indigo ran and didn't look back because looking back was the one thing she couldn't do and stay standing.
She ran.
The path took them downhill, the trees close on either side, branches catching at her jacket, the ground uneven and treacherous and she didn't slow down. Anastasia was right beside her, matching her pace, neither of them speaking.
Behind them the shed.
Behind them Jett.
She didn't hear his voice again.
She heard something else — brief, terrible, final — and then the forest went quiet in the way it did when something was over and she kept running because stopping was the one thing in the world she was absolutely certain she could not do.
Her legs went on.
The dark went on.
The forest went on.
She went on.
They ran until the ground levelled and the trees thinned and the path opened into a small clearing she didn't recognise and then her legs stopped and she stopped with them and stood bent over with her hands on her knees and the breath coming in and out in ragged useless pulls that weren't doing anything.
Anastasia stopped beside her. Breathing just as hard. Not saying anything.
Indigo straightened up slowly.
The clearing was empty. The forest around it was dark and still and offered nothing. Above them through the gap in the canopy the sky was deep black and full of stars that had no business being that beautiful right now.
She stood there and breathed.
In.
Out.
In.
She didn't cry. She thought she might. She stood there and waited for it and it didn't come — just this vast terrible stillness inside her where something had been and wasn't anymore, an absence so complete it had its own shape, its own weight.
She'd heard.
She knew.
Anastasia was looking at her. Not speaking. Just there, close, present, the way she'd been since the beginning — the one who noticed things, who catalogued things, who had been paying attention when everyone else was too scared to.
Indigo looked back at her.
Two of them. Just two now.
She looked at the trees around the clearing. The dark between the trunks. She thought about the rope on the workbench. The tools on the wall. The heavy torch in its bracket. She thought about every piece of equipment she'd seen on this site over three days — the bow rack, the axes, the hooks, the cable ties in their box.
She thought about Jett saying go and meaning it.
Something moved through her that wasn't grief yet and wasn't rage yet but was something between the two — something colder than either of them, and quieter, and considerably more dangerous.
She looked at Anastasia.
"Tomorrow," she said. Her voice came out completely level. Completely calm. Like it belonged to someone she hadn't met yet. "Tomorrow we find him."
Anastasia held her gaze for a long moment.
"Okay," she said.
The forest was silent around them.
Indigo looked at the dark between the trees and the dark looked back and she didn't look away.