The moon hung low over Vicrock Forest, pale and indifferent, casting long silver shadows through the trees. It was the kind of light that made everything look almost beautiful — almost — until you remembered what was running through it.
Indigo Derby's boot caught a root and the ground rushed up to meet her. Her palms hit the wet dirt hard, and for one terrible second the world stopped — the sounds of the forest too loud, the darkness too close. Then a hand locked around her wrist and pulled.
"Get up — get up—"
Anastasia. Her grip was iron. Indigo scrambled to her feet without thinking, legs already moving before she was fully upright, the two of them crashing through the undergrowth in near silence, breathing too hard to speak.
They ran until the trees began to thin. Until the sound of footsteps behind them — slow, unhurried, almost casual — seemed to fall back into the dark. Until Anastasia grabbed Indigo's jacket and yanked her sideways behind the wide trunk of an oak, pressing them both flat against the bark.
They stayed there for a long moment. Listening.
Nothing. Just the wind moving through the high branches and somewhere far off the low creak of something settling.
"I think we lost it," Anastasia whispered. Her voice was steady but her hand was still shaking where it gripped Indigo's sleeve.
Indigo opened her mouth to answer and felt it then — a deep, hot throbbing in her left arm that she hadn't registered until this exact moment. She looked down. In the pale moonlight she could see the dark stain spreading down from just below her elbow, soaking into the fabric of her jacket, dripping steadily from her fingertips to the wet ground below.
"Indigo." Anastasia's voice dropped even lower. She was staring at the arm, eyes wide. "That's — that's a lot of blood."
"I know." Indigo pressed her other hand over it, hard. The pain arrived properly then, sharp and insistent, and she bit down on the inside of her cheek. "I know. It's fine. Keep moving."
Anastasia looked like she wanted to argue. She didn't.
They moved carefully through the last stretch of trees, staying low, checking behind them every few steps. The forest opened onto a narrow dirt path and across it — maybe thirty meters away — sat a cabin. Small, dark, the windows black and empty. No lights. No movement. But four walls and a door and right now that was everything.
They ran.
Indigo hit the door first, fist pounding against the wood, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet. "Hello? Hello — is anyone in there?" Nothing. She tried the handle. Locked. She hit it again anyway because stopping felt like dying.
Anastasia grabbed her shoulder. "There's no one in there. Come on, we can try to—"
A sound. Behind them.
Footsteps in wet grass. Slow. Deliberate. The sound of someone who was not running because they had never needed to run.
Indigo turned around.
It was standing at the edge of the tree line, half swallowed by shadow. The moonlight caught the mask — rough burlap, hand-stitched, the two dark eye gaps absorbing the light rather than reflecting it. The heavy canvas jacket. The work boots. Still. Completely, impossibly still.
Just watching.
Anastasia stepped forward, her voice cracking open the silence like a stone through glass. "What the fuck do you want?"
It didn't answer. It never answered. It just took one slow step forward, and then another, moving out of the trees and into the pale light of the clearing.
Indigo felt Anastasia's hand find hers in the dark.
The Woodsman reached up. Gripped the edge of the mask.
And pulled it off.
Indigo looked at the face beneath it. The world tilted.
"What the fuck," she whispered.
He was ordinary.
That was the thing that hit her first, before anything else, before the fear or the rage or any of the things she'd expected to feel in this moment. He was just — ordinary. A man, somewhere in his thirties maybe, unremarkable face, dark hair matted with sweat against his forehead. Not monstrous. Not the face of something that belonged in those woods. Just a person. A completely ordinary person standing in the moonlight holding a burlap mask in one hand like it was something he'd picked up off the floor.
He looked at them both. His breathing was steady. He wasn't rushed.
Anastasia had gone completely still beside her.
"You're kids," the man said.
"Im Jacob Cain".
His voice was flat. Not cruel, not warm. Just observational, the way you'd comment on the weather. Like the information was mildly surprising and not particularly relevant.
"You're kids, " he said again, and this time something shifted in it — not regret exactly, more like a man recalibrating something, updating a file.
"Who are you," Indigo said.
He looked at her. The mask hung loose in his hand. Behind him the forest was dark and still and gave nothing away.
"Doesn't matter," he said.
"It matters to me."
He considered this for a moment, with the unhurried quality of someone who had decided the outcome of this conversation already and was comfortable with it.
"You're going to want to run again," he said.
"I'm done running," Indigo said.
Something moved across his face at that. Not quite surprise. The closest thing to it he probably got.
Anastasia's hand tightened on hers.
"Who sent you," Indigo said. "Someone paid you to do this. Someone hired you to come here and—" Her voice tried to do something she wouldn't let it do. She pushed through it. "Who was it."
The man looked at her for a long moment. The mask swung slightly from his hand. He looked at the trees to his left, then back at her, like he was thinking through something private.
"Why would I tell you that," he said.
"Because four of my friends are dead." She took one step toward him. Just one. "Because one of them was seventeen years old and she asked someone to help her and nobody did. Because another one walked into the dark to give us time to run and I heard—" She stopped. Started again. "Because I have nothing left to lose and you're standing in front of me without your mask on and I need to know."
He looked at her for a long time.
The forest held its breath.
"You really don't know," he said.
"No."
"You genuinely have no idea who put you here."
"No," she said again. "Tell me."
He tilted his head slightly. Looked at Anastasia. Then back at Indigo. Something moved behind his eyes that she couldn't name — not sympathy, not quite, something more complicated and less comfortable than that.
"Someone in your group," he said.
The clearing went very quiet.
"Someone in your—" Indigo stopped. "No. No that's—"
"Someone paid to have you all brought here. Paid for the booking, paid for me, arranged the whole thing." He said it the way you'd read from a receipt. Factual. Itemised. "Paid specifically to have all of you in one place with no way out and no way to call for help."
"That's not—" Anastasia started.
"The company is real," he said. "ScreamForHell. The experience is real. They run it every weekend. But someone used it. Paid the extra. Had me brought in on the side." He paused. "The actor — the real one — he wasn't supposed to be there when I arrived. Miscommunication."
The actor lying in the undergrowth along the fence line. The boots she'd recognised.
"Who," Indigo said. The word came out very quiet. Very controlled. Like she was carrying it carefully because if she wasn't careful with it something would break. "Who in our group."
He looked at her.
"Parker," he said. "Addison Parker."
The name landed like something physical.
Indigo heard Anastasia make a small sound beside her. Just small. Just one.
"That's—" Indigo started.
"She contacted me eight weeks ago," he said. "Had a list. Everyone on the trip. Paid half upfront, half when the job was done." He paused. "She never specified herself as exempt."
"She never—" Indigo looked at him. "She never said don't kill me?"
"No."
The clearing was completely silent.
Indigo stood there and let that settle into her. Addison at seven years old on a pink bike ringing the bell. Addison at the campfire laughing at something Elizabeth said. Addison sitting slightly apart from the group with her phone and her quiet face and her calculations that nobody could see. Addison saying not me, not me while the hook—
She stopped that thought before it finished.
"Why," she said. Her voice came out strange. Almost calm. "What did she say. Why did she want us dead."
The man was quiet for a moment.
"She said you wouldn't remember her," he said.
Indigo stared at him.
"She said you'd all forgotten something. Something that happened when you were young. Something that—" He paused, seemed to be recalling it. "She said it cost her everything and none of you even remembered it happening."
"What," Anastasia said. "What did we do. What did we—"
"She didn't say specifically. Just that you'd forgotten her once and she was making sure you didn't forget her again." He looked at Indigo. "Her words."
The silence after that was enormous.
Indigo stood in it and thought about the birthday party. The garden. Four girls under the tree talking about dying like it was nothing. Addison on the pink bike, bell ringing, face completely open and unguarded and happy. She thought about every version of Addison she'd known across the years — the contained one, the quiet one, the one who noticed things and said nothing, the one who'd sat slightly apart at the campfire and looked at her phone and said of course when Indigo asked if she was okay.
She thought about a girl who felt invisible to the people who were supposed to see her.
She thought about what that does to a person over ten years.
She didn't have a word for what she felt. It was too large and too complicated and too many things at once — grief and rage and something that was almost understanding which was the worst part, the part she didn't want, the part that sat beside the grief and refused to leave.
Addison was dead.
Addison had done this and Addison was dead and the Woodsman — this man, this ordinary man standing in front of her — had done both of those things and was standing here explaining it like it was a transaction because to him it was.
Anastasia spoke first.
"She's dead," she said. To the man. Flat and clear. "Addison. She's dead. Your client is dead."
He looked at her. Something shifted in his face.
"I know," he said.
"So you killed the person who hired you."
"The terms didn't specify."
"She was seventeen," Anastasia said.
"So are you," he said. And something in his voice on that — something that wasn't quite anything — told Indigo that the recalibration she'd seen earlier was still happening. That this man who did this for money had arrived at a campsite expecting adults or near enough and had found something else and was still, somewhere underneath the flatness of him, processing that.
It didn't make him less dangerous.
It didn't make her feel anything for him.
But she filed it away.
"You're going to try to finish it," Indigo said.
He looked at her. Didn't confirm or deny.
"You came here to do a job," she said. "You haven't finished it."
"No," he said.
"Two of us left."
"Yes."
She looked at him. He looked back. The mask still hanging from his hand. The moonlight coming down through the gap in the canopy above them, pale and indifferent, making everything look almost beautiful.
"Then why are you talking to us," she said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"You asked," he said.
She held his gaze. "I did."
Something passed between them that she couldn't name. Not an understanding — not anything close to that. Just a moment of two people looking at each other clearly and seeing what was there.
Then he raised the mask.
And put it back on.
The burlap settled over his face and the eye gaps found her and just like that he was the Woodsman again — no face, no voice, just the dark canvas and the pale trim and the work boots and the patience of something that had never needed to hurry.
He took one step toward them.
"Run," Anastasia said.
Indigo was already moving.
They ran.
Through the clearing and back into the trees, the path taking them downhill, the branches reaching out from both sides in the dark. Indigo's arm was screaming and her legs were past the point of hurting and her lungs were making decisions she wasn't fully consulted on but she ran anyway because that was what was left.
Anastasia beside her. Always beside her.
Behind them the footsteps started again. Slow. Unhurried.
He knew they couldn't run forever.
So did she.
She ran anyway.
And in her chest, underneath the fear and the grief and the exhaustion and everything else that had accumulated across three nights in this forest, something else was running too. Quiet and cold and completely focused.
She knew who now.
She knew why.
And she knew that in the morning — if there was a morning, when there was a morning — she was not going to be the one running.