They didn't stop running until the shed appeared.
Not the old stone structure. Not the one where Nico had asked for air and Indigo had looked away for three minutes. The other one — the one from last night, the one with the workbench and the rope and the tools and the heavy torch in its bracket. Her feet found it like they'd been planning to come back here the whole time.
She hit the door and went in and Anastasia was right behind her and she pulled it shut and stood there in the dark with her back against it breathing.
Anastasia clicked the big torch on. The one from the bracket. It threw a wide clean beam across the shed — so much better than the phone torches they'd been limping along with for three days — and in the proper light the shed looked different. Larger. More useful.
Indigo pushed off the door.
"We're not running anymore," she said.
Anastasia looked at her. "Okay."
"He's going to keep coming. All night. Until it's done." She crossed to the workbench. "So we finish it."
"With what."
Indigo looked at the tool wall. The rope. The cable ties. The shelving units with their tins and boxes and coiled wire. She'd been through all of it in her head last night, cataloguing, planning, the quiet part of her brain that never fully shut off doing its work while the rest of her was falling apart.
Then she looked at the floor.
There was a hatch she hadn't noticed before. Small, set flush with the floorboards, a recessed metal handle barely visible in the low light. She crossed to it and crouched down and pulled.
It came up smoothly. Cold air rising from below, the smell of oil and metal and something dry and closed. Below — a shallow storage space, maybe a meter deep, running the length of the workbench above it.
Anastasia came and looked over her shoulder.
Inside the hatch, along the back wall of the space, was a locked metal box. Gunmetal grey, heavy looking, a combination lock on the front. The kind of box that existed for one specific purpose.
They looked at each other.
"We don't know the combination," Anastasia said.
Indigo reached down and pulled the box up. It was heavy. She set it on the workbench and looked at the lock. Four digits. She tried 0000. Nothing. 1234. Nothing.
She picked up a hammer from the tool wall.
It took four strikes to break the lock housing away from the box. The metal bent and gave and the lid came open.
Two handguns. Dark, compact, sitting in foam cutouts that had been shaped exactly for them. Two full magazines beside them, separated, stored safely. Whoever owned this shed had done everything right and Indigo had never been more grateful for a responsible gun owner in her life.
Her hands were steady when she picked one up.
She looked at Anastasia. "Have you ever—"
"No," Anastasia said. "You?"
"No."
They looked at the guns for a moment.
"Point and shoot," Anastasia said. "Fundamentally."
"Yeah," Indigo said. "Fundamentally."
She loaded hers the way she'd seen it done in enough films to have a rough idea — magazine in, slide back, round chambered. Her hands didn't shake. She noticed that distantly. Three days ago her hands had shaken holding a torch. Now she was loading a gun in a shed in the dark and her hands were completely still.
She handed the second one to Anastasia and watched her load it.
"Okay," Indigo said.
"Okay," Anastasia said.
The plan came together fast. Not because it was complicated but because Indigo had been building it in pieces for the last two days without knowing that was what she was doing — every hook she'd counted, every rope she'd noted, every piece of equipment she'd catalogued without knowing why.
She knew why now.
The clearing in front of the shed. That was the stage. Open ground, moonlight, clear sightlines. She needed him in the open, away from the trees, where he couldn't melt back into the dark the way he always did.
She needed bait.
She looked at the Woodsman's mask lying on the workbench.
She'd picked it up somewhere in the chaos of the last hour without thinking about it — it had been on the ground when he'd stepped toward them and she'd grabbed it the way she'd been grabbing things for three days, instinctively, because you never knew what would matter. Now she held it in both hands and looked at it.
The rough burlap. The hand-stitched seams. The two dark eye gaps that had been the last thing Elizabeth saw, and Addison, and Nico, and—
She turned it over once.
Then she put it on.
It smelled like sweat and forest and something underneath both of those that she didn't try to name. The eye gaps were small and the world through them was dark and narrow. She reached up and pulled the burlap straight against her face.
Anastasia was watching her.
"You're going to draw him out," she said. Not a question.
"He'll see the costume," Indigo said, her voice slightly muffled through the fabric. "He'll think it's — he'll think something's wrong. He'll come to look."
"And when he does."
"You're in the shed. Door open just enough. When he's in the middle of the clearing—" She looked through the eye gaps at the door. The angle. The distance. "You come out the left side. I come from the right. We've got him in the open with nowhere to go."
Anastasia was quiet for a moment.
"And the rope," she said.
Indigo looked at the length of rope she'd already cut and laid out along the base of the treeline on the far side of the clearing — low, dark, invisible against the ground. Stretched between two trees at ankle height across the path leading into the clearing from the north. The direction he'd been coming from.
"If he comes from the north he hits it," she said. "Goes down. That's when we move."
Anastasia looked at the rope. At the shed. At Indigo standing in the burlap mask with the gun in her hand.
"Okay," she said.
"If something goes wrong—"
"Nothing's going wrong."
"Ana."
"Nothing is going wrong," Anastasia said again. Firm. Final. The tone of someone who had decided.
Indigo looked at her through the eye gaps for a moment.
"Okay," she said.
She went out first.
The clearing at night was cold and still, the moon throwing its pale light down through the gap in the canopy, the trees dark on every side. She walked to the centre of it slowly, deliberately, the canvas jacket heavy on her shoulders, the mask narrowing her world to two small dark windows.
She stood there.
Just stood. The way he always stood. Still and patient in the moonlight.
She waited.
Behind her the shed door was pulled to — just barely, Anastasia on the other side of it, gun up, watching through the gap. Indigo could feel her there without seeing her. That specific kind of awareness you develop for people you've been surviving alongside.
The forest was quiet.
One minute. Two.
Then the trees moved.
Not from the north — from the left, from the east, the undergrowth shifting, the sound of something that had been standing very still deciding to move. She kept her body motionless. Head forward. Arms slightly away from her sides.
The way he stood.
He came out of the trees slowly.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked at her.
She looked back through the eye gaps and felt her heartbeat very loud and very present and kept absolutely still.
He tilted his head. Something wrong in what he was seeing — she could tell by the quality of the stillness, a different stillness to his usual one. More alert. More questioning.
He took a step toward her.
She didn't move.
Another step. He was in the clearing now, on the open ground, the moonlight finding him, and he was looking at her with the focused attention of something trying to solve a problem.
She needed him further in. Further from the treeline.
She took one step back.
He stopped.
She took another.
He followed.
Four steps. Five. He was in the middle of the clearing now, the trees an equal distance in every direction, no quick route back into the dark, and he was still looking at her with that tilted head quality of something that knew something was wrong but hadn't placed it yet.
She reached up slowly.
And pulled the mask off.
The recognition was immediate. She watched it move across his face — not shock, he didn't do shock, but a rapid recalibration, the assessment of a professional updating to new information. His hand moved toward something at his side.
The shed door came open.
Anastasia came out left, fast and low, gun up.
Indigo brought hers up right.
He stopped.
Stood there in the middle of the clearing with two seventeen year old girls pointing guns at him from either side and looked at the situation with the unhurried assessment he brought to everything.
"Get on the ground," Indigo said.
He looked at her.
" Get on the ground. "
He didn't move.
She fired.
The shot went into the dirt two feet to his left. The sound of it was enormous in the quiet forest — birds erupting from the canopy above, something scattering in the undergrowth, the echo of it rolling away through the trees.
He got on the ground.
The rope was already cut into lengths on the workbench. Anastasia kept the gun on him while Indigo tied his wrists behind his back — tight, the kind of tight you do when you've spent three days learning exactly what happens when you leave room for error. She tied his ankles. She checked both twice.
He lay face down in the dirt of the clearing and said nothing.
She stood up.
Looked down at him. This ordinary man. This professional. This person who had walked through three nights of forest killing her friends with the patient efficiency of someone completing a job.
She thought about Elizabeth.
She thought about Nico.
She thought about Addison — all of Addison, the whole complicated impossible weight of her — and she thought about Jett saying go and meaning it and the sound she'd heard as she ran.
She raised the gun.
Anastasia put her hand on her arm. Not stopping her. Just — there.
Indigo stood there for a long moment.
The Woodsman said nothing. Didn't beg, didn't bargain, didn't move. Just lay in the dirt and waited, with the same patience he'd always had, like the outcome was something he'd already made his peace with.
She pulled the trigger.
Afterward the clearing was very quiet.
Indigo lowered the gun. Her arm dropped to her side. She stood there in the moonlight and looked at what was in front of her and felt — nothing, for a moment. Just a vast still nothing, like the inside of the shed with all the torches off. No triumph. No relief. No horror at herself. Just emptiness, clean and complete.
Then Anastasia was beside her. Not saying anything. Just there, her shoulder against Indigo's, the two of them standing in the clearing at whatever time it was in the last hours of the third night.
After a while Indigo became aware of something.
Light.
Not moonlight. Different — yellow, artificial, moving. Coming from the direction of the visitor centre, through the trees, more than one source. And a sound she hadn't heard in three days — engine noise, on the road beyond the fence.
She looked at Anastasia.
Anastasia was already looking.
"Someone's here," she said.
The police found them at the fence line.
Three units, two ambulances, a forensics van already pulling into the car park when Indigo and Anastasia came out of the trees. Blue lights turning silently against the dark, radios crackling, officers in high vis moving with the organised urgency of people responding to something they'd been briefed on but hadn't fully expected.
One of them saw them first. Stopped. Said something into his radio.
They crossed the car park toward her — or she crossed toward them, she wasn't sure later which way it happened, just that the distance closed and then there were people around her, voices asking questions she couldn't quite process, something being wrapped around her shoulders, someone looking at her arm.
She found out later about Addison's parents.
Nicole Parker had called the police on the morning of day two. No contact, no signal, not unusual for the site but she had a feeling — Indigo would always remember that detail, a mother who had a feeling — and she'd called. The first response had been routine. Then they'd run the company, found the site, found the gated visitor centre and the actor's car still in the car park and the actor himself not answering his phone and it had stopped being routine very quickly.
They'd been working toward the site for twelve hours.
They'd been twelve hours too late for four people and exactly right for two.
Indigo sat on the back step of an ambulance with a foil blanket around her shoulders and her arm being looked at by a paramedic who kept asking her questions in a calm measured voice and she kept answering them in a calm measured voice and somewhere nearby she could hear Anastasia doing the same thing.
The sky above the tree line was starting to change.
Not light yet. Just the very first suggestion of it — the deep black softening at the edges, the stars nearest the horizon beginning to fade. The particular moment before dawn where the night admits it's losing.
She watched it.
The paramedic said something. She answered. He moved away for a moment.
She sat alone on the back step of the ambulance in the car park of the visitor centre where three days ago she'd walked in laughing about a four hour drive and felt the weight of everything settling around her — not crushing, not yet, that would come later, she knew that. But settling. Taking up the space it was going to occupy for a long time.
She thought about Jett saying go.
She thought about Elizabeth's house with the wall around it.
She thought about Addison at seven on a pink bike ringing the bell because it was her birthday and the world was good.
She thought about her mum's kitchen. The radio on low. The morning of Addison's birthday party, the plaits, the toast.
The sky kept getting lighter.
She kept watching it.
Behind her the forest sat quiet and dark and full of everything it had taken and would not give back, and the blue lights turned against it, and somewhere inside the tree line the path ran on, and the hooks were still on the trees, and the campfire was cold ash, and the morning was coming whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Indigo Derby sat in the car park and breathed.
In.
Out.
She was alive.
She wasn't sure yet what to do with that. But she was going to have to figure it out.
The sky got lighter.
She watched it get lighter.