“Flashlight,” she said. “Don’t turn it on yet. Not until we get there. Not until we’re inside.”

He took it. Dani had one, too.

“This way,” she said, and started off along the face of the slope, straight toward Truman Avenue.

At the road, Sam expected Dani to lead him south toward town, as she had that afternoon. Instead she turned north, and for the first few minutes of their walk, they had the subdivision beside them, sprawled out to one side of Truman, a zone of pale streetlamps and porch lights shining out through the maples. On the other side of Truman was empty farmland, vast and black.

The country to the north, directly in front of them, was also black. Sam tried to recall how it’d looked in daylight. It was pretty flat, he knew. The land only sloped between downtown Ashland and the edge of the subdivision. Both north and south of that stretch, it was flat everywhere. The only other thing he could remember was the long band of forest that crossed Truman half a mile north of the suburb.

They walked in silence for a while. Sam thought of asking Dani to explain what she’d said—about Ashland being a fake town, about it being camouflage for something else. Instead he kept quiet. Whatever place she was taking him to, obviously she wanted him to see it first, and then tell her story. A story he wouldn’t believe any other way, apparently. Maybe she was right about that. He didn’t believe it so far.

The suburb fell farther and farther behind them. There was nothing around them now but dark open fields, and the stars arching overhead. Sam could hear the low corn shoots rustling like paper in the breeze. It was hard to judge distance in the dark, but he guessed they were about halfway to the forest, when he heard the far-off whisper of tires on pavement somewhere behind them. He and Dani turned at the same time, and he saw the road to the south crowned with light, where the land dropped at the crest of the slope. A car was coming up the hill, still just below the top, out of sight.

“In the ditch,” Dani said.

She led the way off the road, past the gravel shoulder and into the thick weeds. Just inside them, Sam felt the ground drop away sharply. The ditch was a lot deeper than it looked. Four feet, if not more.

“Don’t go all the way down,” Dani said. “There’s water at the bottom. Get a handful of the weed stems and just hold on.”