Alright, stick a pin in it for later. But you do like him, and it’s not the adrenaline talking.

She glanced over at him, then looked away again.

They were five minutes from the camp. Outside the open windows, there was nothing but pitch-black woods going by. In the headlights, the gravel lane began climbing into the high country above the river, skirting the face of the valley wall. On the right side of the road, the ground angled upward into the dark at forty-five degrees, the slope choked with pine trunks. On the left side there was simply a drop-off: a perfect black void with a few treetops hovering in it.

“I wish I could remember us as kids,” Danica said. “I mean when we knew each other. Even if it was just a few days.”

Up ahead, the road curved sharply. Dryden slowed, coming toward it. He seemed about to reply, and then the vehicle made the turn and its headlights washed over a fallen pine thirty feet away, entirely blocking the road.

Dryden locked up the brakes; the Explorer’s tires bit into the loose gravel and then slid, bringing the vehicle to rest just shy of the deadfall. Out in front, dust from the road swirled upward into the headlight beams.

For maybe a second, everything was silent. It was enough time for Danica to think, Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it just happened to fall—

And then through her open window she heard movement—in the darkness just to her right, somebody scrambling fast down the wooded slope. Coming right toward the vehicle.

She felt panic rising inside her, her pulse thudding in her ears. She turned to Dryden and saw him staring straight ahead into the dust. He didn’t look panicked—not even caught off guard. There was nothing in his eyes but concentration. He looked like someone doing a math problem in his head—rapidly.

Then he took a fast breath, in and out, and reached for her with his right hand. For a second she had the crazy impression that he meant to hold hands with her—but all he did was take hold of her seat belt and snug it tightly against her chest.

“Sam—”

She didn’t get to finish it. In the next instant, Dryden hauled left on the steering wheel, took his foot off the brake and slammed it down on the gas pedal.

“Sam, wait—SAM—”

The vehicle lunged forward through its turn, the headlights sweeping out into the darkness above the drop-off—the void full of hovering treetops—and then the front wheels went over the edge and Danica felt the world drop sickeningly out from under her.