“You have got to tell your dad,” Lily said for probably the hundredth time.

Campbell sidled up beside me.

“Later,” I told her quietly. I’ll tell you what Victoria told me later.

“Everybody decent?” Hope didn’t wait for a response to the question she’d just called out before she yelled, “Let there be light!”

One by one, the boat lights came back on—and then some. An instant later, music was booming from the direction of the boats.

There wasn’t much of a shoreline directly beneath the cliffs, but on either side, girls stood shivering on rocky ground. I could feel bits of sand and gravel pressing themselves into my own feet. The beat of the music was impossible to ignore.

Every inch of skin on my body felt alive.

“The Candidates are many,” Victoria called out. She was standing in the light now, her black hair soaked, the weight of the water pulling it straight. “The Chosen . . .”

“Are few.” The last words were yelled by more than one person.

“You know who else is few?” Campbell murmured beside me. “People with ovaries enough to jump off the . . .”

Top. My brain filled in the end of her sentence, but instead of finishing it, she screamed. The sound was horrible—piercing and guttural and without end.

“Campbell?” My heart rate had just stabilized, but I could feel it ticking upward, feel the chill of something in the air, the way I had on the way down.

Beside me, Sadie-Grace started screaming, too.

“Oh dear,” Lily said, preternaturally calm in a way that freaked me out more than the screams. “That’s . . .”

The rest of the sentence caught in her throat. I followed her gaze, to the place where the lake met the shore. Water sloshed gently against the rocks, and scattered among them . . .

. . . was a skull.

LABOR DAY, 3:23 A.M.

“She’s almost here, Sawyer!”

“Close your eyes.”

“What?”

“Just do it, Sadie-Grace. Pretend you’re still unconscious. Until we can move, until we can fight back, the name of the game is stall.”

ELEVEN WEEKS
(AND THREE DAYS) EARLIER

CHAPTER 12

There were numerous downsides to discovering human remains while cliff-jumping, naked, in the middle of the night. For example: explaining to the cops the circumstances surrounding the discovery and becoming acutely aware that your body and the body had been in the lake—in close proximity—together. Two weeks had passed, and I still didn’t feel like I’d showered enough.

I also hadn’t stopped wondering about the corpse—how old it was, who it was, how long it had been in the depths of Regal Lake before the storms had dredged it up.