A book would be perfect, given Kyle’s circumstance, but obviously impossible. What did Boy Scouts like? Patches? Mara could probably find a pen at the crew camp and a piece of canvas and draw a patch about being on a reality show, or climbing a really big tree. But she didn’t want him to think she was making fun of him.

Then she thought of the leather bracelets they gave out after campouts at Primal Instinct. They were tacky but beloved. Kyle wouldn’t need to stand up to use one, and they were kind of like a badge, but not in a way that cheapened the ones Kyle had already earned. Mara had never appreciated the bracelets, but maybe they were the kind of thing people liked, if they were people like Kyle. Caring a lot about purity and proving themselves and stuff.

The bracelets looked rustic, like the instructors had made them by hand while waiting for clients to emerge, but the truth was that Bjørn bought them online in bulk. They weren’t even rare. If you searched the right words, you’d find them on countless websites. Photographed against pristine white backgrounds. You could buy a pack of ten for eighteen dollars. They came individually wrapped in crinkly plastic bags with cardboard tags. Back at headquarters, when no one was coming by, Mara would go through and unwrap boxes of them at a time. Then she’d hang them in the garage for a week so they didn’t smell like plastic anymore.

When Kyle took a nap, Mara went down to the creek, to the bend with the gravel spit, and searched the stones for a while. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But she found another chunk of quartz, white and glittering and about an inch long, that would make a nice pendant if she could figure out how to hold it. She had a few feet of very fine nettle string that she hadn’t used yet, but it was brittle. So she soaked it in water, and after it softened she wrapped it around the center of the crystal a few times to make a wide band, tying it snugly. As the string dried in the sun, it tightened, and when she gave the necklace a few vigorous shakes, the stone didn’t budge. It might not stay put if Kyle were big on, say, jogging, but it seemed solid enough for his current state.

Mara was excited to give it to him. But when she got back to the shelter, Kyle was still asleep. His bandage was wet with pus. A fly sat on it, and she shooed it away. She went down to the lake for a while and dug a seep well with a stick, then moved some fish from the trap to the well, and went over to the bog, where she found a huge flush of oyster mushrooms and, to her relief, another long strand of groundnuts. In the clearing, Bullfrog arranged three signal pyres in the shape of a triangle. Ashley was nowhere to be seen.