Lacrishia closes my hand around the damp, coarse broom handle of a spear, but my body rejects every horrific thing it implies. I push it back, but Lacrishia insists, securing her hand over mine. “You’re all talk,” she says, “unless you’re willing to do the thing. You might not like it, you might not think you can, but there’s nobody between us and these monsters. They know we’re coming, but what they don’t know is what we’re willing to do.”

“I’m not gonna—”

“You’re in charge of these kids, same as me.”

“The Beginners?”

“The kids. I’m not saying you have to run out there, stab the first staff member you see. I am saying that I need you to go into a dark, scary bunker where the Reverend and Bill and Briggs are hiding and bring back my Darcy so we can all go home.”

“I promise. I’ll do it.”

Lacrishia releases her grip, leaving me holding the jagged, twisted spear. In a single move, as if she’s done it a million times, she plucks the torch from its hold in the cavern floor and joins the others. The young woman who could hardly speak above a whisper this morning turns to me, the flickering flame cleaving her face in two: half in shadow, half a hellish red.

“If they put you to the test,” she says, “kill them.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CAMP’S OUT

“This is escalating quickly,” I say, leaving the waterfall—and my scant few happy memories of Nightlight—behind.

“Are you talking about the spears?” Molly whispers. “Or what you and Marcos got up to in the cave?” Molly doesn’t need an answer, and I don’t supply her with one. Both topics—particularly Lacrishia’s directive to “kill them”—are twisting my intestines. How could Molly switch from camper to Lord of the Flies so easily? She’s been ready to scrap from minute one, choking me with a branch as soon as we landed.

I wish I saw things that clearly.

The rain has died off into mist, giving the air itself a physical presence—billows of fog rise off the lake and float low, just above our heads, like ghosts.

Death hangs over Nightlight.