Anything.

Bethany decided to get in touch with Officer Clark now, get her and the whole sheriff’s department mobilized and ready to roll the fuck out. But when she slipped her phone loose from her bra and looked at the screen the last of her courage left her.

She had no service.

The truck shifted course and rolled over a heavy stone. Bethany’s head struck the lower wall of the truck’s cab. She bit her hand to keep from screaming. Bit until she was afraid she was going to draw blood and didn’t let go.

The thought finally occurred to her that whatever had killed Dylan, whatever Luke and the other boys were driving to, the truth that was so determined to stay hidden it had concealed itself all the way out here in the barren Flats: what would the truth make of Bethany finding it? Bethany, wielding nothing to defend herself but a useless phone and an expensive smile?

The thought finally occurred to her that she could—how was it possible?—die.

Peeking from beneath her towel, Bethany saw a pale hook of moon through the camper shell’s window: brilliant and clear as an open wound in the sky. Fear struck the last of her composure from her head. Her mind went blank, her body cold.

That moon, that exact hook of moon, had watched her in her sleep every night this week.

They had crossed the threshold. They were going where the dreams were made. They were driving toward that thing, that pit that had been calling to her since the night Dylan died. It had been calling her here, all along.

JAMAL

The highway to Dallas was nearly empty. Night had fallen. Irons had flipped on his headlights and told Jamal that he could call his mother. Half this plan had been her idea in the first place.

“Won’t it look bad that I’ve run?” Jamal had asked his lawyer, and Irons had insisted that whatever they did would look bad. Hopefully, Irons had said, once Jamal’s cousin in Dallas had gotten him to Atlanta, the lawyer could subpoena footage from the security company that monitored the Tanner ranch and prove Jamal’s alibi.

Jamal hadn’t known what to say to that. However prudent or miraculous this escape may be, the fact remained that he was running away from a crisis he knew he had helped to create in the first place.

All this past summer, Dylan’s mood had pitched wildly at any moment from giddy to morose, from generous to petty to irritable to enraged. As his friends’ trips to the coast became more frequent, Jamal had never found the sack to say a word about what was clearly a dire (and worsening) secret.

With a queasy flood of shame, Jamal remembered the lazy afternoon three weeks ago when—a few minutes after he’d sent those fateful text messages to Bethany: Let’s do it—Dylan had sighed through a cloud of weed smoke in his stuffy attic and said, with a faint trace of something Jamal recognized now, too late, as fear, “It’s like a fever. It makes you crazy.”