“I want to be here. So what?” He scowls at the still-vibrating phone in his hand, then ends the call without picking it up.

“Aren’t you answering that?”

“It’s my phone, and I’ll answer it when I want.” Chase turns to Melissa, who stands placidly nearby. “Who are you?”

“Your father asked me to stay with you,” Melissa explains calmly. “In case you need anything.”

“I don’t need anything, and I definitely don’t need a babysitter!”

“Gosh, that puts me in a real conundrum, because your dad’s paying me to keep an eye on you. And his paychecks are the only ones I’m taking home for this gig, so…sorry. My girlfriend’s birthday is next month, and I’d like to take her somewhere fancy when I get back.”

“Check this out,” Straw Hat says suddenly. “Leo, you seeing this?”

Chase lopes back toward the table, curious despite himself, and Melissa, Askal, and I follow. Straw Hat, it seems, has found a camera that was trained on the cabins when the sinkhole first appeared. Leo is already replaying the tape.

At first there is nothing out of the ordinary. The cabins stand as they were supposed to, with no inkling of what was to come. And then the camera flickers, darkness flitting through the screen for a few moments. When the veil lifts, the sinkhole is there.

“I’ve run it through ten times now,” Straw Hat says. “The camera was most definitely not turned off. If you listen closely, you can hear sounds of the ground giving way at the 25:54 mark. It almost looks like someone threw a blanket over the lens for a couple of minutes.”

I stare at the screen as he replays it again. The darkness that fills the camera lens feels familiar. “Or someone moved in front of the camera deliberately,” I say.

“Impossible. This camera’s mounted to one of the trees overlooking the cabins. We were only supposed to use it for extra shots. Someone would have had to climb all the way up there, and even then, we would have seen who it was.”

“We can’t move it!” one of the scientists within the sinkhole yells. “Mr. Hemslock’s right—we’ll have to chop down the tree to get the corpse out of the hole.”

“Under no circumstances are you to damage the tree!” I hear Armani yell back. “We’ll find out who it is the old-fashioned way!”

Leo’s face is inches from the monitor, as if a closer look would solve the mystery. “Faulty equipment?” he asks. “Or maybe sun glare that caused it to—”

Suddenly, from inside the darkness, the monitor before us breathes out a word, a whisper.

Leo, a woman’s voice says.

Gries swears and jumps back, and Straw Hat upends his chair trying to get away from the monitor, pausing the video by accident in his haste. Chase leaps back with a yelp, sending some of the other crew running toward us, Reuben Hemslock included.

“Did you hear that?” Leo shouts, pointing accusingly at the camera. “Did you hear that?”