Lucas shines his flashlight around. “Yep,” he says, after a beat. “I think so.”

“I don’t see a trail,” Dawn tells him. “You don’t think, like, we might have gotten mixed up somewhere?”

Lucas shines his flashlight at a piece of windswept rock. “There’s the trail right there,” he tells her.

Dawn follows his gaze. She doesn’t see a trail.

“We’re wasting time,” Lucas says, in the way that boys sometimes do when they’re sure of themselves and sick of having to explain. “Come on, Dawn. We don’t want those guys catching up.”

The thing is, boys use that tone that Lucas is using when they’re sure about something, and when they kind of want you to know that you’re NOT HELPING by asking questions.

But just because someone’s sure doesn’t mean that they’re, you know, right.

(Boys especially.)

And it can be hard to differentiate between when someone actually knows what they’re talking about and when they just think they know.

Cases like this, for instance.

But Dawn, in this instance, really has no idea if they’re lost or not. And Lucas sounds pretty damn sure.

So, really, what’s her choice?

Stand and argue?

Or trust Lucas?

Dawn decides that she has to trust Lucas, even though she has her doubts. “Okay,” she says, shrugging. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Lucas says.

He starts forward again, and Dawn follows.

In hindsight, she’d have been better off standing her ground.

Chapter 88

A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, it’s clear that they are lost.

And by clear, I mean that the ridge they’re standing on has come to its logical conclusion, and its logical conclusion is a sheer drop into pitch black with no conceivable way of descending it.

“It’s too dark to tell,” Lucas tells Dawn as they stand at the precipice. “The trail could be down there, like, lost in the fog. Like, just beyond our flashlight beams, or whatever.”

Dawn looks around the barren ridge and picks up a piece of rock about the size of a grapefruit. She throws it over the edge of the cliff, and she and Lucas both listen to hear it hit something. They listen for a long time.

They listen for so long that Dawn starts to believe maybe the rock already landed and they just didn’t hear it.

But then the sound wafts up, faint and far away, of a rock striking more rock and clattering away into nothing. The rock might as well have landed on the moon, for how far it traveled.

It’s a million miles down.

Dawn and Lucas, they’re standing at the edge of an abyss. And there was no abyss on the agenda for the outbound leg of the hike.

They’ve dead-ended, somehow.

And that’s horrible news.