Siena

"It's not hard. I'll be right back," Emmett shouted, the cabin door slamming shut behind him.

"Great," Siena hissed between her teeth. The last thing she wanted amid all this was to be responsible for a gun.

She spun on her heel and hurried down the hall and into the lab. Before they'd tried leaving the first time, she'd stacked the climbing gear in the corner. Rifling through it, she found a harness and yanked it free. But the heaping mess of rope didn't play along so nicely, and the more she worked at the knots, the more tangled it became.

She slammed her fist into the ground. "FUCK!"

Burying her face in her hands, Siena took a few deep breaths. Her time was better spent detangling the heaping mass of anxiety in her brain. But every time she attempted to tease apart a problem she could solve, a wave of nausea swelled in her stomach. Her shoulders itched with stress in the way they used to long before the bugs, when her good ol' panic attacks manifested in a perfectly acceptable textbook fashion.

She dropped her hands and opened her eyes to darkness, a hazier, twilight-tinged world like the one she'd emerged into yesterday. The world with the map and the masked stranger and the beheaded animal. The world where The Mother reigned, whatever the hell that meant.

The stress in her neck tightened into a hook that tried to drag her to her feet until she saw a beat-up field journal lying on the floor of the lab. Isaac's. He'd carried that damn thing with him everywhere, yet left it at the cabin? It made no sense.

Unless he had come back here after he left them on the trail. Maybe he hadn't fallen into the pit after all.

Siena scrambled to the journal and flipped it open to the sketch of the valley he'd shown her two weeks prior: three sister peaks and an imposter. The jagged, unnatural thing reminded her of a fantasy-novel mountain. Mount Doom or something.

She turned the page to a sketch of the melted glacier. Just like the valley, the detail of the copper cliffside was incredible. But the water... he'd scribbled it in. The entire tarn was a smeared mess of graphite. He'd even pressed hard enough with the pencil to rip the page in a few spots.

So destructive for someone so meticulous.

Siena flipped the page again.

The next sketch was of the tree they'd found. The tree she'd entered. It was as grandiose as she remembered, except another smeared dark scribble within the branches had ripped open the page.

She swiped the sketch away to the next. A cry escaped her throat, and she pressed her fingers to her lips.

In a meadow, a mule lay dead. The contents of its slashed pack—rope, a canteen, a first aid tin—rested in the grass. The animal was decapitated, its spine falling limply from its neck like wet rope. Fungus sprouted from the gaping hole where its head once was.

Had he found this? Had he found this and never told them—the body of the mutilated trophy she'd discovered?

No. Isaac would have told them. He hadn't acted disturbed enough to keep it to himself.

But maybe she hadn't been paying close enough attention to him.

Siena wiped her hand across her face and pulled away, rubbing tears between her fingers as the front door slammed. She hopped up and hurried toward the living room, expecting Emmett with a rifle.

But it wasn't Emmett.

Cam stood at the entrance to the cabin. She was as filthy and haggard as the unfamiliar backpack over her shoulder, which she dropped on the floor in front of her.

Siena ran to her and threw her arms around Cam's neck, sobbing in a way Cam usually made fun of her for. But Siena didn't care. "Where the hell have you been?"

Cam's body trembled as she hugged Siena back. "I—I don't know. But I'm being punished. Punished for lying to everyone. For lying to you."