“Best,” Jade says, then lowers in her unbalanced way to grab the trap’s chain, drag it over from where it was, moving slow so it doesn’t spring, chomp into her thigh this time.
“Why move it?” Letha asks.
“Maybe he knows where it used to be, right?” Jade says.
Letha looks at the tree it was at and then at the one it’s at now, like clocking for difference, then shrugs whatever, steps under Jade’s arm again. When Jade sneaks a look back, the headlamp is closer now. Though she’s seeing it now as the mining light on Harry Warden’s helmet.
“Go, go,” she says to Letha, and they hop-crutch ahead, moving so much slower now. Jade knows that if she were even ten percent as wholesome as a final girl, she’d push Letha ahead, tell her to save herself, that her survival is what’s important here, that she shouldn’t endanger herself for someone whose timer’s about up.
But the thing is, Jade’s discovering, she doesn’t want to die.
Not really. Not out here in the dark, with whatever new and terrible construction tool Theo Mondragon’s swinging.
Speaking of…
Jade peers behind Letha, across the lake. Not to the barge that makes a daily crossing, but to the idea of it.
Right?
Except tomorrow’s a holiday, and the lake’s closed to all powered watercraft. Only paddles and oars. Because everyone not checked into Pleasant Valley is going to be watching the movie from innertubes and canoes and dressed-up rowboats tomorrow night. Unless of course word of this massacre in Terra Nova makes it across the water. Then the staties will break Hardy’s injunction, and the media won’t be far behind.
Jade hitches along with Letha, looking behind them again— no light, which is fifty times worse—and reaches into her pocket, comes out with her phone. With her dunked phone.
Her phone with the case still leaking lake water.
Jade holds it out to the side and drops it, says to Letha, “Breadcrumbs.”
Letha nods about the solidness of that idea, pats her pajama bottom pockets for the phone she doesn’t have.
“Oh,” Jade says then, when they stumble back out into the moonlight of… of the meadow Mr. Holmes was showing them. Sheep’s Head, something like that?
“Too exposed,” Letha says, looking around like a prairie dog with a hawk complex, and Jade agrees, is letting Letha turn them around to hug the treeline, but then… there’s that light again. Even closer.
At their new rate of speed, he’s going to catch them inside two minutes, maybe less.
“No, no,” Jade says, turning them back the other way, to cross the meadow. Which no way can they do.
“Is that my dad?” Letha says, then comes up onto her toes, waving one arm. “Dad, Daddy!”
Jade winces and Letha feels it, comes around, her eyes questioning.
“It is him,” Jade says.
Letha studies Jade’s face about this, then looks up to the light drawing closer, making more of a straight line now that it can echo-locate. Maybe Theo Mondragon can even see them now, for all Jade knows. One wounded duck with a shaved head, one improbably-alive daughter.
“You don’t mean…？” Letha says. “He would never—he couldn’t—”
“He is,” Jade says. “And he has been. Sorry. I saw.”
“But Tiara.”
“I don’t know why yet,” Jade says.
“Mr. Pangborne, Mr. Baker,” Letha says. “Ladybird, Mrs.
Todd, Mr. Singleton—”
“Deacon Samuels,” Jade adds. “Those two Dutch kids.”
“Two? ”
“The other one… she’s still out there somewhere.” Jade tilts her head lakeward.
“And that—in the propeller?”
Clate Rodgers.
Jade blinks, looks behind them again, to the light bobbing in.
“Wave again,” Jade says. “You’ll see.”
Letha stares into Jade’s face again, harder, deeper, then turns to call her dad in but this time with hesitation, and not as loud: “Dad! Daddy!”
The light keeps on coming, keeps on, and then— Snap!
Yes.
The bear trap.
Letha turns to Jade and pushes her hard enough Jade spills into the tall grass. “You used me!” she nearly screams, getting what just happened. “You used me to hurt my dad!”
“To keep him from hurting us.”
Out in the trees, her dad is bellowing.
Letha steps forward but Jade grabs her by the knee.
“If it is him, and it is,” she says, “then we approach, we’re dead. If it’s not, and we stay here, then… my leg is a lot wimpier than his, right? He can’t be hurt bad?”