I'd kill for you

The Next Target

I shoved the journal back into the bag so fast the zipper caught on the fabric, and I was three feet away, cross legged on my own cot with my back to him, before I let myself breathe again.

His breathing settled back into that slow, even rhythm within seconds. Too fast for someone actually asleep. Too controlled for it to be an accident, and I lay there afterward with my pulse in my throat, certain he'd felt me there, certain he was only waiting to see what I'd do next.

I didn't sleep at all after that.

By morning the storm had thinned to a heavy mist, the kind that clung to the pines and turned the whole mountain the color of old bone. Ms. Ward announced, with a brightness that fooled nobody in the room, that a group would attempt the ridge trail once the wind dropped, to find a signal, to call for help, to end this before another night fell on top of the last one.

I barely heard her over the sound of my own thoughts, circling the same line again and again until it wore a groove.

I'd spent the last four hours turning one sentence over and over until it wore smooth in my mind. This time, she lives.

This time.

Which meant there had been another time. Which meant Marcus had lived through whatever was happening to us before, somewhere, somehow, and had come back into it carrying the ending in his own handwriting like a map he'd already memorized down to the last turn.

Which meant he already knew who died next, down to the minute, the way he'd known about Preston.

I found the page again in my memory, a name I'd skimmed too fast in my panic and only now placed correctly, the letters sliding back into order in my head like a lock finally catching.

Naomi. 2 a.m. Trail behind cabin six.

I watched her across the breakfast line, picking at cold oatmeal, laughing too loud at something Bree said, utterly oblivious to the hour ticking down somewhere behind her own eyes. My stomach turned looking at her, not because I liked her much, but because a clock was running and she had no idea it existed at all.

"You've barely touched your food," Bree said, sliding into the seat across from me, dark circles under her eyes that matched mine. "You look like you saw a ghost. Another one."

"Didn't sleep."

"Nobody did." She lowered her voice. "Naomi's been weird all morning. Keeps checking the window like she's waiting for someone."

I didn't tell her what I already knew, that whatever Naomi was waiting for had a time stamped on it in someone else's handwriting. Some warnings, I was starting to understand, only made things worse for the person you gave them to.

If Marcus was the one killing people on schedule, warning her meant nothing at all. He'd simply change the hour, change the method, and I'd have handed him a fresh reason to add my own name to a newer page in that same worn journal.

But if he wasn't the one doing it, if the journal was a record instead of instructions, then Naomi was going to die at two in the morning unless somebody who knew got in the way first, tonight, before the mountain took another name.

I didn't trust him enough to ask which one it was. I wasn't sure I trusted myself to hear the answer either way.

I spent the day watching him instead, the way I'd watched Preston, the way I'd watched everyone my whole life at Windmere, cataloguing without being asked to. He didn't act like a boy who'd killed someone two nights ago. He didn't act like anything at all. He read. He ate. Twice, I caught him watching me back, steady, patient, like he could see exactly what I was building in my head and had already decided to let me finish building it before he said a word.

That patience scared me more than anything else about him.

He found me alone once, near the water station, and my whole body went still before I could stop it.

"You went through my bag," he said. Not a question.

I didn't bother denying it. Denying it felt like handing him something. "You wrote my name in it. Twice."

"I know what I wrote."

"Am I supposed to feel safe about that?"

Something moved behind his eyes, quick, almost pained. "You're supposed to still be breathing tomorrow. That's the only part I've ever managed to control."

He walked away before I could decide whether that was a promise or a threat. I stood there with the water station's hum in my ears for a long time, turning the sentence over the way I'd turned over every other thing he'd ever said to me, looking for the seam where it would finally split open and show me what he really was.

I never found it. That was the problem.

By ten that night, the hall had gone quiet, the aide's flashlight dimmed to save the battery, most of the class finally asleep from sheer exhaustion after two days without real rest, blankets rising and falling in a slow, uneven rhythm around the room.

I lay rigid on my cot until the hours felt right by feel alone, counted off in my head one by one like beads on a string I couldn't stop pulling, each one bringing two in the morning a little closer.

Then I got up.

I didn't look at Marcus's cot. I told myself that was strategy, not fear, and didn't examine it any further than that, didn't let myself linger on the shape of him in the dark.

Outside, the mist had thickened into something close to fog, and the trail behind cabin six ran pale and narrow into the trees, my flashlight beam swallowed after ten feet like the dark simply absorbed it whole.

The cold found the gaps in my jacket fast. Pine needles clung wet to my boots, and somewhere off to my left a branch cracked under weight that wasn't mine, close enough to stop my heart for a full second before I convinced myself it was a deer, or the wind, or nothing at all worth turning my flashlight toward.

I kept walking anyway, one hand pressed flat against my own sternum like I could hold my heartbeat down by force.

I found Naomi already outside, hood up, moving fast and purposeful down the same trail, not the wandering, sleepless pace of someone who couldn't rest, but something with intention behind it.

"Naomi." My whisper cracked the quiet in half.

She spun, and for one unguarded second before her face rearranged itself into something softer, I saw something in her eyes that had nothing to do with fear at all, something bright and almost eager.

"You shouldn't be out here," she said.

"Neither should you. Someone's coming for you tonight, I think. You need to go back inside, right now, please."

She studied me for a long moment, head tilted, rain dripping off the edge of her hood onto her shoulder, unhurried in a way that didn't match the hour or the mist or any of it.

Then she laughed, low and easy, and the sound of it turned my blood to ice water in my veins.

"Coming for me?" She reached into her jacket and the flashlight beam caught steel before I understood what I was looking at. "Sweetheart. I am the one coming."

The knife caught what little light there was, and she smiled at me the way Preston used to smile at teachers, warm, practiced, completely hollow underneath the surface of it.

"Should've stayed in bed, Claire," she said. "Guess I get two for the price of one tonight."