Brayden is missing.

I blink, and I think my eyes widen, but I manage to keep my face absent of my spiking anxiety. And glee. Wendy doesn’t know, so I have more time. But …

Brayden … is missing?

I’ve seen Wyatt both angry and kind. Playful and pensive. But never scared. This is new.

“Say more,” I urge.

“I told Wendy no one’s seen Brayden since last night, and she just brushed it off. She says he probably just has the weekend off.”

“Could he, though?”

Wyatt shakes his head. His curls vibrate with his worry. “No one gets Jubilee Weekend off. It’s a big rule, and Brayden has jobs to do that I’ve been covering all day. Plus, why would he just leave in the middle of the night? It makes no sense.”

I don’t really think Brayden took the weekend off. I just want Wyatt to hear himself admit he knows Wendy is lying to him.

“So what do we do?” I ask.

Wyatt stands up straighter, gives me a stern look. “Nothing, Mars. This has nothing to do with us. Or your list of names. It’s probably just a coincidence.”

I have a choice here. I can remain a drifting deflation in Mars-shaped skin. Or I can pull myself together. I choose myself, together, and it keeps my voice low and sure.

“If this has nothing to do with last night, you would have gone to Wendy and told her about me sneaking out yourself. But you didn’t. Because you think there’s a connection between Brayden and the people who go missing near Aspen. You think I’m right.”

Wyatt shakes his head. “No. I don’t.”

“Then why are you coming to me with this when you should be getting me kicked out?”

Effortlessly, Wyatt’s face clicks into a dazzling smile for a pair of parents who float too close to us. We are both flickering between selves—our conditioned performance and our hidden reality. I want to take his hand and ground him here. We’re discovering something real.

“I promise you there’s an explanation,” he whispers, false smile still on his lips. “Brayden has gotten in trouble before for sneaking out. Other shit, too, I think. I’m telling you this so you don’t go looking for him in the middle of the night. It’s dangerous, Mars, and my job is to keep you safe. I can’t do that if you keep going rogue. You do what you did last night again and I am telling Wendy myself. Please don’t hate me.”

I roll my eyes. I’m not nervous anymore. Wyatt is shitty at bluffing. He won’t rat me out, because now he’s seen enough with his own eyes, and the right conclusions are unavoidable. Doubt is the gift I’ve given him, but Wendy is the one who unwrapped it. She’s lying, and now Wyatt knows it.

There is something very, very wrong happening at Aspen.

I sit through lunch, looking for any clues among the counselors at the banquet tables. If they know what’s happening, they don’t show it. The only hint I see is when Donovan, Aspen’s co-director, decides to accompany our cabin over to the athletic complex. I bet he’ll stick around for the rest of the day to cover for Brayden’s absence.

All afternoon I wander between activities, but I never see the Cabin H girls, or even Leena. I only see Wendy once, chatting with parents on the porch of Big Lodge, and her act is perfectly jovial. Donovan sits with us at dinner again. He’s loud and quick-witted, and he fills the conversation with a jack-hammer laugh, but by now the other Hunters are whispering. Brayden’s absence has been noted, but not explained. When I ask Donovan on the way to the theater, he shrugs it off.

“Dunno,” he says. “I’m sure he’s around. Don’t worry about it.”

It.

Not him.

While we file into the theater building, I think about the moment last night when Bria locked eyes with me over the applauding crowd. The memory adds to the strange surreality of Brayden’s erasure. And the moments before—when I watched Sylv dance, and my mind floated elsewhere, saw things I can’t explain but know are true—what was that? It felt … familiar. Like the stolen memory of playing tiles with Bria. It felt like washing dishes in Cabin H. I felt joined to some vast and tangled knowledge, and now, a day later, I catch myself missing it. Just a little. But enough to make me doubt my own intentions as I scheme.

The play begins. We sit in polite attentiveness as students waltz across the set with great import, spewing absolute nonsense with breathless conviction.

What am I not seeing?

I explore all that I can recall of Cabin H’s insides for anything I missed. A trapdoor leading into a secret cellar, or maybe a spot of blood on the lace. But when I think of the cabin, I feel the same intoxicating longing, so I veer from it. Pan out. I view the meadow and its hives, bank around the cabin and finally come to …

The shed.

At intermission I tell Donovan I need to use the bathroom, and Wyatt jumps up, offering to go with me.

Donovan gives us a double thumbs-up. “Buddy system. I like it.”

“You don’t have to use the bathroom, do you?” Wyatt says as soon as we’re outside the theater.

“Nope.”

“Mars. Come on. Don’t do this again.”

“Go back if you want,” I tell him as I march toward the boathouse. Wyatt must know what I’m thinking because he runs in front of me to block my path.

“Stop. I’m going to go get Wendy right now if you don’t turn around.”

I sidestep Wyatt. “Get her. I want her useless ass to see something.”

“See what, Mars?”

“The shed.”

Surprise flashes across Wyatt’s face, like he’s just now remembering the lone shed back up against the trees of the Cabin H property. It’s the opening I need.

“It’s the one place we aren’t allowed to go. Isn’t that weird? The girls even let us into their cabin, but not the shed. Why not? Did you ever use it when you helped your grandfather?”

“It’s new,” Wyatt says, and now he sounds unsure. “Leena built it a few years ago.”

I march on. Wyatt pads after me. We pass through the covered bridge and this seems to bolster his protests.

“What do you think you’ll find? Evil beekeeping suits?”

“I heard the girls in there once, talking about some sort of violence. Maybe they were planning something? I don’t know. That’s why we’re going.”

“You’re going. I’m stopping you.”

“You’re doing a very bad job.”

Wyatt scoffs, but he’s still with me. We’re in the forest now, dusk turning everything into a net of dark greens and blues that crisscrosses the burning orange sky. He has a tiny flashlight on his key chain and he plays with it, but leaves it off.

“The way I see it,” I say through heavy breaths as we climb uphill, “you know something is up with Aspen, but you’re too conditioned to actually break a rule. So you’re using me to break all the rules for you. You want to know just as bad as I do.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Then go.” I stop, teetering on the slope. I sweep my arms out at the forest, back toward the way we came.

Wyatt huffs. “I’m not letting you go alone.”

I can’t help but grin as we pick up our pace. We end up reaching the clearing just as the sun drops behind the horizon, darkening the field before us. Dots of neon zip over the high grass. Fireflies. The cottage’s lights are all on, and shapes move behind the thin curtains.

I pull Wyatt into the brush, but it’s him who leads our slow progress toward the shed. Approached from behind, it’s bigger than I thought, with plywood rooms barnacled to its back. I’m barely breathing as we reach the dirty windows and look inside.

“I don’t see anything,” Wyatt says. “Happy?”

“Never.”

“You should work on that.”

“You should accept people as they are.”

Wyatt ducks down and drags me with him, holding me still. He points, and through the gloom I see someone running in the woods. As she gets closer, I realize she’s on the path I spotted forever ago that bypasses the shed and leads off into the woods, away from Aspen. The shed blocks it.

The girl bounds up the steps of Cabin H and darts inside. A second later the night is full of squeals and screams. The commotion boils out of the cabin in the form of many girls, all in fresh white Aspen uniforms. Their laughter fills the dusk as they wind into the woods, linked by their pinkies, back the way the girl came from.

“What’s that way?” I ask Wyatt.

“Nothing. Wetlands. Then the mountains.”

The girls have vanished, but we can still hear their laughter. We follow after on the narrow path. It pulls us away from the lake, down a gentle slope, to a swamp. The sky opens up as the forest dissolves into sopping puddles and grassy islands. The pine trees retreat, and soon everywhere I look I see the spindly gray-silver aspen trees, black sockets winking in the moonlight. They are utterly still, until a faint breeze breathes a tremble into their branches.

Wyatt reaches for his keys and clicks on his tiny flashlight, but I jump to cover it.

“They’ll see,” I whisper.

Wyatt nods and we continue in the draining light of the blue-plum sky. We follow a path that converts to an ancient wooden boardwalk cutting through the tall swamp grasses. Out here, the fireflies are everywhere. I’m afraid the girls will spot us, but we can’t even see them anymore. Or hear them. Instead, the air is thick with croaks and chirps, and the needling whine of mosquitoes that feast on our bare arms and necks. Soon it’s too dark to continue. We’re about to have to feel our way forward, when finally the clouds unveil the moon, and out of the darkness rises the inorganic structure of a building. We’ve reached the swamp’s opposite border.

It sits at the far edge of an overgrown lawn, beyond a boulevard of noble conifers. Even in the darkness I know it’s abandoned. Entire sections of its outer walls have rotted away, and the moonlight fills breaches like cavities rotting a tooth. It’s utterly quiet now, no laughter to follow. We approach the building, spellbound and reverent, like we may wake it up.

“What is this place?” I ask Wyatt.

“A hotel, I think. There’s a few of them in the Catskills, left behind like this. But I didn’t know there was one on the property.”

We pass through a graveyard of wicker chairs and a tennis court cracked open by saplings. I feel that if we screamed, the silence of this place would swallow it up. I don’t want to go inside, but I need to know more. Everything.

An outdoor pool wraps around the building’s back, furry with moss, a playful breeze rippling across a low tide of ferns. We keep out of the moonlight as we ascend a crumbling staircase to a wide doorframe absent of doors. Pitch black waits beyond and, with a nod, we venture into it. We stay close as we shuffle over carpets squishy with mold, to a lobby completely exposed to the sky. Moonlight pours in, bathing entire trees that have grown from the floor. We find a staircase and climb, the whole time listening for any indication of life within. I only hear drips that echo in the dank air, and a sweet breeze gasping over the walls of ivy. Beneath it all is the muffled thrum of my own heartbeat.

“Mars,” Wyatt whispers, and I realize I’ve ventured off. He’s in a vast dining room near what I think is a fireplace, except … different. Wrong is the word that pops into my head as he clicks his meager flashlight onto something I can’t make sense of. The mantel bulges from the wall in papery mounds, like a monstrous fungus has been poured down the chimney.

“Listen,” Wyatt says.

What I hear is a new thrum. Not my heartbeat, but something beyond me. A sonic richness so low I can feel it more than hear it, and it’s coming from the wall.

“Bees,” Wyatt says. “It’s a beehive.”

We step away automatically. The hive flows up into the fireplace. Bees build downward, I remember, so likely they started at the top of the chimney and descended. I wonder how far it goes down into the building’s rotting body.

“The basement,” I say.

From the lobby comes the echo of laughter. Wyatt turns off his light. We creep to the lobby, keeping hidden as the halls fill with chatter and footsteps. The girls appear a second later from a side passage, chained together by their pinkies. They make no effort to be quiet, and as soon as they’re gone the silence sucks back into the space. It’s like they were never there at all.

I still feel the tingle of the hive we just witnessed. I still feel the need to go deeper.

“This way,” I whisper.

I lead us down the way the girls came. Immediately I sense the temperature rise. It ticks upward as we enter a kitchen, Wyatt’s flashlight blinking on to reveal grimy tile floors and butcher-block counters fuzzed in fungus. I feel for the heat’s source and find a stairwell. Warmth rises up like a hot breath, carrying the smell of beeswax.

We descend. Wyatt goes first with his light. Small bodies dart around us, invisible outside the illuminated cone. I feel the tickle of one land on my outstretched hand. A honeybee. We can hear their drone distinctly now, and the ceiling actually drips with honeycomb in places. When I nearly stumble and fall into one of the structures, Wyatt grabs me and holds on, driving the light directly into the dark before us. We progress like that, with only a few feet of visibility, the walls twisting and enfolding, until the passage opens into a room so big that the flashlight’s weak beam can’t find its ceiling. Instead, great curtains of honeycomb hang down, growing thicker toward the room’s back, folding over one another to form a lacy stalactite.

Wyatt aims the light back down, just in time to stop us from walking into a sudden drop. It’s the edge of the basin over which the hive hangs. I shiver, peering into it, because I know what it will contain.

Honey. Dark, glassy honey.

Wyatt’s arm remains around me as he raises the flashlight back up to inspect the monstrous hive.

“Where are the bees?” he asks.

The air hums with their drone, but he’s right. The bizarre structure is oddly desolate of any visible swarms. A hive this big would have millions of them, but only a few lone honeybees halo our heads.

“I can hear them,” Wyatt whispers. “It’s like they’re everywhere …”

As though he can surprise them, Wyatt flicks the flashlight into the corners, back and forth, until it snags on something moving along the honeycomb near us. A fluid twist, like many small bodies crawling over one another. But under the glare it’s just honeycomb.

Until it opens its eyes.

“Help me,” it says. “Please help me.”

It twists again, something huge beneath the comb. Encased in it. A mouth, a nose, a strangely bent arm, a crumpled hand.

A person.

“Brayden,” Wyatt whispers.

“Please. I feel—” Brayden shudders, and the honeycomb creaks. “Please,” he begs.

I hack at the comb with my hive tool and Wyatt just uses his hands. The light whips around us as we pull down the delicate, sticky structure, digging until we find the naked body below. Brayden whimpers. He’s badly hurt, though I can’t see where. But I can smell the hurt. Blood and a darker odor. Sweet and rotten and thickening as we pry him out.

The bees, invisible as they are, let us know they’re angry. Their drone rises into an undulating siren, then a crackling threat. I drive my hands into the sticky shards, desperate now. Honey fills my nail beds, webs between my fingers, drips to my elbows. But Brayden is nearly free. Just another chunk and …

Brayden’s weight does the rest. He slides from the comb, falling into Wyatt and blotting out the flashlight.

I go to help but then freeze.

The flashlight has become a harsh glare caught between them. For a moment it appears to pass right through Brayden, taking on the golden-scarlet hue of his flesh, embryonic and quivering as he clings to Wyatt. Within him I see a squiggly network of veins twisting together into a mass that, quite clearly, pulses.

His heart.

“Wyatt,” I say.

“Help me with him,” Wyatt snaps, and I rush forward. I grab Brayden’s arm, and when I pull, his flesh slides right off the bone.

I scream until I get the flopping sleeve unstuck from my hands. Brayden has crumpled between us, golden threads strung between him and Wyatt. Wyatt fumbles until he recovers the flashlight, aiming it at Brayden.

Holes. Everywhere, Brayden’s flesh is pocked in holes, clean and precise and weeping with honey. He cradles the bones of his hand with his remaining arm. His bones are soft, too, like warm rubber. He looks at us and his eyes are scoops of yellow jelly in his skull.

“I don’t feel—”

He jolts and gags. A tooth drips from his lips and lands without a sound in the honey pooling around him.

“I don’t feel so good. I don’t—”

“We’re gonna get you to a doctor!” Wyatt yells. He has to yell. The drone from the hives is loud now. Furious. I feel a prick, then a needling pain in my neck. I’ve been stung. Another one gets my knee. I pull at Wyatt’s back.

“Wyatt, we need to—”

“DON’T LEAVE ME!” Brayden leaps at us but his legs buckle beneath him and he falls. His skeletal hand drags over Wyatt’s chest, catching on the keys, tearing them off. The flashlight thuds into the honey, aimed upward into Brayden. The light passes through him. Like a jack-o’-lantern, he glows an eerie gold, his bones black and twisting below his viscous, dotted flesh.

Brayden screams again, his lower jaw yawning wide until it falls to the floor. Brayden implodes with it, smothering the flashlight. The light flickers beneath the quivering mass, flickers again, then goes out.