TOTALLY LOST.

Kyla is right. Dawn’s been hiking for nearly a week now, and if the rest of the Pack dropped off the face of the earth right this instant, she’d be dead within days, if not hours.

Christian has a map and a compass and the radio—but Dawn’s from freaking Sacramento. Suburban Sacramento. She isn’t exactly proficient with a compass. And anyway, all the rocks and trees look identical.

(That’s not totally true. Sometimes the Pack hikes through the rain forest, which is damp and dark and smelly and choked with ferns and bare roots to trip you and big towering trees with branches that claw at your face and your clothes and rip things from your shitty tarp knapsack as you pass. And sometimes they climb up so high onto ridges that they’re out of the big trees and it’s mostly just stunted, runty evergreens and a lot of bare rock, and you can see for miles and miles and it’s just more trees, millions of them, and distant, lonely mountains. Up there, there’s barely a trail, and Christian leads them by following cairns instead, little piles of rocks every thirty feet or so that lead the way across bare rock, up over craggy peaks and down into steep gulches. Sometimes, Christian misses the next cairn, and they all have spread out and search for the way forward, except it’s usually just Lucas and sometimes Dawn who help Amber look; Warden and Evan and Brandon and Kyla hang back and make fun of the counselors and throw rocks off the mountain, and Brielle stays quiet and keeps to herself.

It’s windy on the ridges, and cold, and the emptiness and the height and the barren, alien landscape kind of freak Dawn out, which is why she helps Lucas help the counselors look for the next cairn. It’s like she hears a voice inside her head saying You aren’t supposed to be here, and the sooner they can get back down into the rain forest, the better.

Dawn doesn’t like the ridges. They give her a bad feeling. But the rain forest isn’t much better, or the rough rivers they have to balance across on fallen tree trunks, the cliffs they have to scramble their way up and down, tottering for balance with their heavy packs, the marshy meadows with their sticky, stinky mud and their lingering mosquitoes and blackflies, the loose rocks and slippery bare roots on the trails that give out from under you, twisting your ankles, then uneven ground under your sleeping pad that hurts your neck when you’re trying to sleep, the too-cold night and the too-hot daytime, the taste of the lake water even after you filter it, the dirt on your clothes and your smelly, unwashed body, your limp, stringy hair, the blisters on your feet and the bug bites on the rest of you, the way Christian makes fun of you and how Evan and Brandon whisper to each other when they look at you, the weird sounds in the forest at night, and the wondering what you’d do if Christian and Amber suddenly died or you got separated and had to survive by yourself and,

above all,

the loneliness.