On the monitor, her shape faded into the blackness. She was going downslope, down into the depths of the forest. He lost track of her.
Then a starlike point of light came on.
She had a flashlight; she’d turned it on. Now he watched the light as it went back and forth, getting fainter. She was zigzagging on a switchback trail.
The deeper into biological hell the better.
Suddenly, he heard a scream. Panicked shrieks coming from the darkness of the forest.
“Christ.”
He turned away from the monitor and ran outdoors.
Even though the moon was up, in the depths of the rain forest it was so dark it was hard to see her. He hurried down the trail, stumbling and slipping, heading toward her flashlight, and heard her saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” her voice soft in the gloom. She was shining the beam around.
“Alyson.” He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust. “What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know what happened.”
She was a dark shape holding the bag out in front of her. As if it was an offering from a dark god. “I don’t know how they got away. Here: look.”
She shone the flashlight on the bag. He saw a jagged cut running along the bottom of the bag. It was a fine cut.
“One of them had a knife,” he said.
“I guess.”
“And they jumped. Or fell.”
“I guess, yes.”
“Where?”
“Right around here. I first noticed it here. I haven’t moved since. I didn’t want to step on them.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. They’re probably dead already.” He took her flashlight, crouched down, swung it along the tops of the ferns. He was looking for disturbances in the shimmering dew that coated the ferns. He saw nothing.
She started to cry.
“It’s not your fault, Alyson.”
“I know.” Sobbing. “I was going to let them go.”
“I figured.”
“I’m sorry, but I was going to do it.”
Vin put his arm around her. “Not your fault, Alyson. That’s what matters.”
“Did you see any sign of them? With the flashlight?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It’s a big fall, and they don’t have much mass. They could have been blown a considerable distance.”
“Then they might still be…”
“They might, yes. But it’s doubtful.”
“We should look for them!”
“But at night, Alyson, we might step on them by accident…”
“We can’t just leave them here.”
“You know, the fall almost certainly killed them. Now, I believe you, Alyson, when you tell me that you didn’t cut the bag open and dump them out-”
“What are you saying-?”
“But the police may not believe your story so readily. You could already be implicated in Eric’s death, and now this-dumping those kids in the most dangerous place-intentionally. That’s murder, Alyson.”
“Well, you’ll tell the police the truth!”
“Of course,” he said, “but why should they believe me, either? The fact is, Alyson, we have only one way to go here, and that is to continue on the plan we started. Their disappearance has to be explained as an accident. Then if they reappear miraculously later on-well, Hawaii is a magical place, wonderful place. Miracles happen here.”
She stood very still in the darkness. “We should just leave them?”
“We can look tomorrow, in daylight.” He squeezed her shoulder, pulled her close to him. He shone the flashlight down. “Here. Let’s follow the path, we can see what’s ahead, and we can leave safely. Then we’ll come back tomorrow. But right now we have to deal with the car. Okay? One thing at a time, Alyson.”
Still sobbing, she allowed herself to be led out of the forest, back to the parking lot. Vin Drake checked his watch: it was 11:14 p.m. There was still time to carry out the next stage of his plan.
Chapter 12
Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 11:00 p.m.
The students were jostled inside the paper bag, every movement of Alyson’s magnified and accompanied by a loud rasping sound as they scraped back and forth across the paper. Peter never realized that ordinary brown paper was so rough: it felt almost like sandpaper to his skin. He saw that the others had all managed to face inward, so they didn’t abrade their faces as they slid back and forth. They had been driven somewhere, and it had taken a long time, but where were they? And what would be done to them? It was hard to talk as they fell this way and that, and difficult to come up with a plan when everybody was talking at the same time. The Nanigen man, Jarel Kinsky, kept repeating that there had been some mistake. “If there was some way I could talk with Mr. Drake,” Kinsky said.
“Get over it,” Karen King snapped at him.
“But I can’t believe Mr. Drake would just…kill us,” Kinsky said.
“Oh, really?” Karen said.
Kinsky didn’t answer.
The bigger problem was that they didn’t know what Vin or Alyson were up to. They had been driven around in a car, but where had the car ended up? It made no sense. Then Vin and Alyson seemed to reach an agreement (their exact conversation was impossible to follow) and Alyson carried the bag outdoors. Into darkness.
“What’s this?” Karen King said, alarmed, as they were carried along. “What’s going on?”
They heard a booming sound. It was a snuffle. Alyson Bender.
“I have the feeling she wants to save us,” Peter Jansen said.
“Vin will never allow it,” Karen said.
“I know.”
“I think we better take things into our own hands,” Karen said. She produced her knife, unfolded it.
“Now hold on,” Danny Minot said. “This is a decision we have to reach together.”
“I don’t know about that,” Karen said. “ ’Cause I’ve got the knife.”
“Don’t be a child,” Minot said.
“Don’t be a coward. We act, or they act on us and they kill us. Which is it?” She didn’t wait for Danny to answer. She turned to Peter. “How far above ground do you think we are, right now?”
“I don’t know, maybe four and a half feet…”
“Hundred and thirty-seven centimeters,” Erika Moll said. “And what’s our mass?”
Peter laughed. “Not very much.”
“You’re laughing,” Danny Minot said, amazed. “You people are insane. Compared to our normal size, a drop of four and a half feet is the equivalent of, uh-”
“Four hundred and fifty feet,” Erika said. “Say, the height of a forty-five-story building. And no, this would not be the equivalent of a fall from a forty-five-story building.”
“Of course it would,” Danny said.
“Isn’t it great when the science studies people don’t know any science?” Erika said.
Peter explained, “It’s a little issue of air resistance.”
