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Emelie

Keira used to tease me about my awful sense of direction. She once told me I could get lost on my way to the bathroom.

And she wasn’t wrong. Even if I had a detailed set of directions, I’d find a way to mess things up. No matter where I was going.

Moving to New York wasn’t helpful, either. It took a solid six months for me to get the hang of the trains and subways and transfers and all that. Good thing I worked from home, or I would never have made it to my job on time.

Because at least I could make it from my bed to my desk without having to check a maps app.

All of this came to mind as I wandered around the woods.

In Scotland.

Because I was a complete idiot.

“Kiera, you’re lucky I love you,” I whispered, turning around in a full circle to get a look at what was around me. Not like it mattered, since everything looked like everything else. It wasn’t like there were any trees that looked different than the other trees.

And there weren’t any signs pointing to the mountain peak I was looking for.

What was the deal with this place? I pulled out the printed Google Earth image which I had shoved into my backpack before leaving the hotel after breakfast and looked at it again. For the millionth time.

“It should be there,” I whispered, looking up over the treetops, where I could see nothing but blue sky. “It’s got to be there.”

It wasn’t. On the print-out, which I had assumed would be right because the picture was taking from a freaking satellite, there was a definite mountain peak, followed by several smaller peaks which trailed behind it.

“This has to be true.” If I said it enough, I would be right. Because it had to be true. I was holding the proof in my hands.

Did I do something wrong when I tracked the location the email to Keira came from? No. Impossible. I was too good at my work to make stupid mistakes. And the last time I checked, entire mountain formations did not disappear overnight.

Oh, God. What if Keira got as lost as I was? What if I led her to the wrong place and something terrible happened? I looked around again in a panic, half-expecting to find her rotting corpse somewhere nearby.

It would be all my fault. And here I was, so full of myself. Thinking I was the world’s best hacker or something when I screwed up royally and got my best friend killed.

No. She told me everything was all right—so good that she wanted to stay. But that was the last time I heard anything before she dropped off the face of the earth. Two months later and nothing. Zip. Which was why I bought a plane ticket.

So she had found something. But what? Tamhas? Or something dangerous? Something she couldn’t tell me about, maybe.

I could feel the panic starting to spread through me—my breath went short, my heart started racing a mile a minute. Sweat beaded on my forehead and trickled down the back of my neck. I wiped it away with a shaking hand.

Was this how she felt when she searched the woods? Because she might have had a better sense of direction than I did and she might have had those sharp instincts or whatever, but even she couldn’t find her way to something that didn’t exist.

If she had turned around and gone back to her hotel, why did she tell me everything was okay, and she was going to stay? Why? What didn’t she share with me?

My imagination was running out of control, and I knew it. I had to rein it in before I went into a full-blown panic attack. I hadn’t had one of those since I was a teenager in the worst foster home of all of the millions I had been in and out of. This wasn’t the time or place to start that shit again.

I sat down on the nearest fallen log and did all the old tricks. I deliberately tuned in to all of my senses, one at a time. The feeling of the breeze on my face. The solidity of the log underneath me. The sun warming my skin. The fluttering leaves, the singing birds, the sound of my breath as I slowly and purposefully inhaled and exhaled. The smell of damp earth, rotting leaves, fresh air.

A few minutes later, I was in control of myself again. I could reason through the mess I was in.

First, I needed to know the time. I had no idea how long it had been since I started wandering around and was starting to feel disoriented. My phone was in one of the pockets in my backpack—I wouldn’t have a signal in the middle of nowhere, but I’d be able to use it as a clock, and the compass app I had installed would come in handy.

At least I had the foresight to do that much.

“Wait a minute.” I squinted at the screen, then stood up and held the phone away from me like people always did when they were searching for a signal.

Only I wasn’t searching for one. I was checking to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, that there wasn’t some sort of glitch in the software. Because I did have a full signal—and, according to the display, a Wi-Fi connection.

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