Daryl stopped his pacing and looked up, breath catching when their eyes met. “They’ll send you home.”
Jason’s smile was bittersweet as he shrugged. “A little earlier than planned, but we’re all going home in a week. So this will be over sooner or later.”
Did he mean them?
Whether he did or not, Daryl felt it like a vice around his heart. “Too soon,” he whispered, forgetting all the others around them. “We have to find that fucking key.” He dropped to his knees again and started searching.
“Daryl,” Jason tried, but Daryl didn’t look up.
“No. I need to find it.”
A sigh was all the response he got to that.
This round of searching was as fruitless as the last, and Daryl sank back onto his arse, fists clenched as he hit the dirt. “Is it even fucking here?” He glanced around at the other teams, all of them frantically searching.
“It has to be.” Jenn stood, brushing off bits of the forest. “The clue wouldn’t mean anything else, would it?”
Daryl turned in a circle, examining the area as though the key might jump out at him any second and repeated the words over in his head. Within a unit’s grasp. What else could that mean? He looked up at the tree, brows scrunching together at the huge trunk. “Where exactly did you find the first key?”
Jenn walked over to the base of the tree and followed one of the roots until it disappeared into the ground. “Here.”
“What if that clue didn’t mean points of the compass. What if it was high and low points?” He pointed up the tree. “Would make sense for the cage key to be on the ground while the key for the other lock is somewhere up high. Don’t you reckon?”
Jenn looked up, lip drawn between her teeth. “Yeah, maybe.”
No maybe about it. Daryl felt it in his bones. They’d been looking in the wrong fucking place.
Pulling his phone out, he tossed it to Jenn. “Shout out how long I’ve got.”
“One minute and fifty seconds.”
Motherfucker.
He started to climb. “Keep shouting it out.” The first few branches were low and close together, making it easy to pull himself up, but after that, the space between them drastically increased.
“One minute thirty.”
He had to jump and stretch for each handhold, and the fact he had to circle the trunk to make sure he didn’t miss anything slowed him down considerably. And how far up was he supposed to go?
“One minute ten.”
Fuck.
He scrabbled to get higher, fingers slipping on the wet bark, and for one heart-in-mouth moment Daryl thought he’d misjudged the jump, but he dug his claws in, hissing at the sharp pain as they bent awkwardly. Higher and higher he climbed, painstakingly running a hand over the rough bark checking for the key, until fucking finally a flash of silver caught his eye.
“Forty-five seconds.”
“I see it.”
Ignoring Jason’s urge to be careful, Daryl scrambled up the trunk as fast as he could move.
Splinters dug into his palms, branches whipped at his head, but he almost had it.
“Thirty seconds.”
Reaching up, his fingers weren’t quite long enough to grab it, the tips grazing the end.
“Bollocks.” He grabbed for the branch above and hauled himself up.
