I check the time on my phone.
6:32 p.m.
The clouds outside break apart and a beam of moonlight shines through. It streams inside my bedroom and hits the pearl.
The amulet flickers like red and blue police lights.
A familiar female voice rises inside me. “They just—they fell in. We tried to get to them. We tried to help.”
Lainey.
Behind her, jagged cliffs and tall pines.
Footprints on ice.
A spiderweb of cracks.
A boy falling through.
He thrashes and flails while Lainey and Griffin watch and grin.
I scramble out of my chair so fast, it tips backward and crashes to the floor. The lacerations on my arm tingle with warmth, but when I touch the pearl, it’s cold.
Like ice.
At the quarry.
Someone fell through.
Already?
Or not yet?
Without wasting time on contemplation, I race down the stairs, yank a coat off the hook, grab my dad’s keys, and drive through the dark. When I reach my destination, when I pull off the road onto the gravel clearing swallowed by weeds, my headlights sweep over two familiar cars—Lainey’s Toyota Corolla and Brady Keller’s CR-V.
A battalion of goosebumps march across my skin.
Quickly, I turn off the lights and cut the engine.
Outside, the frigid air nips at my nose and cheeks. I step over frozen puddles trapped in tire ruts and hurry down the trailhead where the sound of laughter echoes across the ice. I hide behind a tree and watch the scene unfold beneath a crescent moon.
There are four of them. Lainey and Griffin. Brady Keller and Caleb Briggs, too.
They stand along the rocky bank.
“Ten to one you end up like Winslow,” Griffin says.
Their laughter boils my blood. The ease with which they can joke about a classmate’s death makes me sick.
“So, how does this dare work?” Caleb asks.
“It’s pretty simple,” Griffin replies. “Walk across the ice to the other side.”
“And you’ll give me fifty bucks?”
“Keller, too, if he’s brave enough.”
“Since when did you get that kind of cash?” Brady asks.
