Chapter 6 A Face That Never Smiles
POV: Thessaly Vance
"Where did you get this?"
I was in his tent before I even decided to walk there, the photograph shaking in my hand, my voice louder than I meant it to be. Kester wasn't inside. Nobody was inside. Just an empty cot, a folded blanket, and the space where a man should have been standing to answer for the impossible thing sitting in my palm.
I searched the whole camp for him. The mess tent, the medical tent, the ridge where he'd first grabbed my arm. Nothing. It was like he'd known exactly when to disappear, which, knowing him, he probably had.
I still had the photograph shoved in my jacket pocket an hour later when I gave up and walked to the supply tent instead, because if I didn't talk to someone, I was going to scream into the wind until my throat gave out.
Prudence was folding rope coils when I stormed in, nineteen years old and somehow the only person on this whole mountain who still looked at me like a sister instead of a headline waiting to happen.
"You look like you want to hit something," she said, not even looking up.
"I want to hit a specific something."
"The medic."
"How did you know that?"
"Because it's always the medic lately." She dropped the coil she was working on and gave me her full attention, arms crossed, eyebrows up in the exact way our mother used to do it. "Okay. Talk. What did Kester Hale do this time?"
So I told her. All of it, the storm chart, the argument, the photograph of me at sixteen standing at the base of a cliff I'd never climbed, dated the same year Dad died. I watched her face change from annoyed to something more careful the longer I talked, until she wasn't folding anything anymore, just standing there listening with her whole body.
"That's not normal," she said quietly when I finished. "Even for this camp."
"I know it's not normal! That's what I keep saying, and everyone acts like I'm the one being dramatic."
"I didn't say you were being dramatic." She picked the coil back up, turning it over in her hands like she needed something to do with them. "I just meant, think about how he warned you. Not what he said. How he said it."
"What do you mean?"
"He never smiled once, Thess. Not the whole time. I watched him talk to you outside the mess tent the other day, from all the way over by the supply crates, and his face never did the thing people's faces do when they're trying to scare somebody or mess with somebody. No little smirk. No enjoying it. He looked like a man reading off a checklist he wished didn't exist."
I opened my mouth to argue and found I didn't have anything to argue with, because she was right. Every warning, every impossible thing he'd known about me, he'd delivered it as if it cost him something to say out loud. Not like a threat. Like a debt he was paying off one warning at a time.
"That doesn't make him not dangerous," I said, mostly to convince myself.
"No," Prudence agreed. "But it might mean he's not the danger."
I hated that she was right. I hated it more that some small, stubborn part of me had already known it and just didn't want to say it out loud, because saying it out loud meant admitting I cared what happened to a man I'd called a liar to his face twelve hours earlier.
Prudence caught the look on my face and grinned, the first real smile either of us had managed all day. "Oh, you like him."
"I do not."
"You so do. You get this face. Mom used to get the same one whenever Dad walked in smelling like chalk and sweat."
"This is not the time, Pru."
"It's exactly the time. You're standing in a supply tent holding a photo of yourself that shouldn't exist, telling me about a man who's apparently been thinking about your safety for years, and you're mad at him for it instead of terrified, which tells me everything I need to know."
I threw a coil of webbing at her. She ducked, laughing, and for one second camp felt normal again, just two sisters bickering the way we always had, before mountains and mysterious medics and cut ropes turned every conversation into something heavier than it should have been.
But the laugh didn't last. It never did lately.
"Just be careful," she said, serious again, all the teasing gone out of her voice. "Whatever this is with him. If he's telling the truth, that's a lot to carry for someone you barely know. And if he's lying, that's worse."
I didn't have an answer for that. I still don't.
I lay there staring at the roof of my tent with the photograph still in my jacket pocket, my brain running the same loop his warnings kept talking about, over and over, no closer to an answer at two in the morning than I'd been at midnight. Every time I closed my eyes I saw his face, wrecked and honest, saying you did this exact thing last time too, and every time I opened them I remembered the picture of a sixteen-year-old version of me standing somewhere I'd never actually been.
Somebody had been watching me for nine years.
That thought alone got me out of my sleeping bag and into my boots faster than any alarm ever could.
I told myself I was just going to check the equipment shed one more time, walk the rack, make sure nothing else had gone missing since the last rope disappeared into thin air. I told myself it had nothing to do with needing to move, needing to do something with my hands instead of lying there drowning in questions nobody would answer.
The camp was dead quiet, the kind of quiet that makes every footstep sound louder than it should. I kept to the edges of the paths, staying out of the wash of the security lights, because after everything this week I wasn't about to announce myself to whoever might still be awake watching the shadows the way Kester always seemed to be.
The shed door was already open.
Not propped, not swinging in the wind. Open the careful way, the way someone opens a door when they don't want it to creak.
My heart slammed hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. I should have turned around right then. I should have gone straight to Aldous's tent, or Zinnia's, or anyone's, and made them come look with me instead of standing here alone in the dark like every horror movie heroine I'd ever laughed at from the safety of a couch.
Every smart instinct I had said walk away. Get help. Don't be the girl who goes into the dark shed alone.
I went in anyway, because waiting had never once kept me alive on this mountain, and some stubborn piece of me refused to start now.
The rope rack that had been missing a coil for two straight days wasn't missing anymore. A line hung exactly where it used to, coiled neat and tight, still damp like it had just come off the mountain an hour ago.
Somebody had put it back.
That was worse, somehow, than it just being gone. Gone meant someone had taken it and run. Back on the rack meant someone had walked in here tonight, calm enough to coil a rope properly, and walked back out again as if nothing had happened at all.
Pinned underneath the rope, half tucked behind the hook, was a torn page. I recognized the handwriting before I even got close enough to read the words, the same careful pencil strokes from the storm chart, from the back of that photograph, and my whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the night air.
I reached for it.
A hand closed around my wrist from behind before my fingers ever touched the paper.
