Page 49 of The Luminaries
While Winnie explains (and hopes she doesn’t get Aunt Rachel in trouble in the process), the final two hunter hopefuls arrive and everyone heads for the black SUVs. Winnie doesn’t see Aunt Rachel anywhere, so she climbs into the jeep Coach Rosa is driving. The Sunday teacher looks completely transformed in her hunter gear, fitted armor similar to Winnie’s, except much cooler-looking on her athletic frame. She punches Winnie on the shoulder as Winnie grabs for the back door handle. “Hope you’re ready for this!”
Me too,Winnie thinks, stomach sinking. The twins scramble in with her, forcing her into the middle seat, while Fatima takes the front.
“So,” Bretta begins as she slings the door shut. “It’s official, Winnie: we’re having a party for our birthday.”
Right.Winnie cringes internally. She’d forgotten all about that. Shereallyneeds to get them a present. What a great friend she is.
“Youhaveto come.” Emma loops her arm into Winnie’s as if they’re the best of friends… and Winnie has to admit she appreciates the touch. Unlike the rest of Hemlock Falls, Emma and Bretta have been nice to her ever since they moved here. And now that she knows what fake nice feels like, she can actually appreciate the real kind.
“And get this, Winnie: we’ve convinced the Forgotten to play.” Bretta utters this with such breathy joy, it feels more like they’re at a slumber party and not in the back seat of an SUV while Coach Rosa drives them all toward their potential dooms.
“You really should have heard them play last night,” Emma inserts. “They were even better than usual.”
Fatima sighs from the front seat and twists around. “Trevor was so good.”
“And Jay,” the twins chime—followed by their obligatory giggle for speaking in unison.
Coach Rosa glances at Winnie in the rearview and then visibly bites back a smile as her eyes meet Winnie’s.Yes,Winnie wants to say to her.I too find this conversation weird given that we are driving toward death.Except, as the twins tell Winnie where the party will be (in the Wednesday gardens after clan dinner) and describe that it’s afancyparty (“Butreally, you can wear whatever you want, Winnie—as long as it’snotyour Save the Whales hoodie”) that will be outside with heaters and a net of lights they put together themselves (“Fatima is just brilliant with design ideas”), the drive to the forest blurs past. Winnie doesn’t have time to let the leeches gathering in her stomach engorge. Bretta talks too quickly, Emma and Fatima chirping in every few minutes too, and it’s all Winnie can do to just keep up with the collective outpouring of words.
It’s actually the perfect distraction.
When at last they reach the sign that declaresNO TRESPASSING, the SUV crests the shift from smooth pavement to dirt road much more gently than Mathilda had. The twins are still talking, and it doesn’t escape Winnie’s notice that Emma’s grip on her arm has grown tighter and tighter with each bump in the road.
Rosa cuts the engine at the spot where Winnie parks every Thursday morning on corpse duty. The twins go silent. Fatima audibly swallows. Everyone sits there, stewing in the tautness of the moment. The forest looms, stark and forbidding in the jeep’s headlights. The trees look like bars on a jail cell.
Rosa moves first, kicking out of the jeep and jolting everyone else to follow. The night is cold. Winnie’s breath plumes. She hugs her arms to her chest and kind of wishes Emma still held on.
The twins are latched to each other now, nary a dimple in sight.
Another jeep that was already parked and waiting opens, spitting out Aunt Rachel along with the Tuesday, Monday, and Thursday Lead Hunters. Rachel gives Winnie a nod, once more wearing the hard angles of her hunter persona. This is the Aunt Rachel Winnie is used to, minus the open hostility.
“Just a reminder of the rules,” she says. “No leaving the forest, and no working together. Only knives, traps, and stun grenades allowed. Break any of those rules, and you’re immediately disqualified. That said—” Her eyes flicker to Winnie as she withdraws a stack of small pager-like devices from her vest pocket, each looped on a lanyard. “—we’d rather all of you live than die trying. Not everyone becomes a hunter, and there’s no shame in that. So if you find yourself up against something you can’t fight, just pull the alarm off the lanyard like so.” She demonstrates detaching the alarm, and Winnie spots a metal pin thatwill withdraw from the main box. “Then all the nearby hunters will come for you. And we’ve got extra hunters out there tonight.”
Again, her eyes flash to Winnie, and Winnie feels a shamed sort of heat rise in her. Aunt Rachel thinks she’s going to fail. For all that she’s been nice to her and given her this fancy new gear, she doesn’t think Winnie will last the night.
But Winnie was sure then and she’s sure now. She has Jay’s secret spot, and she will reach it before the mist rises. She is going to be a hunter. She’s going to keep passing these trials until her family are no longer outcasts.
More SUVs open, and after handing Winnie her lanyard alarm and then squeezing her biceps in a way that might have been reassuring, Rachel moves on.
Which leaves Winnie and Fatima and the twins just standing there. Winnie looks at Coach Rosa. “Can we—”
She doesn’t have to finish before Rosa flings a hand at the trees. “Go, girls. And fast. The mist will be rising soon.”
Do not sprint.It was the first thing Jay had told Winnie seven hours ago.There is too much risk for injury, sprinting in the woods in the dark. You’llwantto sprint, but don’t.
Winnie almost laughs at that advice now. She can no more sprint than she can run backward. Just a slow jog is proving harder than she’d thought it would be. The terrain is impossible to see. No moonlight, no starlight, only clouds. Every step is taking her so much longer than it did with Jay. They’d even practiced once with her going all alone, but she’d had no idea how muchilluminationcontributed to speed.
She tries not to freak out. She can only move so fast, and forward is all that matters. She has her new machete sheathed at her hip and a hunting knife strapped to her thigh, and in a small pack on her back are four shrapnel traps and three stun grenades. A fourth grenade hangs on her belt. No clunky poison-mist traps tonight.
You’ll leave the parking lot between the oak that’s lost its branch andthose two maple saplings. Then go for a hundred paces until you see an aspen stand.
Winnie doesn’t see the aspen stand. She has been a hundred paces, and she doesn’t see it. There is only darkness and shadow and more darkness—and branches that keep clawing at her like banshee hands.
For the first fifty steps, she’d also heard Emma and Bretta charging into the trees. But now that she’s a hundred steps… past a hundred steps… closing in on a hundred twenty-five, she doesn’t hear anything but her own plodding footsteps.
Sprinting.Sprinting.As if.
Then she glimpses two silver maples that have fused into one.Crap.She missed the aspens entirely and now she has already reached step two. This is good because she’s deeper into the forest than she’d thought—and also bad because it means she is already completely turned around on her directions.
