(Sorry for the hold up this week! It's been hard to find time to write on the weekdays, which means I've been doing a lot of the heavy-lifting on the weekends, specifically on Sunday. And it finally caught up with me. Thanks for all of your patience and continued support. Apologies for any errors - it's in the middle of the night and I'm halfway asleep.)



The shadowy figure leads me deep into the woods behind the cabin, deeper than Willow and I went during our bonding walk. I had just enough sense to grab my flashlight, phone, boots, and coat on the way out of the door. I don't tell anyone though. I don't have the mind to think so freely. Nothing else matters except following the dark shape.

It's been fifteen minutes since I snuck out of our temporary home and followed the shadow, and I've given up on resisting the inexplicable, bone-itching need to follow it—him. It's no use. It's like something has taken over my frontal lobe and I've been crammed in the back, forced to watch my body make decisions I have no control over.

I'm terrified. I'm slipping and sliding on the ice in pursuit of the shadow, but all I want is to run back to the cabin and bury myself in my sleeping bag. This is wrong on a level that sends alarms going off everywhere. The scary thing is, a part of me knows I'm going someplace I might not come back from. That part of me is kicking and screaming all the way down the hill toward the heavily-adorned trees, now menacing in the dark.

The figure never stops or looks back at me. He's as black as night, just a silhouette of a fairly tall and well-built man, but the weird thing is that I never lose track of him. No matter how often I stumble and bruise myself or run into a cluster of shrubs and vines, no matter how hard I struggle to turn back, he's right there every time the beam of my flashlight searches him out. He wants me to follow him. He expects me to follow him.

"Where are you taking me?" I find the courage to ask at some point. Surely he's the one doing this to me. Forcing me to go along with his game.

Is he one of the Shroud?

Is this the end for me?

We reach the bottom of the hill and walk parallel to it until the steep path becomes a granite cliff and I hear the faint trickling of a creek. I splash across it, shivering when my jeans become soaked with freezing water, and the next time I look up to keep track of the shadow, he's bending over an area near the rock face with sparse vegetation.

He gets on his knees and crawls forward, disappearing into a dark hole.

I shrivel on the inside even as my body takes steps in his direction. The small mouth of the cave beckons me. It's blacker than night. The No! Snap out of it! Do not go inside there. Don't do it, don't do it—

Bits of twigs and rocks dig into my palms as I crawled through the opening. It's a tight fit, and my clothes and hair are coated with dust and fine grains of dirt by the time I draw myself to my feet. My eyes widen as I flash my beam around.

Instead of a small cave like I expected, I'm standing in a small space with rough, jagged walls and a narrow tunnel that leads even deeper. A soft green light pulses from the tunnel. Sweat rolls down my back despite the cold. I'm swallowing painfully every two seconds, fighting down the rock wedged into my throat. That feeling of being buried alive—it rises inside me again, except worse than ever before. An omen of what's to come.

The shadow continues down the tunnel, and so do I.

The tunnel grows fuzzy-green, and it takes me a second to blink away the tears of stifling fear. The tunnel is sloped downward. I'm descending into the belly of the earth. Half a minute later, I discover the source of the strange light.

Green crystals are encrusted into the walls of the cavern, branching out like veins. On either side of me, they brighten and dim, brighten and dim, and I'm shriveled into myself so I don't end up touching one of them accidentally. If I do, something bad will happen.

I try closing my eyes: if I can't see the shadow, maybe I'll stop this madness. But blinking is all I can manage.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Once. Twice. Five times. Ten. With excruciating focus, I dig two fingers into my pocket and pull it out. Don't drop it. I know there's no way I'll be able to convince my body to stop and pick it up if it falls, so I hold it gingerly in my free hand and press it to my ear.

"April?"

The tense voice in my ear is godsend. "Marcus," I force out in what sounds to my ears like a whimper.

"What's going on?" There are muffled voices in the background. "Willow said you disappeared from bed. Where the hell did you go?"

"I—I don't know." My voices echoes down the tunnel into the pulsing light, and then back toward me. It sounds like someone mocking me. "I'm in a tunnel somewhere. I'm—I'm trapped. I can't get out."

The path keeps descending. I open my mouth to tell him exactly what's happening and close it. He'll think I'm crazy. I have a hard time convincing myself I'm not dreaming.

"Are you in trouble?" Marcus asks me.

"I think so. Yes."

He releases an audible breath. "Is someone with you?"

Does the shadow count as someone? "Do you remember the shadowy people I saw that first day at the restaurant? I thought Saige was making me hallucinate, but it wasn't her. They're real, Marcus. I'm following one of them right now."

"You're doing what?" he demands. "April, turn back. Right now."

"I can't!" Tears are streaming down my face now. "He's making me follow him."

Quiet. Then, "Tell me everything."

I do so as quickly as I can because the softly illuminating light is growing stronger. There are more crystals embedded into the walls, spreading like reaching fingers across its surface. My trembling hand, the one holding the unnecessary flashlight, is tinged green, a sickly hue that matches my internal state.

Where are they taking me?

"Marcus, I don't think I'll make it out of here," I whisper.

"Don't say that." He's breathing harder now, like he's racing through the woods. Through the phone, I can hear Janie calling my name. But I know she's nowhere close to me. "I'm going to find you," he adds. "Keep trying to fight them, alright?"

There's a gentle bend in the tunnel, and beyond it the green light seems brighter. And the feeling of suffocating, of being unable to escape—it's all I feel right now. Words I've wanted to say to him rush to my throat. "I'm sorry. About everything. I wish I could take back the past eight months and start from scratch, but I don't even know how to fix anything because I can't figure out how it got so screwed up in the first place."

"It's not the right time for us to have this talk," he says.

A sob breaks free. "I'm not going to have another chance. I just know it."

He stops panting long enough to let out a string of expletives. "Don't think like that. Babe, I'm going to find you. Just hang on. I'm almost there."

Too late. The bend in the tunnel brings me to the end. The shadow is gone by the time I turn the corner, and what I find makes me so weak I can't hold on to either the flashlight or the phone. I can't even keep myself upright. I sink to my knees and give in to full-body sobs.

This massive room is the origin of the green crystals. They're all I see, so encompassing they seem to burn through the layers of my skin. And inside them . . . inside the crystal walls . . . dozens upon dozens of human bodies.

No, not dozens. Their numbers are more than the double digits. Maybe more than the triple digits. They seem to be lined up in front of each other deeper in the crystal, their bodies ramrod straight with arms hanging at their sides. Men and women, old and young, black and white. Nothing matters except that their eyes are all completely blank and unseeing.

An army of Blanks. This is what the Shroud has been doing. All this time, we thought the worst they've been doing is creating handfuls of Blanks here and there, but they've had a bigger agenda all along. They've been preparing for an apocalypse.

My eyes scour the walls until they land, deliberately, on one of the rows. Like I know instinctively that that spot is significant. It must be because it's the one place where the front of the line is empty. Someone is meant to fill it. Or maybe someone did, at some point.

"No," I moan, drowning in feelings that make me feel like an alien in my own skin. Buried alive. This is what I've been dreaming about. This place and its walls of death.

Control yourself.

Sam's words come back to me, warning me to step away from the edge, but I'm too far gone. I'm lost in the horror of memories that are rapidly rising to the surface, and trying to find control now is like trying to put together a shattered glass vase.

So I shatter, too.



I can't move my hands when I came to. I start to struggle against my binds until warm hands stroke my face and hair and a deep voice murmurs soothingly, "Shh, it's okay, Rose. It's just me. Willow, get these off her, will you?"

Willow kneels next to me on the couch and yanks off the rope around my wrists while Marcus continues to comfort me. Her hazel eyes meet mine, and I stiffen, but she's pulled away before I can figure out why I suddenly feel uneasy.

Marcus cups the side of my face and the concern on his face nearly brings me to tears all over again. I sit up on the couch and wrap my arms around his neck, relying on his warmth and strength in a way I never thought I would again.

"What happened?" I murmur.

"You blanked. I found you right before you . . ."

"Before I walked into the wall," I finish, sick to my stomach. "How did you find me?"

"We tracked the phone you had on. It's a lucky thing that Willow gave it to you."

I frown. Yeah. Lucky.

"It's not the first time I've done that," I say with a wince of pain, rubbing my head. I must have taken a hit somehow. "I don't remember being in there, but I remember finding myself in the streets afterward." Wandering lost and confused, trying to find my bearings.

"Why did they let you out?" Janie asks in abject confusion. "Not that I'm complaining, but this whole thing is freaking creepy."

I pull back to look at her. "Maybe I got away."

"I don't think so," Willow says softly. "I think they let you out."

The soft proclamation is chilling. If they did that, if they willingly allowed me to regain my sanity, it's because it served a purpose. Were they using me somehow? Maybe to keep track of the rest of the team?

"Okay, can anyone tell me what the hell that place is anyway?" Jones says, pacing somewhere behind the couch. "There were like a gazillion Blanks in there, man! And those green walls. Holy shit. What are we going to do now?"

"One thing is for sure," Pablo says from his spot against the opposite wall. "They know we know their dirty little secret now."

"What does that mean?" Jones swings around frantically to face the windows. "Are they coming for us?"

"Just you, dumbass," Pablo answers.

I look around at everyone. "Does that mean you guys have never seen that room?"

"Isn't that obvious?" Jones sputters, gesturing wildly.

Marcus stands and faces him. "Calm down, Jones. Nothing is going to happen to us right now."

"How do you know that?"

"We went right into their top-secret cave and they let us walk out of there alive. You want to know why? Because they couldn't stop us. Those Blanks in that wall were probably disabled or something. And there's a reason the Shroud has never shown up to deal with us directly. It's because they can't. Not like that."

"Isn't that what Doctor Hansel told you guys?" Janie asks. "They're pacifist dicks who use other people to do their fighting for them."

"Exactly."

"I'm not sure it's a good idea to spend the night here," Willow says, crossing her arms with a small shiver.

I shake my head. It's more than a bad idea. "I'm not staying here."

"It's three o'clock in the morning," Pablo says in an exasperated tone. "Where are we supposed to go?"

"I don't care. I'm not staying. They're less than a mile away from us." I shrink into the couch, my voice breaking. "I don't want them to take me back. Please, I don't want to go inside that place—"

"That's not going to happen," Janie says. "Now that we know what we're dealing with, we will protect you, April. We take care of family."

"Jones," Marcus says. "Pack up our supplies. Pablo will help you put them in the van. There's only six of us now, so we can leave behind the bigger van. Willow, transfer whatever we need into the Ford and get the engine warm. And Janie, get April's things from upstairs. I don't think she's in any shape to start hauling things around."

Pablo gives an exaggerated, mocking salute. "Aye, captain."

Marcus waits until the others are gone before he turns to me. "You should go and pack up your things. But first, I want to ask you something. All those times you went missing—sometimes for weeks. You're telling me you were in that place?"

"Yes." My voice quakes, and it's all I can do not to let that tremor travel down my spine and spread everywhere.

"Jesus."

He reaches for me and pulls me to my feet. I sink into his embrace, burying my face against his chest as he holds me tightly. We're suspended above all of the problems we've been trying to muddle through, and for the first time in what feels like forever, it's quiet. The noise in my head, an incessant reminder that my world has been knocked askew. But the world is right again at this moment, in Marcus's arms.

"This is my fault," he mumbles against my hair.

I close my eyes. "How?"

"I was hard on you. I turned the others against you. If I hadn't done that, we could've stopped this from happening."

"No. I think you did the best you could," I tell him and realize I mean it.

Something inside me knows he did try to protect me, but I pushed him so far away there was no coming back from it. Maybe it was my own misguided way of protecting him from whatever awful secrets lie in that cave, among other things.

As if remembering himself, Marcus steps back and curls his hands into fists. "I'll go check on Willow. Be outside in ten minutes."

I nod and watch him walk away, holding completely still when he looks back at me as he reaches the front door. He doesn't come back into the room. Instead he walks through the door and I hear his voice as he heads toward the Ford van.

I go over to the window and watch him and Willow as they carry our weapons and boxes of pre-packaged food from one van into the other. The strangeness of seeing her earlier has hardened to grim certainty. That feeling as I left the cabin earlier, the one where I felt compelled to follow him to the ends of the Earth—there was something familiar about it. I felt a sliver of it last night when I opened my eyes and saw Willow's face during my nightmare. Go to your happy place, I remember her telling me. And I did.

Her ability is capable of taking root inside people and making them do things they never would otherwise. She must have compelled me to stop having a nightmare and have happy dreams about Marcus. And I'm pretty sure she compelled me to follow the shadow.

The only thing I can't figure out is what all of this makes her.

Friend or foe.

I shudder and move toward the door, eager to get away from this place. Now that we've discovered their secret, I wonder what the Shroud will do about it. At best, they'll keep hiding from us and stockpiling more Blanks, giving us time to find a solution.

And at worst, well, they very well might decide to retaliate.