While the woods burn around her, she runs.

She flies down the trail, afraid to slow for even a moment. Distant screams carry through the wind, the voices of her friends muddled and distorted. She hopes they are running, too.

The campers are ­gone—buses took them home just this morning. But the staff is still here. People she cares about. And somewhere in her stomach, there is a single cord of guilt that snakes out behind her, toward them.

She knows she shouldn’t be heading north, where the lakeshore grows rocky and too high to jump from. If she’s not fast, she’ll find herself trapped out here. She’ll find herself dead. All of it will have been for nothing.

The fire licks at the trees behind her, and she keeps running, because she knows there is no time to waste. No time at all.

Had it really been only minutes ago that everyone had been at the beach together? Sad, yes, but safe. Knocking together Solo cups of cheap wine, drinking to the dregs of summer, saying their goodbyes a week too early. Whispering stories about the Phantom, who’d been slinking through the shadows for months. Sowing doubt and distrust and a festering, contagious fear.

A monster from that old campfire story, the kids all claimed. A monster who was waiting in the trees, scarier than any nightmare. It’s not true, but it doesn’t matter anymore. The damage has been done.

Everything is her fault, of course. She has been stupid. Reckless. If only she’d told someone what she’d found, if only she’d—

No. She does not have the luxury of guilt right now. The fire rages and crackles in the trees behind her, but the trail in front of her is, for the moment, clear. That must be a sign from the universe that she has to keep going.