Page 44 of Hide And Seek

“Same,” Jesse said, moving up beside him.

Grayson and Simon exchanged a quick look before nodding almost in unison, and Garrett followed a second later, shrugging like it wasn’t even a question. Cole drifted in after them, hands shoved in his pockets.

From the other side of the group, Zach stepped forward. Chris and Logan went with him, and Jensen rounded out the group, falling into place beside Rhys.

I counted quickly. Eleven.

Rhys did the same. His gaze flicked over the group, a small crease forming between his brows. “We’ll need one more,” he said. “Like I said, it’s safer to move in pairs.”

For a second, no one spoke.

Then Knox shook his head, glancing at the other three guys who hadn’t stepped forward. “I think a few of us guys should stay here,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” one of the others added. “If whoever’s out there comes back to the camp, we probably don’t want every man out in the woods.”

A couple of the girls shifted at that, the implication hanging there without being said outright.

Rhys considered it for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. That’s fair.”

He glanced back at the group in front of him. “We’ll work with what we’ve got. Split into pairs, and I’ll go with Zach and Jensen to take one direction as a trio. That way no one’s going alone.”

No one questioned it. The remaining scout volunteers started pairing off almost immediately, falling into twos with the kind of quiet efficiency that came from wanting to get moving more than anything else.

They headed off to the campground kitchen to grab food and water for their scouting trip. Meanwhile, the rest of us lingered for a moment on the lawn, exchanging brief, uncertain glances before breaking off into smaller groups.

“Guess we should get started,” Jasmine muttered beside me.

The groups fanned out across the camp in loose clusters of two and three. We checked everything in sight. Cabins, activity sheds, storage rooms, offices, anywhere with a door or a lock or even just a shadowed corner that hadn’t been properly looked at. Then we checked it all again, slower this time, opening drawerswe’d skimmed past earlier, pulling things off shelves, crouching to look under beds and behind stacked equipment.

At first, there was a sense of purpose to it. People called out to each other when they finished a room, and groups compared notes in passing, asking if anyone had found anything even remotely useful.

No one had.

By late morning, the energy had started to dip. Conversations thinned out. Doors opened and closed with less urgency, and the whole thing began to feel like we were moving through the same motions without expecting a different result.

We broke for lunch just after twelve, regrouping near the main hall with nothing to show for the last few hours but dust on our hands and a growing, gnawing frustration.

“So that was a total waste of time,” Wren said, dropping down onto the steps with a bottle of water.

“Not necessarily,” Caitlin replied, though she didn’t sound convinced. “At least we know there’s nothing obvious.”

“Yeah, well, ‘nothing obvious’ isn’t exactly helpful,” Jasmine muttered. “I mean, an obvious radio would’ve been nice.”

Caitlin sighed. “You know what I mean.”

I sat down beside her, my gaze drifting across the camp. It all looked the same as it had yesterday. Peaceful. Ordinary. Like it wasn’t hiding anything at all.

Somehow that made it worse.

“We should look again after we’ve eaten,” Tamsin said after a moment, quieter than the others but firm. “There’s a lot of buildings here. It’s easy to miss something the first time around. Maybe even the second.”

“She’s right,” I said. “And we don’t have anything better to do, do we?”

By the time the light started to soften toward late afternoon, it was clear we weren’t going to find anything.

Every building had been checked twice. Some of them three times. Drawers emptied, shelves cleared, storage boxes opened and re-opened as if something might magically appear the second or third time around.

Nothing did.