Page 76 of Hide And Seek

I nodded, rising with her. Jesse, Tamsin, and Wren followed suit.

Set along the far edge of the main building, the kitchen backed onto the woods, with only a single internal doorway connecting it to the assembly hall. The dining hall branched off from there through another doorway.

An hour later, most of the group had left the assembly hall and trickled into the dining hall, lured by the smell of food. I was standing at the counter, serving up bowls of spiced lentil and tomato stew with couscous, when the doors at the far end of the dining hall slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame.

Garrett, Cole, and Levi stumbled inside, their faces pale in a way that instantly set something off in my chest.

“What’s happening?” Jesse asked, rushing over to them.

“I-it’s Piper,” Garrett said.

Sutton shot to her feet so fast her chair scraped loudly across the floor. “She’s here?”

Garrett didn’t speak again straight away. He just stood there, chest rising and falling, like he didn’t know what to say next.

“No,” he finally said. “I mean… sheishere. But I don’t think she ever left. She… she’s dead.”

Sutton stared at him, her expression freezing, like her brain had simply refused to process the words. “That’s not funny,” she said flatly. “Don’t say shit like that.”

“We aren’t joking,” Levi said, his voice tight. “We just found her body.”

A ripple moved through the room. Shock. Denial. The beginnings of panic.

“How?” Caitlin asked. “Where?”

Garrett dragged a hand over his face. “We decided to search through all the buildings again, because we figured someone might’ve missed something the other day. Like a radio. Or just… anything.”

“We were in the director’s office, and we found some blueprints in one of the filing cabinets,” Cole added. “Really old ones, from before they built the camp.”

“Blueprints of what?” Wren asked.

“The original layout,” Garrett said. “Back when Erebus Lodge was still here. Before they tore it all down and built everything new.”

A cold, creeping feeling started to spread through me.

“The Lodge had tunnels running underneath the buildings,” Levi said. “Service routes. Storage areas. And cellars. It’s all mapped out in the blueprints.”

“No fucking way,” Jasmine breathed.

“The buildings are all gone now, obviously,” Cole went on. “But we wondered if the underground parts might still be there. Or at least some of them.”

“So we started looking,” Garrett said. “We figured the killer might be using them to sneak around.”

Levi swallowed. “We found a hatch, way at the back of the old supply building. It was hidden under a stack of crates. Like… completely covered. You wouldn’t see it unless you were actively moving stuff around.”

No one spoke.

“We opened it,” he went on. “There was a ladder going down. And… yeah. The tunnels are still there.”

There was a long, suffocating pause.

“And Piper?” Caitlin finally asked.

Garrett’s jaw tightened. “The tunnel we went into led to an old cellar, and Piper was there. Her throat…” He trailed off again, pressing his lips together for a second before forcing himself to finish. “Her throat was cut.”

“And judging by the condition of her body, she’s been dead for a while,” Levi added. “At least a few days.”

The words settled over us slowly.