Or maybe they all believed Poe’s theory about me breaking the plates and thought I’d taken off. Of course, how could I take off? Where would I go in a place surrounded by water?
“Amy?” Darren’s voice came out of the darkness. “Have you fallen asleep again?”
He’d never answered my question about the number of our attackers. And…yeah, now I could remember. He said he’d been the one who’d broken the plates.
“This would be the third time, you know,” he continued. “Which is pretty tiresome.”
I remained silent. He’d never said we’d been kidnapped.
“This isn’t at all like I thought it would be.”
I swallowed, tried to work up some saliva in my mouth. I tested the strength of my bonds. There wasn’t any give at all.
“It’s just so…fucking…frustrating,” he said. “Nothing’s gone right.”
After that, he was silent for so long I thought maybe he’d given up on talking to me. Finally, I decided to speak up. “Darren…” I rasped.
“Yeah?”
And once I started, I couldn’t stop. “What did you do?”
“They were supposed to still be here. But the fuckers up and left. The Diggers were supposed to find you here and blame the guys on the island.”
“Find me?” I said, a sob rising in my throat. “Like…my body?”
“Jeez, no!” His tone was offended. “But it took forever to row out here. And then you wouldn’t wake up. You were so heavy, I couldn’t even get us to the camp. And now it turns out they aren’t even here. Cowards.”
“What did you do…to me?” I was too groggy. There was no filter between my mouth and my brain. “I was nice to you.”
He didn’t respond. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t have the energy. And it would have split my skull in two.
“So now I have no idea what the fuck I’m supposed to do.”
“How about untie me?” I said, hating the pleading note in my voice. I’d been drugged. I could hardly move; it was the only explanation. I’d been drugged. Four years of watching my drinks at every frat party I’d ever attended, and I’d wound up roofied by a fourteen-year-old with Gatorade and access to his mother’s medicine cabinet. If this kid had so much as laid a finger where it didn’t belong I’d tear him limb from limb.
As soon as I sobered up. For now, though, I rasped my wrists against each other, trying to work the knots loose, to no avail. My skin screamed as the rope tugged against sensitive nerve endings. Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God oh God…I pushed back against the waves of panic in my battered brain.
“You’ve done the whole initiation thing,” he said suddenly. “What am I doing wrong?”
“What?” I whispered. “This isn’t anything like initiation.” That had been all fun and games. Yeah, there had been a few moments here and there that scared the heck out of me, but now, now that I knew what true terror was, Poe and his shenanigans with water guns and coffins seemed like child’s play. “Please untie me.” Please please please please please. I rubbed my feet past each other, and the skin on my calves must be tougher or something, since it didn’t hurt quite as much. Was I creating any give at all?
I wondered if the others were looking for me. How well did sound carry across the water? Would they hear me if I screamed?
I tried it. “HELP!”
Within moments, Darren had me pinned against the sand, my shoulder blades twisting in agony under the pressure of my bound position.
“Ow!” I sobbed. “Please, please, get off me, you’re going to break my arms, get off me! Please!”
“Shut up,” he said, but he let me go.
“Darren, this isn’t a joke,” I said, my face still in the sand. “Untie me. Let’s go back.”
“My dad said they used to play games like this all the time,” he said, as if in argument. “Kidnapping, hostage situations…”
“Games?” I croaked. Okay, clearly Rose & Grave was a little different in the olden days. But I didn’t think Darren had any idea what he was talking about. For all I knew, his dad had just puffed up tales about a few rousing rounds of Capture the Flag. “No, not like this.” Nothing like this, I swear. “Please untie me.”
“And then what?” he asked.
“And then we go back,” I said. I kept working my arms and legs against each other, ignoring the pain in my flesh, in my head. Don’t think about it. Just go. Just go.
“And then what?”
And then someone locks you up and throws away the key, you devil spawn. “I don’t know,” I lied. “Just untie me, okay, and we’ll figure it out.”
No, wrong. Too much. Darren had to be the one to figure it out. He had to be better. I could almost feel his distrust.
I mean, “What do you want? Whatever you want.”
He snorted. “I got what I wanted. Revenge.”
Like The Count of Monte Cristo. That’s the last time I recommended that book to anyone. “Against who?”
“D177, of course,” he said. “What are you, retarded?”
I swallowed. My head felt worse. I was so dizzy. And the knots around my limbs weren’t budging. “Why did you want…revenge against us?”
“I thought you guys would fight back more. I heard about what you did to that kid last semester.”
Micah? “Fight back?”
“But you’re all such pussies. I can see why Dragon’s Head takes advantage of you.”
I fought to wrap my head around what he was saying. “I can’t fight…unconscious.” And tied up. Okay, my feet were definitely looser now.
“Against the pranks I pulled.”
I blinked, slowly. My head felt so heavy, so fragile. “You did the cabin.”
“And the drinks last night.” He sounded proud. “No one even guessed! That’s the part I’m no good at. Half the time, people don’t even notice. Like last night, when I short-sheeted all of the boys’ beds. No one even mentioned it at breakfast. Do you think they slept on top of their sheets?”
Likely. But I was still a step behind him. “The drinks?”
“It wasn’t food poisoning,” Darren said. “It was ipecac syrup. I read about it once on the Internet, but I never saw it before until we got here.”
Ipecac? Did people even make that anymore? Gross. Only on some backward, out of the way island like Cavador.
“That’s how I knew you didn’t get sick. You didn’t have any of the pitcher I made.”
And neither had he. So he’d been faking in his bed last night. And he’d already drugged the Diggers once, and gotten away with it.
“This is why I would join a society like Dragon’s Head instead. From what I hear, their pranks are so much better.”
Their pranks were pranks. Crickets and sodas and library fines. Darren could have really hurt us. Maybe he already had. But the more he talked, the more I doubted he’d done anything untoward to me while I’d been unconscious. He really thought this was equal to Dragon’s Head’s attacks. He sincerely believed that drugging and kidnapping a woman was no different than short-sheeting a couple of bunk beds. “Maybe that’s what’s going on now,” I said, weighing my words carefully. “Maybe the Diggers just don’t know that this is a…prank.”
“I’m thinking that, too,” Darren said, his voice as casual as if he were remarking on climate change.
“Darren,” I said. “Let’s go back. I think I’m really sick. Please? Just untie me and I’ll help you row back to Cavador. It will go much more quickly if we each take an oar.”