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Riley shook her head. “Go ahead. I don’t have a lock code.”
Ellie quickly typed back:
This is Ellie. Riley is safe, with me. What is the way out?
Message failed to deliverappeared immediately when she hit Send. The phone had no signal. Ellie was about to hand it back to Riley when another message came in, also from her mother:
Where you’re heading is nothing but death. Turn around.
The phone still showed that it had no signal.
A thought slammed into Ellie’s head:This isn’t Riley’s mother.
This was someone, something, else.
“I’m gonna hold on to your phone for a minute,” Ellie told Riley. “In case she replies.”
Riley just shrugged and followed after the others, scratching at her arm.
“It ain’t much farther,” Buck said. “Maybe it’s best you all stay here and I scout it—” He paused and looked up at the sky. “You hear that?”
Ellie didn’t hear anything. “What?”
“A buzzing sound.”
“Is it the birds?”
“Mechanical. Not the birds.”
The sun was nearly gone and the moon was out, but very little broke the canopy of trees. They all stopped and looked up, but Robby was first to point. “There.”
Mason Ridley followed Robby’s finger, then shouted, “Shit! Heads up!” And jumped to the side of the path a moment before something large and black fell from the sky and crashed into the earth with a resounding thud, missing him and the others by only a few feet.
“Eww, gross,” Riley muttered, taking a few stumbling steps back from the object. “Is it dead?”
Ellie stepped by her and knelt. “It’s not alive at all. It’s a drone.”
The mangled mess of plastic and metal was about three feet in diameter, or at least it had been. All four propellers were clogged with black feathers, bits of birds, and covered in the same dust the dead bird back at Buck’s cabin had produced when Robbystabbed it. Ellie found two cameras—one on the nose, another beneath meant to record straight down. Both lenses were cracked.
“It looks old,” Robby said quietly.
Buck grunted. “Not old but beat to hell for sure.”
Robby quickly shook his head. “No, itisold. Look at the plastic. It’s faded and cracked, like it’s been in the sun a really long time. Plastic doesn’t get brittle like that unless it’s been outside a long time, exposed to changes in temperature, like toys left out during the winter. This has been through a bunch of winters.”
Evelyn Harper, who had been uncharacteristically silent for most of the walk, finally spoke. “It must belong to whoever put the fence up around town.”
Ellie didn’t disagree. It looked military. No branding of any sort. Although there was no evidence of fire, parts looked melted. She looked up at the sky but saw nothing. From the trees, at least a dozen crows silently looked back at her, their beady eyes glistening with moonshine.
Still holding Riley’s phone, she felt it vibrate in her hand with another message from whoever was pretending to be the girl’s mother:
Turn back
Buck was standing over her when that one came in. “Maybe you should take the kids back to my place and let me go this one alone, Ellie.”
“I think it’s best we all stick together.” She quickly told them what she suspected about the incoming texts. “I don’t know if whoever this is is trying to help us or hurt us. Until I figure out that much, they don’t get to give me orders.”
“Well, it ain’t much farther,” Buck repeated as he turned away and started back down the path.
