"They burned the prison?" Chloe repeats. "How the fuck did the raven survive that?"

"I said that exact same thing!" Steph exclaims. "Well... not in those words. Anyway, she looked at me like I was three years old, asking how the cow could jump over the moon."

Chloe rolls her eyes. "I bet."

"But I didn't back down, Chloe. I asked her again."

"Badass."

"Yeah, I thought she was about to have me escorted out, but then this other teacher came to my rescue."

"What other teacher?"

"I didn't know him. Some new guy in a blazer from the room across the hallway. He must have overheard us, because all of a sudden he appeared, saying it was 'elementary': the Raven was a spirit, not a normal bird. So then Ms. Grant says, 'If so, then it must follow that the prison that could hold it wasn't a normal prison, either.' And so I go, 'Well, how do you burn a magic prison?' And he says 'I don't know, but..."

"...I hope you're not planning arson," Chloe finishes for her. "We barely survived the last one."

Chloe heard the words a moment ago, saw the man who spoke them from behind, through an open door of the classroom. The flashback makes her shiver violently.

Steph stares at her with her mouth open. "How?"

"Was he handsome?" she swallows something bitter. "Glasses? Goatee?"

"Did you...?"

"I don't know how, Steph, but I'm pretty sure that was Jefferson."

"But Chloe, that was word for word. You weren't there..."

"Well, I guess I'm not a normal arsonist," she says, starting the engine. Steph keeps staring. Frank comes out of the woods with Pompidou and glares. Chloe rolls her eyes and reverses out of the spot.

"So we just go and burn that fucking hut down, right? Is that what you're thinking too?" she asks, leaving Blackwell parking lot behind, in plumes of gray smoke.

"Huh? Oh, yeah, pretty much… I'm freaking out still, Chloe."

"Yeah, me too, Steph. That was the weirdest one yet." Maybe we're getting closer? She thinks this part but doesn't say it.

Because you can only jinx it if you say it out loud, right?

They drive to 44 Cedar. At some point after they left the homeless lady, Joyce has come home. While she is sleeping off the third shift upstairs, Chloe burglarizes the garage for a bottle of grill lighter fluid and a half-full canister of gasoline. She loads both in the bed of the truck, then goes back into the house and comes out with a foil-covered plate of eggs and bacon Joyce left for her on the kitchen counter.

They work through it on the way back to the abandoned cabin, sharing a fork. In daylight, the road through the woods doesn't seem as hidden, or as long. They get to the clearing and sit for a while, staring at the empty house, listening. Chloe could swear she hears rumbling of some distant or underground machinery. Mining equipment, maybe. Or a logging train that's 10 miles off.

"OK, let's burn this fucker down," she says finally.

She pours the gasoline thickly inside the hut, over the walls, table and garbage, then empties the leftovers holding the can upside down over the tent in the backyard. She snakes a line of lighter fuel out of the doorway with the bottle, sprays the rest chaotically all over the outside walls and tosses the bottle in through the window.

"Arson," Rose Amber says at the dinner table. "Now why would anyone do that?"

"Can I borrow your lighter?" Rachel says, photo in hand.

Everything is suddenly still.

The sky is holding its breath.

Chloe lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag, grins nervously at Steph, and drops the cig on the Oregon trail of fuel. Nothing happens, but just as the disappointment, the feeling of betrayal we feel when we discover that the trick that looked cool in a movie is just another fucking lie of the world, begins to bare teeth, a tiny blaze puffs up and skips across the blades of grass and into the dark silent doorway, and suddenly the entire thing is up in flames and exhales enough heat to make them take about five steps back.

Fear clutches at her neck with cold fingers (What if Rachel is IN THERE somehow?); doubt follows (What am I even doing? This is hella stupid); then hope (What if it works? What if we finally win?).

Nothing moves except the flames, but something is happening. Something is there, moving, invisible. Something that hates her. Looking over at Steph, she can see that this time Steph is aware of it, too. Frightened of it, too. They back up some more without realizing it. It's scary and exciting and reminds her of that night Rachel started the forest fire, but after a few seconds of hair-raising tension, the air loses the electric charge, settles. The angry presence withdraws. The abandoned hut is just a fucking pile of wood now, burning. One of the roof boards caves in with a crack.

They exchange looks.

"Is that it?" Chloe asks the clearing. "Nothing?"

She walks around the burning thing. It's just fire. The tent in the backyard has not caught on yet, somehow. It sits there, soaked, as the sparks drift around it. Finally, as she stands there frowning, at the tent and at the burning cabin and at the bushes around the edge of the clearing where she found the bracelet, the tent flares up, its material incinerated in moments, leaving behind nothing but the crossed beams of the frame.

"Just once," Chloe says. "Just once I wish I would catch a fucking break."

"This isn't a dead end, Chloe," Steph says. "I think we're onto something. We're just not in the right spot."

"Gingrich, are you actually saying we should burn down more shit?"

"I'm saying if this was a DnD game, there would be choices, and the most obvious one is usually not the right one."

"I would burn the whole fucking town if it saved Rachel, but this isn't a game, Steph. This is just... arson."

"You know what they say: life imitates games."

"Nobody says that."

"I heard it. Somewhere. Anyway, what's with the Debbie Downer shit, Chloe?"

Chloe sighs.

"Fine. Sorry. I just really thought for a moment…"

"I know. I did, too. Because there was something there. I know you felt it."

She shrugs.

"So what else should we burn?"

"I'm not sure," Steph replies, "but I think I know what the opposite of a dark room is."

"Do tell, Sherlock."

"What's the opposite of dark, Chloe?"

"Light… room? Wait, you're saying it's the lighthouse?"

"I think so."

"Should we burn it? Can it even be burned?"

"I don't think the lighthouse is the prison, Chloe, if it's the opposite."

"You can never escape the lighthouse here," Max Caulfield says, looking at a photo in Mark Jefferson's classroom.

Sounds like a prison, Chloe thinks.

Aloud, though, she says, "What good is it, then?"

"Maybe there's a clue. Maybe it will help us somehow."

"We've been there how many times already?"

"Uh… once?"

Chloe scoffs, looks over at the burning hut, which has mostly collapsed by now.

"Anyway, nothing else is happening here. Let's head back."

It starts raining again when they park at the lighthouse trailhead. The parking lot is empty. They try to wait it out, but it just keeps raining, and they can't come up with anything fun to talk about. Soon, Chloe can't stand it.

"Let's just go, Steph."

They climb the trail, getting soaked in the process. It's unpleasant, but at the same time, Chloe finds that everything around her looks somehow clearer. Like it's more crisp. Higher definition. She can hear individual raindrops landing on her jacket. She can smell the pine needles and the bark.

She suddenly remembers where the carving was that Max saw and waves Steph over to the tree stump. It's actually there, the haiku.

"What does it mean?" Steph asks.

"It means that maybe you were right."

Turn this way now, or…

They come to the top of the cliff and the rain is coming down hard and so do the flashbacks.

Max in the storm. Max avoiding the falling logs. Max reading the map:

"Wowser. Chloe drew that to mark our tree fort... so we'd always be able to find each other in case of an emergency..."

Max reading the tree carving, which is there. Max reading TRUST NO ONE, which is not there. The bigfoot face (bigface?)- there. The weird pyramid of glyphs that reminded Max of "wind" - not there. Max and Chloe running up the spiral staircase as kids. Lighthouse crashing on top of Max after being decapitated by a fishing boat. Chloe hugging Rachel on the bench.

Out of this jumble of memories, hallucinations and feelings, it's the stupid one that jumps out.

"What is she talking about?" she mumbles, walking over to the map. "How is marking our fort on the map supposed to help us find each other in case of an emergency? And like that was my idea? I never did that. It doesn't make any fucking sense. What kind of emergency would it have to be? One of us losing her memory or something…?"

It is actually there, the skull and bones, on the map. Drawn with a black marker. It looks like something she would draw, and the black marker looks like the marker she lost at the barn, but she didn't draw that. Did she? Speaking of losing memory…

"What is it, Chloe?" Steph asks, squinting, shoulders up by her ears in the rain.

"This skull I saw in the flashbacks that I supposedly drew to mark our fort, except I never did. And anyway, this isn't even where our fort was." Also, the skull isn't actually where "Max" found it, either. That one showed where the fort was, kinda. Was closer to it, anyway. This one is way off, up in the hills somewhere, north and east of the Posh Bay.

"What is it marking, then?" Steph asks.

"Hell, I don't know. That's like east of the hospital somewhere. The woods. The hills. Another abandoned hut? Pan Estates, maybe?"

As they stare at each other, there's one last big swash, and the rain stops, like someone turned off the water.