"Chloe, what happened back there?" Steph asks between breaths when they slow down to a brisk walk.

"Fuck if I know," Chloe replies.

They're in the woods, somewhere north of Pan Estates. The mine mountain is on their right. The hill on the left is steadily getting steeper. A dry creek bed is snaking ahead into the gloom.

"I thought we were going to check out that mine," Steph says.

"So did I. But then I couldn't get through the door, and suddenly the whole thing felt like a trap, and all I could think of was getting out of there."

"Couldn't get through the door?"

Chloe shrugs.

"Yeah. I opened it. You saw me. Started walking through, then suddenly I was on my ass."

"I thought you saw something inside and backpedaled."

Chloe looks over at Steph, shakes her head.

"Steph, it's gonna sound crazy, but… I think Rachel's bracelet stopped me from going in."

They let that one simmer as they put more yards between themselves and the old mine. When yards become minutes, Steph looks back over her shoulder, asking, "Are we done with the Pan Estates, then? Where are we going?"

Chloe stops, ducks behind a boulder, listens.

"Did you see anybody following us?"

Steph shakes her head.

"But I mean, they must have, right?" Chloe says, peeking around. "That drone was right there staring at us."

"They might have seen us running away and decided not to bother?" Steph suggests.

Chloe thinks about it. Listens again. There's nothing. No sound at all.

"Maybe you're right," she says finally. "But they are probably watching there now. And I still want to check out that HQ."

"So what do we do?"

"I think if we keep following this creek, we'll be able to find a branching ravine to circle back around."

Steph looks unconvinced, but nods. They set off again.

Half a mile later, there is still no branching path. Instead, the passage they are following narrows to the point where the steep wooded slopes are on both sides and the only way forward that doesn't involve rock climbing is down through the gorge between them. Which would have been OK, except it's also getting late in the day, the sun is beginning to set, and the space between the two hills is rapidly growing darker.

Steph pulls out her phone.

"No signal," she says. "Even though that tower was right there. So no map..."

They stop and listen again. It's still dead silent, but now it's so dark that Chloe can barely see Steph's face. Which is good, she thinks, because Steph also can't see the embarrassment on hers.

Chloe the Queen of the Woods.

"Felt like we were curving towards the West, but it's hard to tell," she says softly.

"Not really feeling like spending the night in these woods, if I'm honest," Steph says carefully.

"Yeah," Chloe scoffs. "Me neither. Listen, push comes to shove we just take this same path straight back. Fuck it if the mall cops are still there waiting. Let them arrest us. But it's not night time yet. Fucking dark down here, but you can still see the sun on top of those trees there, see? It's barely after seven. And it looks like some sort of a clearing up ahead."

"Yeah," Steph says, staring at 7:13PM down on her phone.

"Wanna check it out?"

"Yeah, OK."

The clearing that opens up before them is a small valley between several converging hills. The extra light is both, due to the area being more open under the sky, and the fact that the slopes on the left side of the clearing are covered in burned tree skeletons. This is where the forest fire reached before magically extinguishing itself.

"Holy shit," Chloe says.

In the middle of the valley there is a small grove of maybe a dozen birch trees, with half of them burned and the other still alive, although the ones that are alive are crooked and brown-leaved. Which may have something to do with with a pool of dark liquid they are growing around.

Was that a clean water pond before it got polluted by the ash from Rachel's fire?

There's something else weird about the grove. Chloe feels it even before Steph says, "Chloe, let's not get any closer to that." She nods, but it also doesn't look right on the real world level somehow… The shadows! She realizes. The shadows are right to left, which is the opposite of where they should point. She looks to the right to confirm what she already knows to be true. The sun, the west, is not where it's supposed to be. Somehow, they got turned around and ended up walking south instead of north.

"Steph, am I crazy, or is the sun on the wrong side of the sky?" she asks.

Though the question may have been rhetorical, the reply silence seems weird, so she turns around to see if Steph is really pissed at her for getting them lost or something, only to see her walking slowly towards the grove she wasn't going to get any closer to a second ago.

"Hey, Steph?"

Again, she gets no response and no pause of movement, so she rushes after Steph and grabs her by the shoulder, which, when she does, causes something like a discharge of static electricity crackle and sting her wrist.

"Fuck!" she exclaims, flailing her hand.

"Whoa," Steph gasps at the same time. She spins around, eyes going wide when they find Chloe's face.

"Chloe!"

"What the fuck just happened?"

"I think I… uh… had a vision."

"What about?"

"None of you business, you nosy bitch. Everything would have been so much better if you just killed yourself like you were supposed to." With that, Steph faints and falls slowly to the ground.

Having gotten over the shock, Chloe kneels next to her.

"Steph! Come on, Steph! Wake up!"

Not sure what to do with her hands, she slides one under Steph's neck and tries to lift her.

"Chloe," Steph says weakly, opening her eyes. "What's…? It's the grove, Chloe. We need to get away from the…" and passes out again.

"Steph! Fuck." Get away from the grove. Got it. But I have a better idea.

She lowers Steph gently, slips the backback off, almost tears off the straps unbuckling them, unwraps a Molotov and gets to her feet.

"Let's see how you like this, motherfucker," she growls, flicking the lighter.

The rag is on fire immediately. Too fast, in fact. Terrified that it's going to explode in her hands, she curses and runs a few steps towards the grove, and heaves the bottle as far and as fast as she can. It flies, spinning and spitting fire, missing the birches and falling in the dry grass between the circle of trees and the pool. It doesn't break on impact, but then it bounces and lands again and this time it cracks and pours liquid fire across the grass and into the pool. All of it, including the pool, begins to burn, popping and crackling and emitting thick black smoke.

Steph wakes up with a gasp and struggles to her feet, clawing at Chloe's clothes.

Chloe grabs her by the hand, and away they run.

Somewhere.

Into one of the ravines.

They run, until it's so dark that to keep running means risking face-firsting into mossy rocks or, worse yet, breaking their ankles.

Which is to say: not very far.

They stop and stand in the cold, moist darkness, panting. Behind them, there is a distant, vague, red glow in the sky, and smoke rising. Chloe lets go of Steph's hand finally.

"OK," Steph says. "That was really weird."

"You're telling me. If that's how the flashbacks look from the outside, I have no idea how you're still hanging around me."

"Why? Did I do something? I can't remember."

"Not a lot. Phased in an out a few times. Called me a nosy bitch."

"Phased...? What?… I did?"

"What do you remember, Steph?"

"We were walking, and then… I was ... somewhere else. It looked like the Two Whales. Your mom was there. A-and a bunch of other people, but they were all frozen, unmoving, except for this one girl in the booth who seemed angry about something. She was talking, telling me something, yelling maybe, but I don't remember what she was saying."

"What did this girl look like?"

"Uhm… short hair? Hoodie? Skinny. Shoulder bag."

"Well, Steph. I guess you've met Max. Also, I think maybe we found what was marked with the skull and bones."

"That was your Max?"

"Sounds like it. I've seen that scene before. The diner with a bunch of people frozen in time."

"I'm really confused right now."

"Welcome to the club, Gingrich."

"No, but, Chloe, this girl, she wasn't… friendly. She wasn't trying to help. I actually felt like she wanted to kill me."

"Yeah. What you were saying to me also wasn't very friendly, so it's pretty safe to assume that wasn't a real Max or 'my' version of Max."

"So who or what was that?"

"Someone who doesn't like us at all. Or at least hates me enough so that she was willing to hurt you to get to me. Good thing we brought the cocktails, right?"

"I'm not sure. I saw fire. Did you use one?"

"Hell yeah! It was totally awesome, too. Woke you right up. Look at that bitch burn."

They stand there for a bit, watching the sky.

"Hopefully, we didn't just start another forest fire," Steph says.

Chloe shrugs.

"Maybe it'll burn Pan Estates down, together with the key to the Dark Room."

"So you don't think...?" Steph asks.

"Why?" Chloe's head snaps towards her, desperate hope flooding her face concealed by darkness, but the one filling her voice laid bare. "Do you?"

Steph says nothing for a while.

"Whatever was in that grove was definitely evil, but..."

"Anyway," Chloe says, turning away. "We should get the fuck out of here. Now I definitely don't want to spend the night in these woods."

They look around. There's nothing to see except the dark slopes and shreds of sky between the treetops. As Chloe looks up, the sky gets lighter for a brief moment.

"I think we're gonna have to climb up to the top of this hill. We should be able to get our bearings from there."

"OK, Chloe. I'm right behind you."

The hill is not very tall, but the climb is hard as fuck, especially in the dark. There's no path, and the slope is steep, so the only way up is to pull yourself from one tree trunk to the other, feeling around for roots to use as stepping stones. They advance slow, silently, eyes to the ground. Sometimes they crawl. In the dark silence, the words the grove entity spoke with Steph's mouth come back and stay with her.

"… killed yourself like you were supposed to."

When they finally make it to the top, it's like the spell is broken. The Pan Estates unfurl itself before them. The yellow-windowed HQ and the two towers, with red and white lights blinking on them, are directly below and to the right. It feels like if you took a good running start, you could leap to the catwalk around the top of the water tower. Maybe tag that shit properly.

Far to the left are the dim lights of Arcadia Bay, the ocean, and on the cliff, the lighthouse. As they look toward it, its beam sweeps inland across the woods and the hills. It feels like it's going to sweep right past them and in a moment it blinds them with its light. They shield themselves, grinning stupidly, and it takes them a moment to register that the beam did not sweep past. It stopped. Stopped right on them.

"Like you were supposed to."

The light goes out. It's so dark that for a moment she thinks she's in the dark room, but that's not what it is. It's worse. She's in a cave. She's in a cave and it's completely dark but somehow she can see everything. She can see the leaning totem, the doe tied to it and the shiny black diamonds of its eyes. She can see shadowy figures standing motionless at the edges of the cave.

She can see the knife.

She walks towards the doe, though she doesn't want to. She tries to resist, but she can't.

There's a sound of the whale song.

"Uh, Chloe?"

She blinks, blinded by the lighthouse beam that's still on her.

How long?

Just then it moves, its white eye sliding down her clothes and down the hill and across the treetops below, across the construction lot with the abandoned machines, across the roofs and backyards of the Pan Estates, not in a straight line of a lighthouse sweeping from side to side, but in a strangely halting, elaborate way, like someone drawing a path on a map. Path leading back towards Arcadia Bay, circling out to the hospital then back in through the Posh Bay, until it reaches the Blackwell campus, sweeps past the dark mass of the main building and disappears.

No, not disappears.

It stops there.

They can't see where exactly it is pointing, but they can see the luminous body of the beam, hanging motionless in the sky above the town.

It only lasts a few seconds. Then the beam shuts off and reappears pointing out at the ocean and when it sweeps back it only goes as far inland as the boundary of the bay, before swinging back out to sea again.

"That wasn't normal," Steph says behind her back a minute later.

"Steph, I haven't seen normal in a week."

"What did it point at?"

"Couldn't tell, but it was something near Blackwell. The dorm?"

"The dorm again? Did we miss something there? Nathan? Samuel? Wait, did Rachel stay at the dorm?"

It shocks even her this time, Rachel's name. For a moment, she understands how all those people must feel when they hear it. She stares at Steph with her mouth open.

"R-Rachel? Well, yeah."

But what about it, right? They went in there, broke into Nathan's room, and it didn't even occur to them until now to check Rachel's room? Check it for what, though? Would she leave instruction lying around about where to go and what to do to free her from a supernatural prison? Would she leave a letter that explained everything? The room must have been searched by now… Probably emptied out.

"Do you think there could be anything left there?" Steph asks.

"Honestly, I haven't thought about it once, until just now."

But if she's honest, even just now what she's thinking about is not Rachel's dorm, but the doe tied to a totem and the people in the cave.

And the knife in her hand.