Steph wakes up just as they drive past Rachel's house. Her eyes open, that is, but she's still completely out of it. So it takes a minute for Chloe to notice, because she's scanning the Amber house - all the lights are still on - and the street - there's that lamppost - for clues and signs. There are no signs. Only memories.

When Steph begins to move her head and look around with an unfocused gaze, it gets Chloe's attention. She tries to talk to her, but Steph doesn't seem to hear, or at least she doesn't acknowledge her questions in any way. Which is kind of worrisome, so Chloe tells her to hold on, focuses on the road and speeds up. Finally, as they pull into the hospital parking lot for like the twenty-sixth time that day, Steph speaks.

"Chloe?" she says, rubbing her face.

Chloe hits the brakes.

"Steph! Are you back now? How are you feeling? Are you… gonna puke?"

"I don't know… What happened? Where are we… going?"

"What do you remember?"

"I remember being sick and dizzy," Kate Marsh says to Max Caulfield in her dorm room. "Then Nathan Prescott said he would take me to the hospital…"

"Rachel's room," Steph says. She peers ahead through the dirty windshield. "We were in Rachel's room, looking for clues, and… How? Where are we?"

"I think we got drugged. I came around first, but you wouldn't wake up, so I was taking you to the hospital. Come on, we should get you checked out."

She starts forward again.

"No, Chloe," Steph says, stopping her. "Wait. I think I'm OK now. Thirsty though. Do we have any water left?"

"There's some cold leftover coffee here. Are you sure you don't want to go in? You were out pretty hard."

Steph shakes her head, drains the cup and still looks thirsty.

"Can we go get something else to drink?" she asks. "And you can tell me everything I missed on the way?"

After a short argument, Chloe grumbles, turns the truck around and heads back towards town again. She tells Steph how she got knocked out by someone unseen, how she woke up in the truck and how Steph wouldn't wake up no matter what she did, so she decided to take her to the hospital, in case the bastards OD'd her. She doesn't mention the fact that when she woke up in the truck, it was parked across the rails in front of an oncoming lumber train. It just doesn't seem like a good idea to worry Steph with that now that it's over and done with. Not that concealing the fact that someone tried to kill them is a good idea, either, but fuck, she doesn't know what's worse.

"Did you see anybody?" she asks instead. "Remember anything?"

Steph thinks about it for a while.

"Not much," she says. "I remember feeling like… a draft, and I remember I think a girl, laughing, and… a train horn?"

"Yeah, sounds about… weird," Chloe says, trailing off at the end.

Some time later they get to the gas station and Chloe stands lookout while Steph holds it up for two large cans of what looks like ice tea. Or maybe she buys them.

"What in the name of all that is holy?" Chloe asks, accepting one gingerly.

"Just try it," Steph says. "I'm craving the taste for some reason."

So Chloe does, and it's actually passing decent. Or she is really thirsty as well.

"OK, so…" Steph says after emptying her can in damn near single gulp. "Should we regroup at the hotel and figure out what this drugging business is about and what we're going to do next?"

Chloe replies that they should crash at her place tonight, because she needs to return the keys, and it's only half-lie. Or half-truth. Just like the bit with waking up in the truck. She does need to return the keys, but she probably wouldn't care about it too much if someone wasn't trying to kill them. But since someone is, Fort Price-Madsen suddenly seems a lot safer than half-abandoned Harbor Inn on the outskirts of Arcadia Bay.

Pretty near the tracks, by the way.

Steph loves the idea of returning the keys and requires no further convincing.

"Maybe… you can also return the gun…" She suggests.

"Uh… yeah," Chloe says, "eventually."

Probably not while they're under a direct threat of homicide, though, which she doesn't say.

They climb up the drain pipe and into Chloe's window. The clock on the bedside table, if you can fucking believe it, says 4:19. Chloe goes down to the garage - loudly - to return the keys, hesitating once there. Why is she returning the keys? Wouldn't they need access to the dorms again? Yeah, somebody tried to kill them the last time they went there, but wouldn't it make a warped kind of sense to want to return there for exactly that reason? Doesn't that mean they were on the right track? Doesn't that mean there is something there worth killing for?

Or was, anyway.

In the end, she does leave the keys on the counter. She can always steal them again, if needed. Tonight she does not. Tonight, whatever is left of it, she needs rest.

Returning to her room, she finds Steph asleep on the bed, her phone next to her on the pillow. Seems the figuring and planning will have to wait until morning. Struggling briefly with a feeling of guilt for wasting her time on sleep, Chloe stretches out, pillowless, next to Steph, her bent elbow under her head. Registering with a delay a flash of blue, she unfolds her arm to look at Rachel's bracelet around her wrist, wondering suddenly if it was it and not her drug habit that woke her up just in time to survive the train.

Yeah, sure.

She shakes her head and recreates the elbow pillow, closing her eyes. The nonsense thoughts spin in a vortex, dragging her along towards what she hopes is a normal dream for once.

She's back in the Blackwell dorm hallway, thinking "No such luck" for some reason. No such luck. No such luck.

She's not sure what that's about. Brushing the thought away, she walks the length of the corridor, coming to the two identical doors at the end of it. Two identical Exit signs flicker on the wall above them. There aren't any numbers on the doors, but there are slates on the wall next to them. She comes closer to read them. One says "Sit and Spin;" the other has the drawing of an eye on it.

"Sit and spin," she says aloud. "Like in a vortex. The eye… the lighthouse?"

Even in Arcadia, there eye am.

She opens the Eye door.

And finds herself in another, or the same hallway. There are two more doors under the exit signs at the end. The first slate reads "We Are Monsters." The second one reads "Everybody Lies!"

She goes through the second door.

Another corridor, another set of slates. One has the drawing of the All-seeing Eye inside a pyramid. The other says "You are about to die."

I know those, she thinks. Those are graffitied in the truck.

She went through the eye last time, so maybe now she should try the creepy warning.

The outcome is the same. Another hallway.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

"Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, away."

What the fuck is this? It all seems vaguely familiar somehow, vaguely purposeful, but…

"What the fuck is this?" she asks out loud. There is no answer.

She wipes the slates clean and opens a door at random, but it still changes nothing.

At least until she gets to the end of the next hallway.

Both slates in front of her now read "WAKE UP."

Which somehow makes the choice really hard, and she spends a stupid amount of time just standing there.

Finally, she picks the left door and goes through it, entering the living room at the Price house.

William Price is at the dining table, going through a stack of bills.

"Dad?" Chloe says.

"Hey Sweetie," he says, looking up. "What's up?"

"What are you… doing here?"

"Nothing much. Just… staring at these bills. It's not like we can pay them." He chuckles.

"What are they for?"

"Oh, everything. Everything we do and everything we don't do."

"That doesn't sound fair."

"It's not."

He fishes an envelope-folded sheet of paper out of the stack and tosses it on the table in front of her.

"Look, here's one with your name. I wish I could help you with it. I really do, but…"

He gestures at the rest of the pile.

Chloe bends down to take a closer look at what he gave her. It looks like a normal bill, with a logo on top and a table of several columns in the middle. Kinda reminds her of an estimate she got from a repair shop once. The logo and the headers are somehow blurry, out of focus, but her name and address in top left corner are very clear. In the body of the table, in "Services Rendered" column, in typed, capital letters, she reads "RACHEL IN THE DARK ROOM." At the bottom, in the right corner, it says:

Balance owed:

-Fire

-Blood Oath.

"Wait, what? Blood oath?" she repeats. "What the hell?"

She turns to ask her father what it means and how to pay it, but wakes up instead.

Her room is flooded with a gray light of the early morning. Steph is asleep. Chloe looks at the clock, half expecting it to say 4:20, but it's actually 6:03. She slept an hour and a half.

Good enough.

She gets up and sits at the desk in front of the open window and lights a cigarette.

Blood oath. And fire. OK, Fire she kind of gets. They already established that they needed to burn something. But blood oath? What is that about?

She remembers Prescott letting it slip to Max Caulfield in her big dream that Frank took a blood oath for Rachel. Was that supposed to be a clue? What the fuck even is a blood oath? She tries to remember more, but there seems to be nothing else there.

She pulls her phone out and stares at it, remembering the headlights in the junkyard and why she didn't ask Frank for help with Steph. But she's at home now, so fuck it. She makes the call.

"Price?"

"Hey Frank, did I wake you?"

"I wouldn't pick up if I wasn't up already. Pompidou woke me. What the hell do you want?" His usual adorable self. If he had parked them across the tracks, it sure didn't seem to affect him much. No pangs of conscience and guilt in his voice.

"Do you know what a blood oath is?"

There is a long silence. Chloe imagines Frank is contemplating the audacity of someone calling to ask that at 6 in the morning. But, in the end, he says, "I do."

Damn, are those… pangs of conscience and guilt now?

Now Chloe is silent, waiting for him to ask her why she's wasting his time, but nothing is said, and after a while its becoming awkward.

"So if I wanted to… take a blood oath, for… Rachel," she says eventually, feeling really stupid. "How would I do that?"

"You wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Because you would have to find her first, idiot. You need two people and their blood for a blood oath. You both cut yourself, and mix the blood, while taking the oath."

"Shit. OK, thanks Frank."

"Why are you asking about that? Did you have another dream?"

"Yeah. I thought it was supposed to help me find her somehow. Having to find her first doesn't help at all."

"Why call me, though?"

"The dream said you took a blood oath for Rachel…"

There was another long silence, after which Frank says, "No. It wasn't with her… And it wasn't for that…"

Something in his voice makes her suddenly think of Damon Merrick.

"OK…" she says after a pause.

"Anyway," Frank says, "You cut a finger; you mix the blood; you make a promise. Now, don't call me again, unless it's to place an order or to pay what you owe."

He hesitates, probably coming up with a clever threat that involves bleeding, but then just hangs up instead.

Chloe stares at the mess of the Missing Person posters on her desk absently.

It doesn't make any sense, she thinks. Mix the blood, make a promise. What fucking promise?

She sees the stage, the lights, Rachel on one knee…

Oh, fuck. Not now.

And blood, yeah? Well, aren't you just the smartest piece of supernatural garbage? How am I supposed to get Rachel's blood if Rachel is who I need to find? Should we do the oath after I find her? Or do I need to take a blood oath with someone else? Steph? What is that gonna do? And what am I supposed to promise Steph?

Unless…

She sits there staring at that "unless." The thought is so crazy that she can't even articulate it internally. She knows what it is, but she's not putting it into words, for the crazy fear that Steph will somehow hear it. For this same reason, she can't even bear to be around when Steph wakes up, until this idiotic idea disappears from her brain.

So she writes Steph a note and climbs out of the window.

God damn, this is completely insane, she thinks, stomping across the lawn to her truck. Fucking ridiculous. She walks around the back to the driver side door even so, not really sure how far she was going to go once she got inside, but as she takes hold of the door handle, she catches movement in the middle of an otherwise deserted street out of the corner of her eye, and she turns to see who it is can't sleep either and whether or not they are also thinking crazy thoughts, and she sees a slender woman with the hood up under the lamppost across the street, and for one full second her heart stops, and the thoughts of stabbing a certain District Attorney disappear from her mind completely, because for one full second she thinks that the woman under the lamppost is Rachel.

But then the woman turns to face her and Chloe sees that it's not Rachel.

It's Sera Gearhardt.