1
BROOKLYN
Ishould have turned back an hour ago.
Forty minutes into the hike, the trail had quietly stopped being a trail. The blazes on the trees faded. The canopy swallowed the sky. What I’d been confidently following turned out to be a drainage groove carved by decades of rainwater—not boot traffic.
Fantastic.
I pulled out my phone. The blue GPS dot blinked in the center of an endless green void. No marked trails within a quarter mile.
According to the scavenger hunt checklist folded in my pocket, the rare yellow fringed orchid grew somewhere on this ridge. Above four thousand feet. Rocky clearing. Southern exposure. I’d had to Google what “southern exposure” even meant last night.
My phone’s altimeter app read thirty-eight hundred feet. I hadn’t known what an altimeter was two days ago. Now I was apparently staking my life on one.
I was lost on a mountain I had absolutely no business being on, wearing hiking boots I’d borrowed from my friend Paisley’ssuitcase and carrying a daypack I’d thrown together in twelve wildly overconfident minutes. Two granola bars. A half-full water bottle. A portable charger I had very confidently forgotten to charge.
This was not how the trip was supposed to go.
Three days ago, my biggest decision was whether to have blueberry or chocolate chip pancakes at the Pancake House. Hartley and I had been in our regular booth, debating syrup distribution strategies like civilized women, while Lauralie kept our coffee topped off with the soothing consistency of someone who understood priorities.
Paisley had already been in full wilderness-commander mode—maps, highlighters, GPS coordinates spread across Evan’s booth like she was launching a small military operation. She’d laughed when Hartley teased her about it, but the laugh hadn’t quite reached her eyes, and when she thought nobody was looking, her expression had settled into something tighter. I’d noticed and filed it away under Paisley being Paisley. I hadn’t asked.
I’d signed up for the scavenger hunt on a whim. The prize money was real, and I wasn’t above wanting it. But my strategy had been casual, bordering on negligent. Wildflowers in the Pancake House parking lot. A few roadside pull-offs. A respectable little collection of low-point, common species.
Good enough.
Until last night.
Hartley had casually mentioned she’d racked up enough mid-tier finds to be competitive. Paisley hadn’t said much about her actual finds, but with the amount of planning she’d done, I figured she had to be sitting on something impressive.
And something in me—the stubborn, competitive, slightly unhinged part—slipped its leash.
You could win this.
You just have to stop being lazy.
So here I was. Extremely not lazy. On a ridge I couldn’t find on a map, chasing a flower that might only exist in an outdated blog post written by someone with better survival instincts than me.
The slope steepened. I grabbed a root and hauled myself up onto a narrow rock ledge jutting from the hillside like a shelf. Below me, the forest dropped away in a dizzying green plunge. The valley floor flickered through the trees, impossibly far down.
My stomach tightened.
For the record, I am not a hiker. Paisley is a hiker. Hartley is a planner. I’m the person who sleeps in, eats waffles, and texts things likeIf I’m not back by noon, send a search party as a joke.
Apparently, the universe does not appreciate irony.
The ledge narrowed. I pressed my back to the rock and sidestepped along it. One step. Two. Three. On the fourth, my boot hit loose scree.
Time snapped thin.
I went down hard. My right foot shot out, my ankle rolled with a sickening pop, and then gravity claimed me. I slid off the ledge—eight feet, maybe—hit the slope of loose rock below, and kept sliding.
My hands clawed for purchase. Leaves. Dirt. Nothing solid. A downed tree caught me across the ribs and stopped my fall with a violent jolt that punched the air from my lungs.
For a long second, I couldn’t breathe. Then pain bloomed in my ankle—hot, immediate, furious. I tried to rotate it.
White-hot spike.