Amelia shakes her head. ‘This is wrong. Scott and Brenda are the weakest.’
‘Excuse me,’ Brenda says, standing up straight. ‘There is nothing weak about me, young lady. If I’m not very light on my feet today, it’s because of this damn heat, and the shock of everything that’s gone on – but I am certainly not weak, and I am more than capable of dealing with this oaf.’ She nods her head towards Scott, who is staring at her open-mouthed.
Lucy can’t control her laughter. ‘Glad to have you back, Brenda. Thought we’d lost you.’ She gives Brenda a double thumbs up, then turns to Amelia. ‘Come on then, let’s go.’
‘Wait,’ James says. He puts a hand on her shoulder, and she automatically shrugs him off. She’s not OK with people touching her without permission. Not much with permission either, come to think of it. ‘I don’t really need to spend time on my own,’ he says. ‘I could just tag along with either of the groups—’
‘Big Brother is watching, Jamesy. He’s got some sort of plan.’ Scott stands up, testing his bad ankle. ‘Personally, I would also not describe myself as weak. So why don’t you girls run along, and we’ll see you later on when we get the next set of instructions . . . mmmm-k?’
Amelia’s face has turned bright red, and it’s not from sunburn. ‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘Save it, lady.’ He turns to Brenda. ‘What say you and me show these kids how it’s done, huh? I’m already thinking of a few things I’m going to ask for. The first being a top-up of this water bottle. Those cocktails were nice and all, but this water is something else. Don’cha think?’
Brenda shakes her head, but she’s smiling. Scott offers her his arm and she takes it, and the two of them shuffle off up the hill, in the direction their map had pointed them in.
‘Piss off then, James,’ Lucy says. ‘I’m starting to think this might be a race, and I’m not losing out to you or those two crazies.’ She tips her head towards Scott and Brenda, still close enough to have heard her, and Scott curls his spare arm around his back and gives her the finger.
James opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. He’s pale too, like Brenda, and he’s shaking ever so slightly.
Amelia is looking at him too. ‘James, are you—’
‘I’m fine.’ He cuts her off and turns away from them. They watch as he heads off up the path behind Scott and Brenda. He quickly gains on them, but before he reaches them, he turns left and starts to hike up an unmarked trail.
‘Right then,’ Lucy says. ‘Where’re we headed?’
Amelia says nothing. She shoulders her backpack and heads up the hill, following the same path as Brenda and Scott. Before long, the others are out of sight, and the two of them are at the brow of the hill. There’s a cluster of worn rectangular stones arranged in a square, piled up at different heights on each side. Bright green succulents poke out of the gaps, and a fluorescent moss covers most of the flat surfaces. They stop walking and glance around at this place they’ve stumbled across. There are more rows, more walls.
‘I think these are ruins,’ Amelia says, running a hand across one of the stones. ‘Small cottages, maybe. Or some kind of shelter, anyway. Looks like they’ve been abandoned for a very long time though.’
‘I did one of those haunted house things once, for a piece,’ Lucy says. ‘I had to accompany a B-lister from The Only Way Is Essex – who couldn’t stop screaming every time someone moved – and that couple who’re always on morning TV talking about their psychic experiences. Best five hundred quid I’ve ever made. In fact, I’d do it again for free, just to watch that reality TV dork shit his pants again.’ She laughs. ‘I’m sure this spooky wee place is fine though. But I’d rather not stick around. How far to the next stage, do you think?’
‘Hmm?’ Amelia hasn’t been paying attention. She taps her watch. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I just remembered . . . Scott mentioned he was going to message someone. Do you think he got through?’
‘Does it matter?’ Lucy shrugs, feeling a bit dejected that her funny anecdote has fallen on deaf ears. ‘We’re not with him, are we? They could be getting airlifted to safety as we speak . . . and we don’t have a phone.’
‘I think we’d notice if there was a helicopter coming in to land.’
‘S’pose so.’ She walks around the walls of the small building, peering over into the middle. Inside, the light is different. Darker, even though there’s no roof to block the sun. The walls on the inside are blackened, as though charred. She reaches a gap that was obviously once a door, but she doesn’t want to go in there. She’s not sure why, but there is something wrong with these buildings. These cottages or shelters or whatever they are. The energy is off-kilter. There’s a strange old-smoke smell that makes her feel sick. Or maybe she’s just tired and hungry, and fed up with this ‘adventure’. Whether the ruins are haunted or not, Amelia is not nearly as much fun as those TV people she’d hung out with.
‘Jeez,’ she says, breaking the silence. ‘Remind me never to accept another weird invitation again, will you? If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Look at Tiggy’ – she pauses, walking around to the next building – ‘she was definitely too good to be true.’
‘We don’t really know that. We don’t know if these projections are real – I mean, Tiggy told me about it all, because I couldn’t see them for myself, but I don’t know . . . she might’ve been lying. We don’t even know if that was really Giles down there in the water, do we? He was too far away to be sure.’
‘Lying about glassing a girl at a party, or lying about not doing it? Plus, you went down there to the boat with her. Didn’t you get a better look at him? Didn’t she?’
Amelia shakes her head. ‘They’d already moved him by the time we got to the bottom. And I don’t know about Tiggy. I can’t work her out. She looked back at me from the boat, but I don’t know if she was trying to communicate something or if she was still in shock . . .’
‘Right. Anyway, forget that. What does your watch say? Where are we going? I want to get away from these . . . things.’ She scowls at the blackened buildings. ‘They’re seriously giving me the creeps.’
Amelia taps her watch again. ‘Bad news.’ She looks Lucy in the eye. ‘It’s telling me we need to go inside this cottage.’
‘What?’ She feels her chest tighten. ‘Go inside? It’s barely got four walls. I just told you: I’m not going in there. I don’t like it. It feels weird. We don’t know what these things are, or what happened here.’
‘They’re just old cottages. What’s the big deal?’
‘What’s the big deal? You do it, then. I’m not doing it.’
‘Lucy . . .’ Amelia’s voice trails off as the familiar beep sounds, signalling that a projection is about to start.
Lucy’s tracker vibrates hard, as if someone is trying to drill into her skull. She screams in pain.
‘Go into the cottage, Lucy,’ the voice says in her ear. ‘It’s the only way.’