Nightfall ✓

Chapter 6

"Yeah, I guess we need to rest now." Zack found a nice, big rock and a fallen tree whose trunk could be used as a bench, and we sat down in a circle. "It's so cold. I wish we could build a fire." He shivered.

"I have a matchbox," I said and passed it to him along with a piece of paper. He burnt the paper and put it on dead, wet leaves. The fire burnt for a good ten seconds before dying out. He sighed.

Liam played with a twig, twisting it in his hands. "I'm sorry, guys. Maybe we shouldn't have come on this trip. It's turned into a nightmare."

"It's okay. We'll find a way out of it," I said. He smiled gratefully.

"No, actually, it's totally not okay," Ash interrupted. "We're sitting in a dark forest at nightfall, totally drenched, with no fire to warm us and no way to get out, with no idea where the heck we are at this moment, and you think that is okay, Hazel? It's totally Liam's fault and you're telling him that it's okay?"

Liam froze, staring at her quietly with the twig unmoving in his hand.

"It's no one's fault and everyone's fault," I said softly. Her anger was making me uneasy.

"No, it's —"

Zack hugged her and rested his chin on her head. "Ash, relax, okay?" She nestled her head in the crook of his neck. I heard her mumble something like 'I'm going to sleep' and smiled to myself, fingering my locket, wishing I had someone to hold me like that.

When Ash was well asleep on Zack's shoulder, Liam turned to me and said, "Tell me it's not my fault."

"Yeah, it's not."

He looked at Zack, who agreed. "Not your fault. Ash is just scared, I think."

"She's not scared," Liam fumed. "She loves to blame people, especially me."

"Zack, you should turn that torch off," I said, looking at the torch that was now blinking at the rate of a thousand blinks per second. "We would need it later."

"Yeah," he said and turned it off. "Okay, now let's stop wasting our time. Think of what we should do now, keep walking in one particular direction, or roam about till we find the trail?"

"We can't go around in circles till we find the trail," I reasoned.

"But we can't walk straight in a forest either," Liam said.

"Yeah...I've heard that before. But I've always wondered why."

"I read about it somewhere," he said. "Scientists blindfolded people and asked them to walk straight in a desert or on a beach. The people couldn't walk straight. In another experiment, people were made to walk straight in a forest in different weathers. Without the blindfolds, obviously. It was found that when it was sunny, people could walk straight, but in cloudy or rainy weather, they couldn't. So it was concluded that people need reference points to walk straight. Which we definitely don't have."

"You used the phrase 'walk straight' precisely five times," Zack told him.

I looked around and found a nice tree. Liam's small speech had given me an idea. If we didn't have reference points, we could look for reference points. "Could you hold the torch for me, Liam? I want to climb that tree."

"Huh? Why?"

"Just do it."

So he stood under the tree and shone the torch upward, while I climbed nimbly— slipping and sliding over wet branches and at one point almost falling off—with my binoculars around my neck. I was used to climbing trees; it was what Sana and I used to do all the time back home. I felt a pang of nostalgia.