Page 107 of Hide And Seek

“Probably just reeds,” Simon muttered.

“Yeah,” Garrett said. “Or a rock.”

Logan shifted, bracing himself as he leaned forward. “Hang on,” he shouted back to us. “I think I’ve caught on something.”

He crouched carefully, one hand gripping the edge of the raft as he reached down into the water with the other to feel around.

“What’s going on?” Jesse shouted to him.

“I don’t know. It’s weird,” Logan called back. “It’s like…” He paused, fingers moving beneath the surface. “There’s something stretched across here. Some kind of netting, maybe? And… huh, looks like there’s a rope too.”

He grabbed hold of the rope and gave it a testing tug.

Next to me, Jasmine craned her neck, frowning. “What the—”

The world split open before she could finish.

The explosion hit so fast it didn’t feel real at first. Just a blinding flash and a deafening crack that knocked the air out of my lungs.

Heat slammed into us an instant later.

The raft disappeared, and Logan went with it. One second he was there, crouched over the water, and the next, there was nothing but fire, smoke, and a violent surge of spray as the river swallowed the blast.

Someone screamed.

The sound echoed, distorted, half drowned out by the ringing in my ears. Bits of debris rained down around us, splashing into the water and clattering against the rocks on the edge of the riverbank.

Where the raft had been, there was only churning current and drifting fragments.

No body.

No sign of Logan at all.

He was just… gone.

22

For a long,stretched-out moment, no one made a sound.

It was like the blast had knocked the noise clean out of us. People just stood there, frozen where they were, staring at the river as if their brains were still trying to catch up to what their eyes had just seen. A few mouths hung slightly open, breaths shallow and uneven, but nothing came out. No shouting. No running. Just this unnatural stillness, like if we didn’t move, didn’t react, we could somehow pretend it hadn’t actually happened.

Smoke curled up from the river where the raft had been, the water still churning. My gaze stayed fixed on the empty space, trying to force Logan back into existence.

A sound tore through the haze. Someone was finally screaming.

It took me a second to realize it wasn’t just one person. It was overlapping, jagged, breaking in different places.

“Logan?”

I didn’t know who said it. The name drifted out over the water, like he might still answer if we just gave him a second.A few people edged forward, peering into the river like they expected to see him surface at any second now. But there was nothing. Just ripples and bits of debris turning lazily in the current.

“What the fuck was that?” someone demanded, voice cracking. “What happened?”

“He’s in the water,” another voice insisted. “He has to be. He just got thrown off when it blew up.”

But even as they said it, I could tell they didn’t believe it. Because there was nowhere Logan could’ve gone. No shape beneath the surface. No sign of someone fighting to come up for air. The river just kept moving, carrying everything away like it meant nothing.

My stomach lurched.