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CHAPTER 1

Carter Benson felt a horrible sense of déjà vu as he stood on the edge of the green and shadowy jungle. He was drenched, out of breath, and already starting to shiver.

How could this be happening again?

As he waited for Buzz, Vanessa, and Jane to catch up, he scanned the area for any clues about where they’d just landed. But something else caught his eye.

There, on a rocky point at the far end of the beach, was a girl. Dressed in dried grass, braided leaves, and some kind of leather or skin tunic, she looked unlike anyone Carter had ever seen before. As she stared back, he froze right to his spot. So much had happened in the past twelve hours, his brain didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Or of her.

Then again, everything that had happened in the last two weeks would have seemed impossible . . . two weeks ago. How they’d survived a shipwreck and thirteen days on a deserted South Pacific island, Carter wasn’t even sure anymore. But at least they’d thought it was over.

It wasn’t over.

“Carter?” Nine-year-old Jane came up alongside him. Buzz was there now, too. He and Carter were both eleven, but Carter always got everywhere first.

“HEY!” he shouted out to the girl.

“What is it?” asked their older sister Vanessa, the last to join the group.

Carter turned to all three of his siblings. “There’s someone—a girl—right there! Look!”

“Where?” Vanessa asked.

“Right there!”

Shouts were coming out of the woods now. Several of them, from different directions.

“What’s that?” Buzz asked. He and the girls turned toward the noise, but Carter kept his eyes on the girl.

She’d crouched down now, nearly out of sight. Before Carter could make any sense of it, she checked once over her shoulder, then stood up, quickly stepped to the edge of the point, and dove. A moment later, she’d disappeared beneath the choppy surface of the water.

Carter ran without thinking. He dug his feet into the sand, sprinting for the shore as fast as he could get there.

“Carter, stop!” Vanessa yelled after him. “We can’t split up!”

“What are you doing?!” Jane screamed.

If there had been time, his answer might have been, I don’t know. Or maybe more like, Following my gut. Out here in the wild, hesitation was not their friend. Sometimes you had to take chances just to survive.

And maybe this girl could help them.

Jane raced along the beach after Carter. Buzz and Vanessa were right behind.

So much had happened in the last two weeks, but Carter was still the same. Once he made up his mind about something, there was no stopping him. Already he had reached the water’s edge near the rocks and was sprinting right into the ocean. He never even looked back.

“What about the dinghy?” Buzz called as they ran.

“It’s tied off, right?” Vanessa said.

“Yeah, but—”

“Just come on!”

Vanessa was right. The boat was important, but not as important as sticking together. When Jane looked back, she could see the little yellow dinghy where Carter had secured it to a giant piece of driftwood on the dry sand. It would be fine there in the meantime.

And maybe Carter was right, too. There were people on this island—the shouts from the jungle, the girl Carter had seen. Maybe this was exactly the help they needed to survive, possibly even to find their parents, and to be rescued. All over again.

It was never supposed to happen like this. Not in a million years. The dinghy itself had been part of the last rescue. It came with the small airplane that had found them on a deserted rocky atoll Jane had dubbed “Nowhere Island.” After thirteen days of struggling for food, water, and shelter in that place, they’d been this close to going home again.

Instead, the nightmare had continued. A relentless current had swept them and the boat away from Nowhere Island, away from their parents, and away from any chance of rescue . . . to here.

Wherever here was.

“Carter, please!” Vanessa screamed, but it was no good. He swam away from them, heading around the rocky point with no sign of slowing down.

It was beyond frustrating. Her younger brother was made of guts and stubbornness, but at thirteen, Vanessa was the oldest. That meant it was her responsibility to keep everyone together. No matter what.

“I’m going to kill him!” Vanessa said. “Seriously. How could he just run like that?”

Her eyes were on the shoreline now, searching for some way to cut him off. Should they climb up onto the rocky point? Head straight into the ocean?

The beach had seemed clear enough a moment ago, but with the next step, Vanessa felt the ground shift. Her foot seemed to slip right through the sand. There was a crackle of dead wood, a splitting sound, and then nothing at all beneath her.

The fall barely even registered—not until she hit the bottom of a sandy pit with a jarring thud. Small sticks and a shower of dirt clods rained over her head.

Her mind scrambled, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Was she hurt? Could she stand up?

“Vanessa!”

Jane’s and Buzz’s heads both appeared up around the top edge of the pit. They lay on their stomachs reaching for her, but she was too far down. They’d never be able to get to her. Not on their own.

“Can you get out?” Buzz asked.

Vanessa stood slowly, testing her legs to make sure she hadn’t sprained anything. She tried jumping—once, twice, three times—but it was no good. A long night of drifting in the dinghy had left her legs wobbly. Even with six years of gymnastics, she couldn’t find the spring she needed. The pit was too deep, its walls too far apart to shimmy up. The sides only cascaded with loose dirt and sand when she tried.

“Why is this hole even here?” Jane asked in a shaky voice.

“I don’t know!” Vanessa answered. The possibilities were too scary to think about, and they didn’t have time to spare. “Just go look for a vine!”

If there was one thing they had going for them, it was that they knew something about the jungle. Maybe not this jungle, but there would be vines, anyway. Just like on Nowhere Island.

“Hurry!” she said.

Vanessa could hear the panic in her own voice. She didn’t want to scare Buzz or Jane, but the looks on their faces said everything. They were already terrified.

“What if—” Buzz started to say.

“Just go!” Vanessa yelled. “And stay together!”

Buzz headed into the woods with Jane, running as fast as he could.

Before all of this, “adventure” had meant something he did on the couch with a game controller in his hand. But not anymore. Now the jungle was a familiar mix of humidity, swarming mosquitoes, and the sound of a million other bugs and birds.

His eyes had grown keen on Nowhere Island, too. Within a moment of scanning, he spotted bamboo, firewood, and the kind of long ropy vines he’d been hoping to find. They hung in a thick cluster just past the tree line.

“What was that?” Jane asked suddenly.

Buzz whirled around. “What was what?”

“I thought I heard something moving around,” Jane said.

The shouting from the woods had gone quiet now. Buzz wasn’t even sure which was scarier—the shouting or the silence. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered more than getting Vanessa out of that pit and finding Carter.

“Let’s just get this done and get out of here,” he said. He wiped his sweaty hands on his tattered shorts. Then he took hold of a low-hanging vine and started to pull.

“Buzz?” Jane said.

“Help me!” he said, putting all of his weight on the vine to free it from the branches overhead. As he did, the sunlight through the canopy made him squint. He thought he saw a shadow moving up there, but it was hard to tell.

“One, two, three!” he said, and heaved again. The vine snapped, and Buzz fell back, rolling into the brush.

“Jane, help me!” he said again, with a rush of angry impatience. “Give me a hand!”

But Jane didn’t answer.

“Jane?” he said. Buzz scrambled onto his knees and spun around, but she wasn’t there. She was just . . . gone.

“Jane!”

For a moment, all Buzz could hear was his own heavy breathing. Then, a soft rustling sound. It came from the brush, deeper in the jungle. As he looked around, he saw a small group, moving almost silently through the woods. They were kids, he realized, not much bigger than Jane herself. And even though he couldn’t see his little sister, he knew they had her. There was no other explanation.

Buzz clamped a hand over his own mouth to keep from shouting out. That wouldn’t help. But neither would losing track of Jane.

Pulse pounding in his ears, he kept to a low crouch. His eyes locked onto the group as they moved farther into the jungle’s shadows. Then, stepping lightly, he started following from a distance and, at the same time, tried to figure out what in the world he was supposed to do next.

“BUZZ! JANE!” Vanessa screamed for what felt like the hundredth time. Where were they?

Everything had changed so fast. How had they even gotten into this mess?

It was a question she knew the answer to, but that didn’t make it easy to accept.

Was it really just a day ago that the rescue plane carrying their parents had landed off the shore of Nowhere Island? Yes, it was. It had felt like some kind of miracle at the time, and the happiest moment of Vanessa’s life.

But their luck hadn’t lasted long. The rescue plane itself was too small to carry everyone. None of the family wanted to split up after everything they’d been through, so all six had agreed to wait on Nowhere Island while the crew went for a larger chopper.