Chapter 3: The Stalker's Game
Lana ran until her lungs burned and her legs felt like they might give out beneath her. The mechanical sounds had faded behind her, but she couldn't shake the feeling that she was still being pursued. Every snap of a twig, every rustle of leaves seemed to herald the approach of her captors. She clutched Maya's backpack against her chest like a shield, the physical weight of it a reminder that she wasn't going insane—that the horrors she'd witnessed were real.
When she finally stopped running, she found herself in a part of the forest that looked different from where she'd been before. The trees here were younger, their trunks thinner and more widely spaced, allowing more light to filter through the canopy. But somehow this openness made her feel more exposed, more vulnerable, as if a thousand unseen eyes could be watching her from the shadows between the pines.
She pressed her back against the rough bark of the nearest tree and tried to catch her breath while scanning her surroundings for any sign of movement. The forest was quiet again, but it was the wrong kind of quiet—not peaceful, but expectant, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks.
Jenny's words echoed in her mind: They're breaking us. Piece by piece, day by day, until there's nothing left of who we used to be. The casual way those figures had discussed her classmates as subjects and success rates made her stomach churn. But it also made her angry, and anger was better than fear. Anger could be used.
She needed to find Cole Martinez. The figures had mentioned him specifically—something about him being "off-script" and showing resistance. If he was fighting back, if he was refusing to be broken down like the others, then maybe together they could figure out how to escape this nightmare.
But first, she needed to understand the rules of whatever game she'd been forced to play.
Lana opened Maya's backpack again and pulled out the journal, flipping through the entries more carefully this time. Now that she knew the journal was real—or at least, she hoped it was real and not another manipulation—she needed to extract every bit of useful information from Maya's observations.
Day 3 - They leave supplies, but never enough. Always just barely what you need to survive another day. It's like they want us hungry and desperate but not dead. David says they're studying us, seeing how we react under stress.
Day 5 - Found tripwires in three different locations today. Not meant to kill, just to hurt. To slow us down. David thinks they're herding us somewhere specific, controlling our movement without us realizing it.
Day 7 - The voices at night are getting closer. Sometimes I think I hear Mom calling my name, but I know it's not real. David broke down crying today when he thought he heard his little sister. They know exactly which buttons to push.
Lana felt a chill that had nothing to do with the forest air. They were using psychological warfare, exploiting the deepest emotional connections their victims had. How long before she started hearing her own mother's voice calling out to her from the darkness?
She was about to close the journal when she noticed something she'd missed before—tiny marks in the margins of several pages. At first glance they looked like random scratches or doodles, but when she looked more closely, she realized they formed a crude map. Maya had been tracking their movements, noting landmarks and dangerous areas.
According to the map, there was something marked with an X about half a mile north of where Lana estimated her current position to be. Maya had written a single word next to the X: "SAFE?"
It wasn't much, but it was better than wandering aimlessly through the forest. Lana oriented herself using the position of the sun, which was beginning to sink lower in the sky, and started walking north.
She hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards when she heard it—the unmistakable sound of footsteps matching her pace.
Lana stopped. The footsteps stopped.
She started walking again. The footsteps resumed, maintaining the same rhythm, the same distance.
Someone was following her, staying just far enough back to remain out of sight but close enough to keep track of her movements. The realization sent ice water through her veins, but she forced herself to keep walking at the same steady pace. Panic would only make her careless, and carelessness could get her killed.
She tried to listen more carefully to the footsteps, to glean some information about who—or what—was stalking her. The steps were too heavy to be another student, too deliberate to be an animal. They had the measured cadence of someone who was comfortable moving through the forest, someone who knew exactly where they were going.
One of her captors, then. But why were they following her instead of simply taking her? Were they waiting for something? Driving her toward a specific location?
Lana's mind raced through the possibilities. Maybe this was part of the psychological conditioning Jenny had described—keeping her in a constant state of fear and uncertainty until her mind cracked under the pressure. Or maybe they wanted to see where she would go, what choices she would make when she thought she was acting freely.
Either way, she wasn't going to make it easy for them.
The next time she came to a large tree, Lana ducked behind it and waited, pressing herself against the bark and holding her breath. The footsteps continued for a few more seconds, then stopped abruptly. She could hear her pursuer moving, trying to relocate her, but they seemed reluctant to get too close.
Interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to let her know she was being followed. Maybe she'd gained some small advantage by making them reveal themselves.
She waited for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, then carefully peered around the edge of the tree. She couldn't see anyone, but she could feel a presence somewhere nearby, watching and waiting just as she was.
Two could play this game.
Lana took a deep breath and sprinted away from the tree, not north toward Maya's marked safe spot but east, toward what looked like denser forest. She ran hard for about fifty yards, then ducked behind another large pine and listened.
Sure enough, the footsteps resumed, faster now, trying to close the distance she'd created. But they were also less careful, more hurried. She was forcing her stalker to react instead of act, and that gave her a psychological edge.
She repeated the maneuver twice more, each time changing direction unpredictably and using the brief moments when her pursuer was disoriented to study the forest around her. By the third sprint, she'd spotted what she was looking for—a game trail that led uphill toward a rocky outcropping where she might be able to get a better view of who was following her.
The climb was harder than she'd expected, especially while carrying Maya's backpack and trying to move quietly. Her legs burned from the earlier running, and the cut on her temple had started bleeding again. But she pushed through the discomfort, driven by the knowledge that understanding her enemy was the first step toward defeating them.
The rocky outcropping turned out to be a small cliff face, maybe fifteen feet high, with enough handholds that she could climb it without too much difficulty. From the top, she had a clear view back down the slope she'd just climbed, and more importantly, she could see the game trail she'd used to get there.
She didn't have to wait long.
A figure emerged from the tree line below, moving with the fluid grace of someone completely at home in the wilderness. They wore dark clothing that seemed to blend with the shadows, and their face was hidden behind what looked like a tactical mask—the kind she'd seen in military movies. They carried themselves like a soldier, alert and dangerous, but there was something else in their posture that she couldn't quite identify.
The figure stopped at the base of the cliff and looked up, as if they knew exactly where she was hiding. For a long moment, they simply stood there, and Lana had the disturbing feeling that they were studying her just as intently as she was studying them.
Then the figure raised one hand in what could have been a greeting or a threat, and spoke in a voice that was electronically distorted but unmistakably human:
"Impressive. Most subjects don't notice they're being tracked until much later in the process."
Lana's mouth went dry. They were talking to her directly now, abandoning any pretense of stealth. Why? What had changed?
"You're learning faster than we anticipated," the figure continued. "Adapting to the parameters of the exercise. That's good. It means you might actually survive what comes next."
Exercise. They were calling this an exercise, as if the terror and psychological torture were just another training drill.
"What do you want?" Lana called down, surprised by how steady her own voice sounded.
"Want?" The figure tilted their head as if considering the question. "We want to see what you're capable of. We want to push you to your limits and see what emerges on the other side. You've shown promise so far, Subject Three. But the real test is just beginning."
Subject Three. The same designation she'd heard the other figures use. They had numbers for all of them, reducing her classmates to data points in some twisted experiment.
"My name is Lana," she said, injecting as much defiance as she could into her voice. "Not Subject Three. And I'm not playing your sick games."
The figure's posture shifted slightly, and she thought she heard a sound that might have been laughter.
"Everyone plays the game, Lana. The only choice is whether you play to win or play to survive. So far, you've been playing to survive. But survival isn't enough anymore. The parameters have changed."
Before she could ask what that meant, the figure stepped backward into the tree line and vanished as suddenly as they'd appeared. Lana strained her eyes, looking for any sign of movement in the forest below, but it was as if her stalker had simply dissolved into the shadows.
She stayed on the rocky outcropping for another ten minutes, waiting to see if the figure would reappear, but the forest remained still. Finally, she climbed back down and resumed her journey toward the location marked on Maya's map.
But now she walked with the knowledge that she was no longer just being followed—she was being actively hunted by someone who knew the forest better than she did, someone who was treating her terror as entertainment and her survival as an experiment.
The sun was beginning to set when she finally reached the area Maya had marked as potentially safe. It turned out to be a small clearing dominated by a single enormous pine tree, its trunk so wide that it would take at least six people holding hands to encircle it. The tree was old, probably centuries old, and its massive root system had created a series of natural shelters and hiding places around its base.
But what drew Lana's attention wasn't the tree itself—it was what was hanging from one of its lower branches.
A rope. Thick and new, tied in a noose and hanging at exactly the right height for someone of her size to slip their head through if they stood on the exposed root just beneath it.
The message was clear: this was how she could end the game if she chose to. This was their offer of escape.
Lana's hands clenched into fists as rage flooded through her. They thought they could break her down, drive her to despair, make her so hopeless that she'd choose death over continuing to fight. They thought they could reduce her to just another data point in their sick experiment.
They were wrong.
She found a sharp rock and began sawing at the rope, her movements violent and determined. It took several minutes to cut through the thick fibers, but when the noose finally fell to the ground, she felt a surge of satisfaction that was almost electric.
"I'm not that easy to break," she said to the forest at large, knowing that somewhere out there, someone was probably watching and listening. "You want to see what I'm capable of? You're about to find out."
But as she spoke those defiant words, she heard a sound that made her blood run cold—the sharp crack of breaking wood, followed by a whistling noise that was moving fast and getting closer.
Lana threw herself to the side just as a massive log came swinging down from the canopy above, suspended on ropes and moving with enough force to crush bones. It missed her by inches, slamming into the ground where she'd been standing with a impact that shook the earth beneath her feet.
Before she could fully process what had happened, she heard another crack, then another. More logs were falling, turning the clearing into a deadly obstacle course of swinging timber and snapping ropes.
This wasn't random. This was deliberate, coordinated. Someone was up in the trees, controlling the trap, trying to drive her in a specific direction.
Lana dodged and weaved through the falling logs, her heart hammering against her ribs. She could see the pattern now—the logs were forcing her to move toward the eastern edge of the clearing, where the forest grew thick and dark.
She had two choices: let herself be herded like livestock toward whatever trap awaited her in the forest, or make a stand here in the clearing and face whatever was coming head-on.
The decision took less than a second.
Instead of running toward the forest, Lana dove toward the base of the enormous pine tree, where the root system created a natural fortress of wood and earth. She pressed her back against the trunk and looked up into the canopy, trying to spot whoever was controlling the trap.
There—a shadow moving among the branches about thirty feet up, too large and too deliberate to be anything but human. Her stalker had climbed the tree and was now directly above her, close enough that she could hear them breathing.
"Come down!" she shouted. "If you want to play games, let's play them face to face!"
The shadow stopped moving. For a long moment, the forest was completely silent except for the gentle creaking of the ropes that had held the logs.
Then, impossibly, the shadow began to descend.
They came down slowly, using the thick branches like a ladder, their movements controlled and confident. As they got closer, Lana could see more details—tactical clothing, military-style boots, and that same electronic mask that distorted their features into something inhuman.
But it was their size that shocked her most. This wasn't one of the adult figures she'd seen earlier. This person was smaller, closer to her own age and build. Another student? Or someone pretending to be a student?
The figure dropped the last few feet to the ground and landed in a crouch, then slowly straightened to their full height. They were maybe six feet away from her, close enough that she could see the rise and fall of their chest as they breathed.
"You wanted to see my face," the figure said, their voice still electronically distorted. "Are you sure you're ready for that?"
Lana's mouth was dry as dust, but she managed to nod.
The figure reached up and began to remove the mask, their movements deliberate and almost ceremonial. As the mask came away, Lana found herself looking at a face she recognized—angular features, dark hair, and eyes that held an intelligence she remembered from biology class.
Cole Martinez stood before her, his face expressionless, holding the tactical mask in one hand like a trophy.
"Hello, Lana," he said, his voice now clear and unfiltered. "I've been waiting for you to find me."