Someone started egging people on, and that meant someone else demanded the bar be lowered.
Down it went, lower and lower, and fewer and fewer people could clear it.
Eventually even Daisy hit her limit. Her legs were simply too long—at that height, there was no way through without cheating. She could have used gravity to drag herself under, but that would have ruined the point entirely.
With everyone well-fed and full of energy, the group moved on to music. Audrey Nathan, Coulson's cellist girlfriend, turned out to be the most musically gifted among them. Coulson spent so much time impersonating a middle-school principal that he and Audrey naturally had something in common: both could actually play instruments. Add Daisy's voice—which had no business sounding that good—and the three of them gave an impromptu beachside concert that ran well past midnight before anyone thought about sleep.
Nobody was roughing it tonight. The beach had atmosphere, sure, but why sleep in a tent when there was a perfectly good aircraft ten minutes' walk away? They kicked the fire out, did a sweep, and filed back aboard one by one.
Those with partners found their partners. Those without lay alone with their thoughts. Through her enhanced hearing, Daisy caught muffled sounds from several cabins. And then—barely there, but unmistakable—she thought she heard Maki's voice mingling with Elektra's.
She switched her super-hearing off immediately. Eavesdropping at a time like this was just rude.
With no one watching, she more or less dragged Hill into her own room.
Having switched off her super-hearing and being eagerly occupied with mischief of her own, she didn't notice a handful of troublemakers huddled in another cabin, deep in conspiracy.
"Peter, you actually saw someone out there today? That can't be right." Lorna felt like her palms were sweating. She had both arms wrapped around Mary Jane, the two of them pressed together as if something were lurking just around the corner, watching them—while her heart hammered with the thrill of it anyway. Terrified and excited at the same time. A very contradictory feeling.
The other girls were much the same. Seven of them total: the Girl Detective Squad, Harry, and Cloak and Dagger—all crammed into Harry and Peter's cabin to hear Peter describe what he'd glimpsed in the trees that afternoon.
"I mean it. Something felt off, so I looked back without really thinking—and there was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old, peeking out from behind one of those big trees. The kind you'd need two people to get their arms around."
His delivery was suitably ominous. The cabin's air conditioning was cranked high, and every last one of them shivered.
For emphasis, he turned to Harry. "Right? You saw it too?"
Harry scratched his head in a distinctly non-aristocratic way. Honestly, he wasn't entirely sure the thing he'd glimpsed for half a second had been a small figure rather than just a shadow shifting in the wind.
The lot of them were rattled half to death—even Lorna and Dagger, both with real abilities, had gone pale. The only one who seemed remotely unbothered was Cloak, Daisy's distant pseudo-relative. Someone who bridged the Dark Dimension and Earth on a daily basis had a considerably higher tolerance for things that went bump in the night. If there was a ghost out there, he'd just grab it and chuck it into the Dark Dimension to give Dormammu a fright.
His composure steadied the group. The bravado kicked back in quickly enough, and they agreed: go check the trees. If anything actually strange was out there, they'd come back and tell the adults.
They dressed quietly, popped the hatch via Lorna's hacking, and slipped down to the beach.
Both Lorna and Harry had guns. After a quick discussion, Harry took point—he was the boy, after all, and someone had to walk in front—while Lorna brought up the rear under the highly reasonable banner of "watching their backs."
Peter carried a baseball bat up front alongside Harry. Mary Jane clutched her camera with a white-knuckle grip, as if fully intending to snap the close-up of her life the moment anything leaped out.
The night was dark. A gentle wind stirred the leaves with a constant low rustle, and the moonlight was thin. As they left the beach and stepped into the trees, visibility dropped sharply, and their pace slowed almost on its own.
Fear was real. An unnameable pressure settled over all of them, knees faintly unsteady—but no one admitted anything, and everyone was trying very hard to look like they weren't scared.
"What was that?" The words were barely out of Harry's mouth when a rapid set of footsteps broke the silence, somewhere in the dark surrounding them—deliberate, rhythmic. Tap tap tap. Something circling.
Whatever it was didn't care about being heard. The sound moved front to back, then back to front, but no matter which direction they looked, nothing was there.
"It might be underground." Peter kept his voice low. "Did anyone notice? There's a lot of sand around here."
Dagger didn't hide her abilities. Light bloomed across her palms and she used it to light the way. The two boys up front felt the glow at their backs and visibly relaxed.
Lorna had picked up enough from living around agents to know this was a terrible idea—a bright beacon in the dark was a beacon. But she was genuinely frightened, and she wasn't going to say anything.
Following the daylight markers Peter had left, they reached the spot.
"Over there, a bit to the left. I was right here when I saw it." He pointed to a large tree.
"Ha!" Dagger snapped her wrist and flung a Light Dagger at the trunk. Her aim was solid. The blade buried itself in the bark and cast a clean circle of white light several meters wide.
"Nothing weird here. I say we head back..." Harry said, working very hard to sound casual.
He'd barely finished the sentence when he registered the looks on all their faces—horror, directed at the tree. He spun.
A boy stood behind it. Bowl-cut hair. A green striped checkered shirt. Brown shorts. Five years old, maybe six.
Staring right at them.
"That's impossible—Daisy said there was nobody else on this island!" Lorna had an almost irrational faith in Daisy's competence. In her mind, Daisy could solve anything.
Not that she needed to say it. The others were rattled for the same reason. The adults had swept the island that afternoon and found zero signs of human activity. How had a child who looked no older than five or six survived here alone?
Sharp as they all were, they stepped back as one. Cloak and Dagger—with powers to call on—moved to the front.
"Doesn't feel like an extradimensional creature." Cloak couldn't sense anything from another dimension coming off the boy. He didn't lower his guard.
"Doesn't feel like a normal human either..." Lorna's magnetism was basic—still a work in progress—but even so, she could feel that this child's magnetic field was nothing like a person's.
There was nothing to latch onto, nothing to pull. In her magnetic sense, he registered like rock. Or sand.
As if reading their fear, the bowl-cut boy broke into the most guileless smile imaginable.
He stepped slowly out from behind the tree.
"Are you here to play with me?"
That single line—lifted straight from every horror movie ever made—sent a full-body shudder through the group.
"What the hell is this thing?" Jessica swore, though she lacked the nerve to actually step forward.
They backed away one pace. The boy advanced two, emerging completely from the shadows. The Light Dagger still glowed in the bark above.
In that cold white light, the boy's face was a deathly, waxen pale.