Framed

Sixteen, Part Two.

The drive took about as long as Ellie had predicted it to be, two hours passing through brush and wildfire singed trees, through children's campgrounds and boulder formations. The trees formed a sort of ceiling above the road as the drivers passed by, with the falling autumn leaves giving the teens in a van some semblance of shade most of the way through.

"I want pizza." Camila said abruptly, about an hour into the ride. She was seated in the back, closest to the trunk, next to Lauren and Zayn. Harry and Mani sat in the middle, and Ellie drove. Thanks to a venti espresso macchiato, she was now wide awake and able to drive through the countryside, occasionally cursing Siri out for her slow speech, which caused a few wrong turns on Ellie's part.

"What happened to the snacks that Zayn packed?" Ellie asked from the driver's seat, relishing the fact that she had insistently objected to have anyone in the front seat with her. It allowed her to actually savor the little sense of silence and peace that she had with the noisy, but endearing group. Not to mention, when someone was in the front seat with her, she didn't want them to put a hand to her face and play the "I'm Not Touching You" trick that annoying siblings usually do. Considering the present company she had at the moment, she didn't put it below them to attempt any practical jokes on anyone in the car.

"She ate those snacks." Lauren told Ellie from the back. "Except for the pumpkin seeds, which Zee and I are splitting up right now."

"I want pizza." Camila repeated.

"How much did you eat?" Harry asked from the middle of the car, not looking at the back of the car, where Lauren and Zayn were literally dividing the seeds in half, the same way one would divide cookies.

If someone listened closely, one could hear Zayn muttering in a barely audible register, "One for me, one for Laur, one for me..."

"She ate three bags of chips and the remainder of the pack of Oreos that was in Ally's pantry." Lauren informed them from the back, her eyes still vigilantly watching Zayn allocate their seeds between each of the plastic snack baggies they were holding.

"No pizza." Ellie decided. "It's not worth a stop, at least not now, and there's no pizza here anyways, we're in the middle of the damn forest."

Camila sighed morosely, and curled into her corner of the back area to try to take a nap.

-

The location that Dinah gave them was only about fifteen minutes away from Julian, not far from where Lauren and Camila had spent their first date, staring up at the stars, making smores. Lauren opened up the window in the back of the van, taking in the crisp and cold air of the countryside.

They drove up the hill that led them through the city, passed the lake and the local graveyard, with all the passengers looking at the apple orchards that just seemed to grow in number as they went closer and closer to their destination. There wasn't any fruit on the trees, and a light confetti of snowflakes were scattered on the ground, gliding down slowly from the clouds.

Dinah's cabin was next to a small, currently closed kiosk next to one of the smaller apple orchards, her only way guiding her out of the area being the dirt road that led to the city, the one that Ellie and the others had just used to get to her.

There was a light on in the small cabin, looking more like candlelight than electricity, although the cabin had access to it. The power lines lacked in number, but they were there, camouflaged among the apples and pines.

"Should we do this?" Harry asked nervously. "What if this is some sort of lure or bait or something? We could literally be sitting ducks right now."

Lauren, who was chewing on her half of the seeds she had been given, put a reassuring hand on his shoulder from where she was sitting, and felt her friend's shoulder shaking.

"We'll be okay. I have some things in the trunk that we can take, if you feel we need them." Lauren takes time to enunciate every word, fully aware of what she's suggesting.

Harry nods anxiously, and the decision is made for her.

-

"You're an idiot." Ellie tells her as Lauren puts a Swiss army knife and a taser into her hands. "You're a person of interest for a set or murders, and you've put weapons in MY car?"

"Ally told me to, don't shoot the messenger." Lauren said, flapping her hands up in mock surrender. "We're already idiotic enough to be going her in the first place, we might as well be a bit smart about it and take some things to defend ourselves."

"But still -" Ellie stopped speaking once she heard the sound of a new pair of feet stepping on the dirt road, the rocks and snow crunching underneath the pair of boots.

"Mani?"

Mani turned around from the trunk, where she had been grabbing a canister of pepper spray. When she saw the tall Tongan girl, she let the canister fall in the snow, only staying in its spot due to the ice, and ran up to her.

Dinah had her arms held out, hoping for a sort of embrace, but Mani stopped. "No hug for me?" Dinah asked sadly, lips forming a sort of pout, as if she deserved a hug after going missing for days.

"You deserve a slap to the face more than anything." Mani's expression steeled itself up, the softness in her eyes disappearing. "We thought you were dead, or working with the killer!"

"She wasn't." a warm, fireplace like voice says from the darkened alcove of trees, while a dart filled with some sort of liquid is shot into Dinah's leg.

Dinah falls, while two people step out from the shadows of the pines.