Shadowed Eden by Katie Clark

and everything went quiet.
    “What’s going on?” Avery leaned toward the front. “Are we breaking down?”
    Luca gulped and angled himself toward the group. “It looks like we’re running out of gas.”
    Bradley’s expression exploded with anger. “What? We had a full tank!”
    “The gauge has been dropping since we began,” Sam explained. “There is a leak.”
    The van shuddered again and died.
    Everyone moaned.
    Tasha began to cry, and Luca glanced at June. Hopefully she wouldn’t break down again.
    She frowned but seemed to be in control of herself.
    “We’re farther out,” Avery said. “Can we use the radio to call for help?”
    Sam didn’t look too confident with that plan, but he agreed to try.
    “Driver one, can you read?”
    Static.
    “Can anyone hear me? We are stranded.”
    Nothing.
    Sam sighed and tried one last time, this time speaking his own language, but no one answered.
    Luca closed his eyes and lay his head back, but then he remembered something. He spun toward the group. “Benny, give me your smart phone.”
    Benny frowned but begrudgingly passed it up.
    Luca powered it up and waited for everything to load. “There’s no signal.”
    “I could have told you that,” Benny said.
    “When we were in the jungle you said you had signal.” Luca worked to keep his impatience from showing.
    “Yeah, in the jungle. There’s no signal once I get in the sand.”
    The jungle. Great.
    Luca met Avery’s gaze, and he watched the excitement of getting away melt into defeat.
    He pushed open his door and began to climb out. “It looks like we have to walk back.”

13
    Avery
    The sun beat down on Avery’s head as she walked. It was a relentless rhythm of thump, thump, thump . Her feet slid with every step, making her legs work extra hard to make it back to the jungle, and her thighs and lungs burned. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her mouth. She needed water. They all did. How could a mile take so long to walk?
    It was a hundred times worse with Erin's predictions running through Avery's head. Who told Erin they wouldn't be leaving? And was this person keeping them trapped?
    The driver had said the gas lines had a leak. It was almost like someone had sabotaged them, cutting the lines to keep them here.
    Avery shuddered.
    Luca walked ahead of her. He carried the bag with the bottled water, but she wouldn’t ask him to stop and get her one, not until they got back.
    “Where are we going to sleep?” Leave it to Benny to ask a question like that.
    Avery looked around and had to admit it was a legitimate concern. Hiking back and forth to the van didn’t sound very appealing, but neither did sleeping in the open. “I wonder if we could make shelters somehow.”
    “Out of what?” Bradley looked at her like she was just as crazy as Erin.
    Avery shot him a look. “Sticks and leaves. Anything. We have all day and nothing to do.”
    Bradley shook his head. “I’m not sitting around here anymore.”
    The finality in his words hung in the air and no one spoke for a few minutes.
    Finally Luca chimed in. “What do you mean?”
    “I’m walking. I’ll load up with water, then I’m going in search of the village. I’m good with directions. If I can’t find anything after a couple of hours, I’ll come back.”
    “You’re going out there alone?” That sounded like the worse plan ever to Avery.
    “We could go, too,” Tasha said.
    Bradley laughed. “No thanks. We don’t need any girls to take care of.”
    “Hey!” Tasha’s nostrils flared and she glared at him.
    “No, he’s right.” It was the first time Erin had addressed them all day. “The girls don’t need to go off with the boys alone. The girls will stay here.”
    No one argued with her, probably out of habit.
    “It’s better to go in groups of three,” Luca said. “You need someone else.”
    Two of the others stepped forward, leaving Luca, Benny, and David with the girls.
    “Let’s get back to the tree