Autumn tossed Riley a rock she'd hovered up to the treehouse. "Try that."
"Should be easy enough." Riley felt the rock in her hand, its weight, how it was cold and slightly slick with rainwater. She looked at the target Autumn had pinned mid-air - a few twigs, roughly arranged to look like a basketball hoop. Too far for Riley to throw, but far enough to displace it there.
"You got this." Autumn reassured her, hovering halfway between the improvised hoop and the treehouse platform. Riley closed her eyes, pictured the two places, and the strange energy of teleportation that always flowed through her before the universe shifted didn't stay inside her - it pooled into the stone in her hand, and with a soft pop, it materialised over the twig hoop.
"I think I got it down."
"Good." Autumn hovered closer to the rock face, held out both her hands and looked like she was yanking on an unseen handle. Cracks formed in the cliff, and with a little more effort, a boulder the size of a travel suitcase dislodged from the wall and hovered next to Autumn. "Try this one."
"Whoa. You can just... do that?"
"I'm very powerful." Autumn smirked, not elaborating at all. "Come on, try to teleport it."
Riley nodded and did the same thing again - picture the rock, picture the place where it's supposed to go, now swap them around - she could feel her body wanting to do it, feel the energy coalescing and emanating from her - but it wasn't enough. The rock didn't move.
"That's... too big. Or too heavy" she said and wiped a drop of sweat off her brow.
"No biggie." Autumn said and clapped her hands together, the rock splitting in two. "Try half."
That worked, if with considerable effort. The rock fell through the hoop onto the forest floor. "That felt... different."
"Try the other half?" Autumn nodded at the other side of the boulder, still floating beside her. "Just trying to see something."
Riley focused again, and displaced the second rock successfully. Her hands tingled. "Weird. It was..."
"Easier?" Autumn asked and hovered closer. Riley nodded, massaging her hand. "How it worked for me too. You need to train your power, but it gets easier quickly."
"I gotta write all this down. And ask Abby. She's teleported a lot more than me, she should have.. also noticed that."
"Where is your log?" Autumn asked and peeked inside her treehouse. It wasn't on the table.
"Probably left it at breakfast." She hopped down the platform and grabbed onto the rope ladder - she'd gotten the hang of that now.
Riley and Autumn opened the door to Sadie's treehouse. She was sitting at the table, a steaming mug of tea in her hand. It was boiling in the cup. Before her, Riley's notebook, closed. Marigold sat beside her, JP was reading a French book on the couch in the corner.
"Riley." She began, not smiling. There was something in her eyes - anger? Disappointment? Sadness?
"Sadie." Riley said and approached to grab the notebook. "Everything all right?"
Sadie snatched the book away before Riley could take it. "What is this?"
"It's my log. I told you-"
"What is the first rule of camp?" Sadie interrupted her. Riley had to think, a moment longer than Sadie liked. "It's that we don't use our powers to hurt people."
"I don't know what you're-"
Sadie flipped to one of the pages. The middle spread that had all the matrix of powers and how they could be combined. The one where Riley had listed all the ways they could be used offensively. "You wanna explain this one?"
"I- it's just notes, I-"
"Sadie." She read out loud. "Thermokinesis, super strength. Fireballs? Probably the strongest front line out of all of us."
"You don't understand, this-" Riley tried to plead, but Sadie held up a hand and kept reading.
"Autumn." Riley glanced at her. "Can create null fields void of any matter. Stable, infinite vacuum. Could suffocate someone." She snapped the book shut with a loud clap. "How dare you."
"How dare I what?" Riley felt her face growing hot. "Take notes? Try to understand what we can do?"
"Plan ways to hurt people!" Sadie slammed the notebook down on the table. Her tea was now boiling violently in the mug. "We're not weapons, Riley. We're not soldiers."
"I never said we were!" Riley shot back. "But what happens when someone comes for us? When they find us? Are we just supposed to sit here and hope they'll be nice?"
Autumn stepped forward. "Riley-"
"No, let her finish." Sadie's voice was dangerously quiet. "I want to hear exactly what she thinks is going to happen."
"USGS is already here." Riley gestured towards the monument. "And they're not looking for earthquakes, are they? Something is going on. Something big enough that the government is involved."
"You know they're in Keystone. That's all. There's no connection between us, and, and- and the mountain, and-"
"Listen to yourself!" Riley cried out. "Of course they're here because of us! It's cause and effect, or do you really think they're here for soil samples?"
"She's got a point." Autumn said. "This whole thing is fishy."
The door swung open. Abby and Jacob burst in, out of breath, sweaty, disheveled. "Sadie!" Abby yelled. "We need to have a camp meeting. Right now." Marigold followed behind them.
"What happened?" Sadie asked, her anger at Riley momentarily forgotten as she took in Abby and Jacob's panicked state.
"The cabin-" Jacob started, but had to catch his breath. "The first cabin. On the clearing. There's a... there's a tunnel. Behind the wall."
Sadie's face went completely blank. "What were you doing in the cabin?"
"We followed tracks in the snow," Abby explained. "Someone had been there, and-"
"And you didn't think to tell me first?" Sadie's voice was sharp.
"Wh- no, we were going to investigate, and then, maybe-"
"You shouldn't have gone there. The cabin's off limits." She quickly said.
"What? We're just storing tools and materials in there, that's hardly-"
Something clicked in Abby's head.
"It was you, wasn't it?" She asked. Everyone turned to look at her. "You went to the cabin. You knew about the tunnel."
The room went silent. Riley looked between Sadie and Jacob, trying to process what she'd just heard. Autumn had drifted closer to the ground, her usual perfect control slipping slightly.
"The Hall of Records," Sadie finally said, deflating slightly. "It wasn't supposed to be found."
"You knew about it?" Marigold asked, her eyes wide.
Jacob shot back. "You knew about the hidden tunnel that leads to a creepy hall of carved president faces that fucking move?"
"Of course she knew," Riley said, the pieces suddenly clicking into place. "That's why you built the treehouses. Why we're here specifically. It wasn't just about being close to the monument - you needed to be near that tunnel."
Sadie's shoulders slumped. "It was supposed to be a last resort. Somewhere to hide if we were ever discovered. Jesse and I found it when we first came here."
"And you didn't think to mention this to any of us?" Autumn's voice was quiet but intense. "After everything we've shared?"
"I was trying to protect you!" Sadie snapped. "The less you knew about it, the safer you'd be!"
"Like hell!" Riley grabbed her notebook off the table. "You just got done lecturing me about planning for the worst, about how we're not soldiers - but you've had an escape tunnel ready this whole time!"
"That's different-"
"How?" Riley demanded. "How is it different? Because you decided it was necessary? Because you're in charge?"
"Because I've seen what happens when we fight back!" Sadie shouted, and the temperature in the room suddenly spiked. Her mug of tea exploded, sending scalding liquid everywhere. "Freya's in jail, Jesse is rotting god knows where! I've seen what they do to people like us when we resist!"
Another silence fell over the room, broken only by the sound of dripping tea and Marigold's occasional sniffles.
"The faces moved," Abby said quietly. "When I tried to teleport us out, they... they turned to look at us."
"That's impossible" Sadie replied quickly. "They're solid granite."
"And yet." Jacob said. "They moved. Roosevelt turned 32 degrees, Washington 39-"
"I think you owe us an explanation, Sadie." Autumn interrupted him. "The truth. All of it."
She sighed and picked up the shards of her tea mug. "Fine." The tea spill was seeping into the wood of the table. Sadie watched it intently. "I came here four years ago. That much you know. The cabin was already here. It was old, broken down, and I tried fixing it as best as I could. I needed somewhere to sleep." She heated up the tip of her finger and idly burned little doodles into the surface of the table. "The tunnel was already there. Must've been dug when they started the monument. I didn't go inside at first. Only when Eric showed up in '09 I tried expanding the cabin a little bit, moved some things into the tunnel." She got one of the polaroids off the wall, the first in the series. A picture of Eric and a much younger Sadie, with longer hair, outside of the cabin, with the president's faces in the background.
"Eric?" Riley asked. "Who's that?"
"First one to join me. He... didn't stay long. He just needed a place to hide for a while." She wiped her palm over the table, the wood heating up to evaporate the spilled tea. "He had powers too. Could turn invisible. Sometimes."
"So what happened?"
"He left. Just after a few months. But he knew Jesse, sent her here when she ran away from home. Together, we found the hall of records. Built the first treehouses. Until she... you know."
"Okay? What's that got to do with-" Autumn started, but Sadie kept talking.
"She mapped the hall. At the far end there's another tunnel, leading all the way behind the presidents' faces. I've... never been."
"Why not?" Marigold sniffled. "That'd be, like, the first thing I'd check out."
Sadie shook her head gently. "It felt wrong. It didn't want me to be there."
"One thing I don't get..." JP asked, looking up from his book. "Why stay here at all? Why build the camp here, of all places?"
"It's... important to me. The mountain." She shook her head. "I can't explain it."
"I say we explore it." Riley said and got up, snatching her logbook before Sadie could take it again. "If we stick together, we can-"
"No."
"Wh- come on, Sadie. There's clearly something there, something so important that the US government is sending their entire geological team to Nowhere, South Dakota."
"It's dangerous."
"It's only dangerous if they find whatever is in there before us." Autumn chimed in. "I say we do it."
"Abby? Jake?" Sadie sighed and massaged her temples.
"If... if Riley goes, I'm going."
Against their better judgment, the Mount Rushmore Superhero Camp squeezed through the opening in the back of the cabin and into the tunnel. Jacob was leading them, with a flashlight he'd taken from his treehouse. It was much brighter than the lantern he had before.
"Jake?" Marigold asked, her allergies clearing up a little. "This isn't going to collapse, right?"
He looked up at the ceiling of the tunnel. "Two percent chance."
"That's reassuring" Riley mumbled. Her stomach was turning, but she ignored it.
The tunnel widened, and soon, they were standing in the Hall of Records. The presidents were looking straight ahead, stoic, unblinking. Abby didn't take her gaze off of them. The cone of light travelled all the way to the end. A metal door was installed in the rock face.
"And they... looked at you?" Marigold asked, looking up at Washington's enormous face in the stone. "Cause they're pretty... yknow. Made of stone."
"They did" Jacob said. "I was there." His light wandered around the room, and something flashed. A glint of light reflected off... something.
"What's that?" JP asked and pointed at the direction the reflection was coming from. They moved closer, in front of Roosevelt's unfinished carving.
"That's..." Jacob handed his flashlight to Abby and stepped closer. In front of Roosevelt, in mid-air, floated the stolen park ranger torch. It looked pristine, undamaged, not a single scratch on the plastic housing, and most notably - no crack in the lens. "Whoa." He reached out to take it, turned it on - it worked, even better than it did the first time.
"The mountain... repaired your flashlight?" Sadie asked, quietly, as if the presidents could hear her. Jacob unscrewed the back of the device and looked inside - the battery, an ancient 4.5 volt zinc-carbon lantern battery with the Radio Shack logo on it, looked like it had just been taken out of the packaging. The printing was bright, colourful, and the contacts gleamed in the shine of the torch Abby held.
"Looks that way." He answered and put the battery back. "Trying not to think about it."
They walked over to the metal door, Abby walking backwards to keep an eye at Roosevelt's face. Riley hit the metal door with her palm - a metallic clang echoed through the hall, making Abby flinch.
"This is definitely new" Jacob said and ran his hands over the surface. "The monument was finished in 1941, and this is definitely newer." He took hold of the handle - it didn't budge. "Little help?"
Sadie nodded and pulled the handle. The metal groaned and strained as Sadie pulled on it with her superpowered strength. Then, a loud bang - she'd ripped the locked door out of its frame, almost sending Sadie tumbling to the floor. Jacob shone his repaired searchlight inside.
"Whoa." Abby whispered.
"Yeah." Riley said. "That's... not what I expected."
Behind the door was a smaller room, a reception area of some kind. It smelled of musty carpet and old furniture - the air thick with the scent of decay and forgotten time. There was a reception desk, its surface coated in a thick layer of dust, with an old, boxy computer and a rotary telephone on it. A few chairs were scattered around the room, their fabric faded and worn. The fluorescent neon tubes in the ceiling were dead, casting long, eerie shadows in the beam of Jacob's repaired flashlight.
"Creepy." Marigold whispered, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell.
Riley stepped around the desk, carefully avoiding touching anything. She examined the computer, its beige plastic yellowed with age. "Think this thing still works?"
Jacob shrugged. "Only one way to find out." He reached for the power button and pressed it. Nothing happened. He tried again, then wiggled the power cord. Still nothing. "No power. Figures."
Autumn circled the room, her gaze sweeping over every detail. She ran a gloved hand along the surface of the desk, leaving a clean streak in the dust. "This place hasn't been touched in years."
Abby was fiddling with the rotary telephone, pulling the dial around and letting it spin back with a whir.
JP ran a finger across the spine of a tattered paperback on one of the chairs. The cover crumbled slightly as he did. "Looks like someone was reading Tom Clancy."
On the wall, a paper calendar hung crookedly. Riley tapped Abby on the shoulder, motioning her to sweep the beam over it.
A picture of Lake Superior, the old USGS logo in the corner. On the date table below, the calendar had stopped on one date.
"Is that..." Abby began.
"...yeah." Riley finished her thought.
The days on the calendar had been crossed out, one every day.
The marks stopped on the 2nd of July, 1998.