L I N E
No luck. They were locked out. Another precious minute wasted. Ana looked nervously at her phone:
33:06
They couldn’t keep messing up like this. They couldn’t afford to.
Squatting next to each other on the floor, they both took turns keying in guesses. Alex found a pencil on a shelf, and they scribbled ideas on the side of a crate next to them. Brainstorming as fast as they could. Scratching out the worst ideas. Trying out the better ones:
Y E A R
L O S T
H O P E
On and on. Time was ticking away. They could both feel it. Their guesses were getting wilder, off target. Desperate. This wasn’t working. Bates didn’t play that way. There had to be something more, something they were missing.
E X I T
D E A D
S I G N
Panic was setting in. They had wasted well over ten minutes and were no closer. They were running out of ideas and had given up writing words on the crate, instead taking turns to enter any words that entered their heads.
She looked at Alex. He was bent over the keypad, his hand hovering over the glowing keys. His long fingers were shaking.
Oh, god, what if she had made a mistake? What if the code was random?
The thought sent a bolt of fear through her. If her plan didn’t work, it was too late to try something else. They’d put all their eggs in this one basket. Was Alex going to die because of one of her stupid ideas? Just like Danny. Was it happening again?
No!Not this time. She closed her eyes and took a deep steady breath.Focus.
Bates could have gone with a standard numeric lock. It would havehad tens of thousands of combinations, compared to this alphabet lock. Or if he’d wanted to be really secure, he could have used biometrics—money didn’t seem to be a problem for him. No, Bates chose an alphabetic cypher for a reason. It wasn’t random. There was a word that would unlock the hatch. A four-letter word that meant something.
Maybe it was a name or a clue. Maybe it was something personal to Bates. But the lock was new, which meant it must have been deliberately installed as part of the setup for the Balloon Game. It was all connected. The code had to mean something, it had to be part of the game.
Which meant it was guessable. They could do this. They would do this.
A loud metallic clang shook her from her thoughts. Someone was banging on the door to the shed.
Ana turned to Alex. They’d had the forethought to bar the door by wedging a steel pole through the handles in case Ellis came for them, which was only a matter of time. It was getting close to the end of the hour, hunting time.
“I’ll go see if the door’s holding,” Ana said, looking around and finding a long wooden pole resting against a shelf. “Keep trying, okay? Maybe it’s something we’ve seen, or a word, a name. It has to have meaning.”
Alex nodded. Their eyes locked, a grim determination in their expressions. There was no time for drama. They were in the fight for survival here. He squatted in the dirt by the hatch and entered another word.
A L E X. Wrong.
Ana clambered over the piles of junk towards the door. More loud bangs and clattering noises.
A chair leg poked through the gap and splintered as it was levered sideways in an attempt to pry the door open. There was more loudclanging as dents appeared in the corrugated metal. Something heavy was being thrown at the door, over and over.
Ana checked out the makeshift lock. They were surprisingly lucky that the handles were D-shapes of solid metal, welded to the door. The bar wedged through them was holding. It would take a supreme effort to break it down. It would take time.
They needed a distraction.
“Nice try, Ellis,” Ana shouted.
