My valise sat unopened on the bench at the foot of the bed, packed with three days’ worth of clothes because that was how long I’d planned to last before getting myself eliminated. The zipper glinted in the chandelier light, a small metallic reminder that I could still leave. Right now. Walk downstairs, find whoever was in charge, and request an immediate extraction from this experimental study in human degradation.
No one would stop me. They probably wanted me gone. I’d seen the production assistant’s face when I’d refused to kneel — her whole expression lighting up, delighted, as if she’d just discovered next week’s dramatic highlight reel. I was the villainnow. The arrogant architect who thought he was too good to bow. They’d spin my departure as confirmation that I couldn’t handle a strong woman, that I’d run away from a challenge, that I was the man this show existed to expose.
Fine. Let them spin whatever narrative they wanted. I didn’t care about public perception or viral clips or the forty million viewers who watched this nonsense. I cared about getting back to my real life, the one where I drew straight lines and built solid foundations and never had to think about how Sloane’s voice sounded when she said “We’ll see.”
We’ll see.
A threat wrapped in silk, delivered with a smile that broadcast she knew exactly what she was doing.
My hand reached for the zipper.
And stopped.
I was halfway down the corridor, moving toward the exit I’d memorized during the mansion tour, when I heard the commotion.
“Come on. Come ON.” Frantic, pitched higher than it should have been, accompanied by the sound of someone repeatedly slamming a fist against what I assumed was a door. “This is ridiculous. This is so— why won’t you just— WORK.”
The smart thing would have been to keep walking. The logical thing, the thing that aligned with my carefully maintained policy of minimal engagement with other human beings, would have been to round the corner and pretend I’d heard nothing. Someone else’s problems were not my problems. Someone else’s malfunctioning door was not my concern. I was here to get eliminated as quickly and painlessly as possible, not to make friends with my fellow contestants.
But the sound was familiar. Too familiar. The golden retriever in human form who’d nearly face-planted on the carpet during the ceremony.
Mason Rivera was standing outside one of the bedroom doors, his tuxedo jacket discarded somewhere, his shirt untucked and wrinkled, his key card clutched in his fist like a weapon he didn’t know how to use. Sweat beaded at his temples. His free hand was currently engaged in what appeared to be an attempt to physically force the electronic lock into submission through sheer desperation and repeated violent contact.
“It worked before,” he was saying to the door, or possibly to God, or possibly to the universe at large. “It worked like two hours ago. I put my stuff in. I came back. It was fine. And now you’re just— you’re just doing this to me? Tonight? After everything?”
I stopped walking.
The hallway was empty except for the two of us, all the other contestants presumably in their rooms, celebrating their successful genuflection or planning their next strategic move. Mason hadn’t noticed me yet. He was too busy having a breakdown at his door.
“Please,” he whispered to the lock, a new level of pathetic. “I’ll do anything. I’ll be nice to you. I’ll polish you. I’ll — I don’t know what locks want. What do locks want?”
I could keep walking. I could turn around and go back to my room and pack my bag and leave this whole disaster behind. I could let Mason sleep in the hallway, which would probably be good for his character development and would definitely not be my problem.
Instead, I heard myself say: “You’re pushing when you should be pulling.”
Mason spun around so fast he nearly dropped the key card. His face went through seven expressions in two seconds — confusion, recognition, wariness, hope, more confusion, and a tentative gratitude obviously tempered by that I’d refused to kneel earlier and was therefore probably a terrible person.
“What?”
“The door.” I closed the distance between us, plucked the key card from his fingers before he could protest, and examined it. Sweaty. Slightly bent from his attempts to beat it into submission. Still functional. “These locks have a light. Green means the latch is released. But the door swings out, not in. You keep pushing.” I wiped the card on my shirt, slid it smoothly through the reader, waited for the green light, and pulled. The door swung open without resistance. “You were fighting the mechanism.”
Mason stared at the open doorway like I’d just performed a minor miracle. “How did you— I tried that like fifty times—”
“You tried variations on the wrong approach fifty times.” I handed the card back to him. “Repetition doesn’t fix faulty methodology. It just reinforces it.”
His brow furrowed. “Is that, like, a metaphor for my life?”
“I don’t know anything about your life.” I stepped back, already calculating my route back to my own room. “I just know how doors work.”
“Right. Yeah.” Mason was still staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read — part confusion, part an unsettling warmth I hadn’t asked for. “Hey, thanks, man. Seriously. I was about to sleep in the hallway. I was actually considering calling my mom to see if she could, like, remotely hack into the system from Ohio, and she definitely cannot do that, she barely knows how to FaceTime—”
“Goodnight.” I was already walking away, already regretting the thirty seconds I’d lost to this interaction, already wondering why I’d stopped in the first place when every instinct I had was screaming at me to maintain distance, keep moving, don’t engage.
Behind me, Mason called out: “I’m Mason, by the way. In case you forgot. We met earlier. At the— you know. The thing. With the kneeling.”
I kept my back to him. “I know who you are.”
“Cool. Cool cool cool. So like— if you ever need anything—”
