“A very, very small room,” said the final team member, a guy, this one with a husky drawl like aged leather and currants.
“Name?” came the first voice again. Beck shut his eyes. He had to be wrong.
“Adi,” the boy grunted.
“That it? Should be four of us. Come on, clock’s ticking.”
Every word made Beck’s mouth water with the distinctive mixture of blue Kool-Aid and sherbet fizzing along his tongue.
If he wasn’t mistaken, he was locked in an escape room with Sierra freaking Angelos.
THE
ESCAPE GAME
SEASON FIVE
Snag Round: It’s All About the Chemistry
07
Sierra
“Beck,” said the fourth member of Sierra’s team. Finally. “Myname is Beck.”
Hopefully he was better at decoding than he was at speaking.
“Let’s take a tally of our clues,” Sierra said, sweeping her attention over the room she’d been studying from the moment the blindfold came off. She didn’t have much. A sign on the door that readsilence meand a clipboard on a peg.
“Wait,” said the girl, Carter, “you didn’t tell us your name.” She sounded suspicious.
Rather than answer, Sierra read through a series of lab notes that detailed various experiments.
Experiment 1: 2 parts solution A + 1 part solution J
Result: forest green, mostly opaque
Experiment 2: 3 parts solution A + 1 parts solution K
Result: violet purple, gummy texture
And so on, for seven experiments total. She flipped the page up, but there was nothing else. “I’ve got a clipboard with a list of lab experiments talking about different solutions, coded alphabetically, and some colorful results. Beck, what do you have?”
“Uh—okay, right.” Beck cleared his throat. “I’ve got a three-digit padlock on the door, plus a bunch of jars with random things in them. A battery, a glove, a bone, a . . . I think this is a ball of crumpled foil? A silver earring and . . .” Slight pause. “Huh. The last one’s empty. Oh, and there’s a neon sign that says ‘escape.’”
Sierra grunted. “In case we forget why we’re here?”
Beck gave a nervous chuckle. “That’s what I thought.”
“I’ve got a bunch of books,” said Carter. “Textbooks. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology.”
“Look closely,” said Sierra. “There could be something hidden in the pages, or writing that could be useful.”
“This is supposed to be a chemistry lab,” Beck added. “Maybe start with that one?”
“Good point,” Sierra said. So hedidhave a brain, thank god. “Let me read these lab notes to you. Maybe it connects with something in those books.”
She read off the experiments, from beginning to end. Even as she did so, she thought of how this would be edited out during production. Reading arbitrary lab notes did not make for great television.
