No—not the wall. The door. The big wooden door. That was . . .open? Adi had figured out the code to the keypad while Fitzy and Symphony were talking.
“Go!” Adi cried, pushing Beck and Carter through. “Hurry!Sierra!”
Beck stumbled through to the other side and barely had time to register his surroundings—more stone walls and vaulted ceilings and an entire wall of books—before he spun back around to see Adi with his hand on Sierra’s wrist, yanking her through the doorway.
“Vera!” Carter screamed.
Vera was on the ground. There was blood. A lot of blood.
Fitzy was distracted by the wound in his shoulder, but when he saw the others were escaping he swung the gun, aiming for them— right as the door slammed shut.
Beck stood panting, hands on his knees as he struggled to drag in stilted breaths. He braced himself for another gunshot, but it didn’t come. Instead, Fitzy started pounding at the door, trying to force it open.
“H-how?” Carter gasped. “How did you open it?”
“The place names on the holy water coincided with the numbers on the map,” said Adi, breathlessly falling against the wall.
“But you didn’t have the atlas,” said Carter. Sweat matted her curls to her temples, and her eyes had a dazed, horrified look in them. Beck suspected they all had that look.
“I know where Jordan is,” said Adi. “And Lourdes. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. Holyshit, that was my mother.”
“Vera . . .” said Carter. “We left her there. She could be . . .”
“I’m calling the cops.” Sierra whipped out her phone. She covered her opposite ear as she turned away from the sounds of Fitzy repeatedly ramming something into the door.
“They won’t get here in time,” said Adi.
“In time to save Vera?” asked Carter weakly. “Or . . .”
She didn’t have to finish.
Adi looked alarmingly ill. “She was in one of her moods the night Alicia died. I remember her throwing shit around, screaming at me. She’d come home late. Late—because she’d been outcommitting murder.”
Beck squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Every thump on the door made him flinch. How long could it hold?
“We have to play the game,” he whispered.
Realization dawned on Carter’s face. “Every room ends with an escape.”
“Yeah,” said Adi with a humorless laugh. “Where Fitzy and mymotherare on the other side.”
“Not this time,” said Carter. “They’re trapped in the first room, at least for now.”
“Right,” said Beck. “We need to stay a step ahead of them. Solve the puzzles, get out. Once we’re in the studio, and they’re still locked in here . . .” He swallowed hard, knowing that he was grasping at tenuous hope. They were stuck with a murderer and a maniac with a gun. But the police would be on their way. They just had to play through the game. That was it. They could do that.
“What are we waiting for?” said Adi. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Beck forced himself to focus. To ignore the pounding on the door, each thump like a splinter in his tongue, and take in the space around him.
It wasglorious, actually. The stuff of escape room dreams. They were in what appeared to be the dining hall of a Gothic castle, with hand-sawn wooden beams, enormous iron chandeliers, a wall of dusty books complete with a rolling library ladder, and a series of medieval tapestries on one wall. A table in the center was set for several guests, with fine china and silverware.
Carter made her way to the other side of the massive hall, where a gate stood blocking their exit, held in place by a rope-and-pulley system fastened with an iron padlock in need of a key. “This isn’t the last room. Look.”
Beck joined her. Beyond the gate was a cemetery, boxed in by more towering stone walls. In the corner stood a marble mausoleum. Grayish-blue lighting gave the effect that the cemetery was cast in silver moonlight, and the limbs of a scraggly tree held animatronic bats, blinking at them with red eyes.
Vera had outdone herself.
