We worked in silence until Hana yelled my name. I spun on my heels, taking in the head-height, letterbox-sized door she’d opened in the wall.
“You need a code,” I told her as I stared at the small alarm box with a green light that flashed on top.
She paused for a second. “It will be the same as the downstairs code,” she declared before typing in the number. The green light turned red, and I knew what was about to happen before it started.
I lunged for the main door to stop it from closing, but it didn’t move. Instead, a metal sheet sprang closed, sealing the space where the door would go. And then, similar metal structures closed quickly over the skylights, plunging us into darkness.
“Ro?” Hana cried in the now pitch-black space. I dragged my hands along the walls, trying to find a light switch, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. My heart hammered, my mind running at a hundred miles an hour as panic set in.
I fumbled for my phone in my pocket, turning on the torch and using it to help me find my way to Hana. Once I was next to her, I moved the light to try and find anything to help us get out of here, but there was nothing.
“I think this might be it,” she muttered as if speaking to herself, holding up a small silver object between us that I quickly realised was a flash drive.
“Hana,” I prompted, “We need the code to be able to get out of here.”
“If it’s not the door code, I have no idea. You can just override it, right?”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Of course I can.” My anxiety eased a little. I just needed to keep a clear head, and we’d be out of herein no time. This was where I thrived. And now, I got to do it for Hana… with Hana. Exhilaration swelled inside me.
I moved across to where I’d left my laptop just as Hana turned the torch on her phone on as well, her face illuminated and her eyes locked on me. I sat with my back against the wall, my fingers moving over the keyboard as I tried to reconnect with the house’s security system. “Fuck,” I muttered. “Is your phone working?” I unlocked mine, trying to connect a call with my office.
Nothing.
Hana gasped. “No. Why isn’t my phone working?”
I dragged my hand down my face before trying to connect the call again, but nothing happened.
“Fuck,” I yelled louder this time.
“Ro, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
I looked up. She had the phone tilted, so it cast half her face in shadows, and I hated that I’d see the look of disappointment when I explained.
“When you unlocked that hidden box and found your key, there was another alarm in there. Obviously, as a last-ditch attempt to keep it safe. It turned this room into a dead zone. No phone signal, no internet connection, no way of communicating and,” I pointed to the now sealed door and windows, “no way in or out.”
Hana slid down the wall next to me. “But you can fix this, right?” She sounded so hopeful.
I shook my head. “Nope. My skills are in tech. We have no access to tech.”
She held out the flash drive in front of her. “You fucking son of a bitch,” she muttered at it, as if it was the object's fault. “You couldn’t just let me walk away. You had to drag me back into all this, and now what? We have to stay stuck here forever?” She paused, and then her head snapped in my direction. “Wait,” shecried, thrusting it into my hand before leaping up, her phone light bouncing as she moved to her bag, unzipping it and tipping it out onto the floor, the loud clatter of metal tools filling the air.
“Really?” I said with a chuckle.
“I like to be prepared.” She shrugged as she lifted a crowbar, brandishing it like she was declaring war. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
“Why the fuckcan’t we get this open?” she asked, sweat dripping down her hairline.
I took the crowbar out of her hands. We’d been trying for well over an hour, and we’d got nowhere.
“Because this is meant to be a safe room… somewhere people can’t break into and therefore somewhere people can’t break out of.”
My arms burned from trying to prise the door open, but it hadn’t even shifted a tiny amount, and now my phone battery was dangerously low as Hana’s had died completely.
“So what? We just give up. No one knows we’re here, Ro. No one is looking for us, no one knows we’d come here.” I could hear the fear in her voice.
I glanced at my laptop. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“What does that mean?”
