My eyes find her feed, and my brain simply stops.
The image doesn't make sense.
I stare at it, waiting for the visual to resolve into something rational, something that fits within the parameters of what should be happening on my island.
There's a man in the maze.
A man who isnotone of my attendants.
The build is wrong, the posture is wrong, everything is wrong. He's covered in mud, caked with it, and he's dragging Scarletta by her hair through the dirt while she screams.
"Red! Red!"
Her voice tears through the speakers, and the word hits me like a physical blow. She's safewording. She's actually safewording, and the man—whoever the fuck he is—doesn't stop.
He kicks her. Hekicksherin the ribs and she crumples, and I watch her mouth form the word again, desperate, pleading.
Time dilates into something thick and syrupy.
The cameras. The glitches I dismissed. The digital artifacts and blur on the Chaff Island feeds that I attributed to humidity and scheduled for maintenance.
My head snaps to the secondary wall of monitors. Volk's feed. The body is still there, face-down in the mud, covered in fire ants exactly as it should be.
Except.
The body hasn't moved in hours. Not a twitch. Not a single involuntary spasm from the venom coursing through his system.I'd noticed it earlier and assumed he was dead or dying, but now?—
I zoom in on the Chaff Island feed, and the image stutters. Pixelates. Reforms.
The resolution is wrong. The shadows don't match the current position of the sun. The timestamp in the corner reads correctly, but the light filtering through the jungle canopy is at least two hours off from where it should be.
Loop.
Someone looped my fucking cameras.
My gaze returns to the maze feed, to the mud-covered man with pale eyes who has my Scarletta by the throat now, and the pieces click together with the precision of a closing trap.
Dimitri Volkov isn't dead in the jungle.
Dimitri Volkov is in my maze.
Time snaps back into focus.
I'm moving before my conscious mind finishes processing. The control room door crashes open and I'm sprinting through the jungle, my bare feet hitting roots and rocks and I don't feel any of it. The undergrowth tears at my legs. I'm naked. I'm fuckingnakedand unarmed and Scarletta is in there with a man who has spent fifteen years trafficking children, a man who knows exactly what happens to people who cross me, a man with nothing left to lose.
The maze entrance looms ahead. I designed every inch of this labyrinth. I know the optimal paths, the portal archways, the dead ends. I can reach the center in four minutes if I run the correct route.
I round the first corner at full speed.
A body lies crumpled against the bamboo wall.
The monster costume is still mostly intact—the elaborate prosthetic clawed gloves, the voice modulator hanging loose around what remains of his neck. But his head is gone.
A scream rips through the air behind me. Female. High-pitched. Not Scarletta—the timbre is wrong, the accent different. It's coming from the direction of the preparation pavilion, at least half a mile back.
Another scream answers it. Male this time. Deeper in the jungle, toward the eastern shore.
The sounds multiply, overlapping, a chorus of terror spreading across my island like wildfire.
