It takes us five of our ten minutes to drag ourselves to the column out of view of the cameras.
“There’s a sigil called the daisy wheel. It’s one of the few that can trap entities,” Nico explains quietly.
I haven’t heard of it before, but the books about sigils were farther down on my reading list, and I didn’t reach them before the Game Master took us.
“People used to carve them into their homes, or in churches, in medieval times. Donny and I tested hundreds of sigils. Most of them were useless, but this one worked. It acts like a weaker salt circle, but it should hold him long enough.”
The tile is too tough to carve anything into. Unfortunately, the Game Master didn’t leave an angle grinder or a diamond blade lying around, but there is one thing at our disposal.
Nico unwraps his foot. The wounds are angry red around the edges, with dark streaks radiating outward. Our makeshift bandages are soaked through with blood and pus.
He gets his nails around one of the soft scabs on his sole. I grip his wrist.
“We need those to stay closed so we can run out of here,” I say.
“Then how?—”
I start unwrapping my tourniquet.
Nico reaches for my arm. “Over my dead?—”
“Youwillbe dead if I don’t do this.” I’m already loosening the belt despite his glare. “We both will be, because I’m not leaving you behind. Unless I develop some really impressive acrobatic skills in the next five minutes, I don’t need my hands to run.”
He frowns but stays quiet as I angle my arm downward. The pain is a deep, rotten throb that pulses in time with my heart, spreading a sickly warmth inside me. I massage my forearm, cursing at the pain, but blood dribbles from between the ridges of my flesh.
Nico catches my blood in his palms and dips his fingers into it, painting a circle on the dirty tile big enough for a person tostand in but small enough that the column still conceals it from the camera.
“Benji would give me such a long lecture if he could see this,” Nico mutters, biting his lip in concentration. “You’re supposed to use a drawing compass to make these, but I’ve never had time for that.”
“I’ll be sure to tell on you as soon as we get home,” I say.
The sigil takes shape under his fingers: one large circle with six ovals inside of it, their points meeting in the center like petals. It’s beautiful. Or as beautiful as a symbol written in blood can be.
Every stroke of his fingers against the gritty tile is loud in the silence, which is so absolute it makes my ears ring. It takes a couple of seconds for me to realize that my ears aren’t actually ringing—I’m hearing energy underneath the silence. I can feel the essence of Morrow thrumming in the air like an undercurrent. Or like one of those high-pitched sounds old TVs make that you don’t really notice until someone points it out, and then you can’t unhear it.
Nico closes the final loop, and I tighten my tourniquet again, feeling more than a little woozy. Nico wipes my blood on the front of his pant legs, leaving dark streaks on the fabric, and we crawl back to the front of the column where Morrow can see us on the camera, sitting side by side.
“Now we just need to get him to step on it,” he says.
“What if he doesn’t take the bait and come down here?” I whisper.
“He will,” Nico mutters.
“What if he has some other trick we haven’t thought of?” I ask. “Like gas he releases into the room, or a bunch of rats that’ll come out of the walls and eat us?” Being eaten by rats isnothow I want to go.
“I don’t know,” Nico admits. “But I think this is our best shot.”
“Okay.” My mind is coming up with all the ways this can go wrong. “What about the host? I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Eden, I need you to understand something,” he says. “After Billy possessed me, he did leave some residuals behind. I can control it, but it’s so easy for me to slip back into his mind. I usually care what happens to the hosts, but in this case, I don’t give a flying fuck. I give a fuck about you, and about us getting out of here. If it’s a question between you and that host, that man’s going to die. If it’s a question between you and anyone who stands between us and that door, they’re going to die. I’ve killed people before. I can do it again. You arenotdying today.”
There’s this swooping sensation in my stomach like I just crested a roller coaster and am plummeting downward. Nico has spent years being the guy who saves people. He’s the moral center of his team, but right now? I know with absolute certainty he means what he says.
I don’t know if it scares me or makes me want to grab his face and kiss him, but a glance up at the timer tells me we have less than a minute, and I need to focus.
I go back over his plan. I feel like my idea has a better chance of working, but if he absolutely refuses to do it, then this, at least, is better than waiting to die. This plan requires us to be mobile. Capable of more than lying here like broken dolls waiting for someone to put us back together. Are we really supposed to outrun the Game Master when we’re running on scraps of chocolate and are about as dangerous as a pair of wilting houseplants?
We just need to get past the door and lock the Game Master in this room. Morrow could abandon his host and pass through the wall, which would be dangerous, but in a different way than if he were in a host.
