“Do you want me to ask more people to help with the search? Call the police?”
Definitely not. Ivy pictured Darnell stomping around, getting everyone worked up, ruining any chance, however slim, that they’d accept the missing resident back.
“Not yet. I’m going to check the field, okay?”
Ivy hurried off before Sarah could convince her otherwise. Found the path, although it was more difficult today. Most of the bent stalks had recovered, their stems straightening.
The flowers were in full bloom. The size of dessert plates. Fractals. Repeating sequences from a central, radiating point.
Beautiful.
Ivy spent the next hour searching the field, softly calling her father’s name. Kachinski was right; he wasn’t here.
Where are you?
Ivy returned to her car, drove bleary-eyed to where she’d found the missing man in the middle of the night.
No sign of him.
She made her way to the barn.
After the events at the Thomas Clarke House, police had vacated the area. They’d left signs up, warning would-be hikers or nosy journalists that this was a crime scene. Trespassers would be prosecuted,blah, blah, blah.
Yellow tape surrounded the entire structure. A hint of egg smell still hung in the air.
Ivy ducked under the tape, stepped into the first room. Her vision no longer distorted from the gas mask, it looked very different from the first time she’d been here.
The table and chairs were gone. The buttons and digital display also bagged and tagged and removed. A hole in the drywall.
The prisoner’s dilemma.
Someone had built the interior precisely for the game.
No, it wasn’t Zeke. Zeke couldn’t plan for a simple quiz. He had... what did the kids call it? TikTok brain. Couldn’t focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds. Swiping up—or sideways, or however the hell the app worked—to move onto the next fifteen-second dopamine-releasing video.
Next, Ivy found her way to the first crime scene. Recalled the approximate location from conversations she’d overheard between Vaughn and Darnell.
CiCi’s Pizza. The Cedar Ridge Preserve.
It wasn’t hard to find—the excessive use of yellow crime scene tape made it noticeable from a quarter mile away. This barn was larger than the first, and the interior was different from the photo that Vaughn had shown her, too. For one, there were no bodies on the ground.
The 100 prisoners problem.
No boxes, no numbers. But there had been numbers.Primenumbers.
Ivy peered through the hole that someone had crudely cut from the drywall. He wasn’t there. She returned to her car and sat in the driver’s seat.
Why prime numbers?
That wasn’t part of the game. And Vaughn—or was it Darnell?—was right; using prime numbers made the game more complicated. They had to mean something. It was a message. Her mind went to the letter with her name on the envelope.
Neither 8001 nor 8128 were prime numbers. But the missing value—127—was.
Ivy took out her phone. Abby hadn’t called yet—still at work.
Her eyes fell on the date again: June 5th. Five... a prime number. The anniversary of the fire. Thatfuckingnight.
Years ago, her father had taught her what it meant to learn something. Explained the process, the frustration. That’s where Ivy had been lost for the past three days: in a state of frustration.
