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We kept going. At the end of the corridor, Damian stopped beside a closed door. The air felt colder at this end of the house.

He pushed the door open with his foot. The hinges didn’t creak, and somehow the silence terrified me more than a noise would have. He shone the flashlight inside.

“This is the room.”

The four of us froze.

A dining table stood beneath a Tiffany lamp filmed with dust. The lamp was dark, but its stained glass still caught the flashlight in fragments of green and amber. Chairs had been arranged around the table symmetrically. Perfectly symmetrically.

The wallpaper had peeled in long strips, exposing plaster beneath. The ceiling was stained black in one corner. On the far wall, someone had nailed a length of white fabric over the windows. White gauze. Like a wedding veil. My hand tightened around the flashlight.

Behind me, Callie whispered, “Marlowe.”

I knew what she was asking.

I was asking it too. But I thought of the cave. The water at my ankles. The throat of the earth closing around me. The moment I had learned that fear could scream as loud as it liked, but I didn’t have to follow it.

I stepped inside the room. The temperature dropped another few degrees. I felt Callie shake next to me.

“Wait,” I said.

I lifted the flashlight and aimed it at the table. I thought of Clemency, held in this room for a week.

“We can’t let them win.”

We scanned each inch of the room with our lights, like we were checking for something that might crawl out from under the table or climb across the wall.

The room was empty, except for a large, faded circle scored onto the floor. One part of it was marked with white chalk.

“The northern point,” Damian said. “I marked it.”

A closet stood open in the corner. I caught Damian staring at it.

“Don’t go in there,” he said.

“Oh great,” Jess said.

Callie whimpered.

“Why?” Priya said.

“It’s where they kept her.”

“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” Priya said.

“Don’t you dare,” Callie hissed, grabbing her arm.

My flashlight swept across the side of Priya’s face. She looked like her knees were about to buckle. I aimed the flashlight at the closet. Its walls were etched with hundreds of scratch marks.

Fingernails.

Priya and Callie were shaking now.

I tried to move a chair from the table so I could unpack my backpack, then stopped with my hand on the back of it.

The chairs were bolted to the floor.

“Oh,” Jess said. “That’s absolutely horrifying.”