Six Must Die, page 5
Inside the CCHS hoodie, my fingers hit something cold and cylindrical. A clue.
Ha. Maybe I’ve still got it.
I don’t want to be too hasty, though. Every new clue discovery means less time for Arsonist’s Revenge to jog my memory of Wanderland. Which means that tonight, I’m not following There’s No Escape Rule #7: When you find a clue, shout it out loudly. Tonight, I’m sabotaging our game.
Malachi’s voice comes in over the walkie-talkie: “Remember, if you get stuck, y’all have three hints—but if you use all three, your time won’t count for the leaderboard.”
“Malachi,” Guinevere says, “no one likes an overinvolved Game Master.” Her eyes meet mine for the briefest second, still swirling, still hurricane, and I’m suddenly reminded of how the two of us used to spend hours teaching each other elementary Czech and Cherokee on the floor of her childhood bedroom, back when things between the two of us were so much easier: Agasga. Prší. It is raining. Tsagasgv. Pršelo. It has rained. Agasga doyi nogwu. Venku právě prší. It is raining outside right now. But then her judgmental glare flicks back to the dials of the TV, and the moment passes. The thunderstorm of her volatile emotions—anger, frustration, and residual longing—temporarily subsides.
I exhale. I’m not delusional—I know I’m not Sheriff Stallard, or Call-Me-Diana, or a reporter from the Tennessee Star. I can’t be too direct with my line of questioning. But I can’t be too hesitant, either. Which means I need a good target. Someone who won’t be too difficult to press about the circumstances surrounding the fire; someone who can help me get warmed up.
My eyes fall on Charity. She spent her senior year shepherding our class through tragedy as a paragon of grief. Right now, though, her lips are moving silently as she reads over her graduation speech. She’s not even pretending to help us look for items to escape Arsonist’s Revenge.
I slide into the dining chair next to hers and nod at the paper in her hands. “Did you manage to find a clue already?”
“What, this? No.” Charity laughs, her breathy voice high and soft. “I’m rehearsing my speech, remember?” Her glossy mouth pinches with concern. “Oh, wait. You probably don’t. You know, since you, like, forget a lot of things now? Because of your…” She points to her temple, blinking at me with her fake-innocent doe eyes.
“My brain injury?” I say flatly. “Yeah. Memory is kind of a problem for me.”
Charity sets her speech down and sighs. “Well, that’s what I’m doing. It’s, like, stressful, though? After the public scrutiny my mom faced after first expressing support for BREAKOUT and then joining the lawsuit against it, I feel like I owe it to her to say something meaningful tomorrow. But I’ve rewritten this stupid speech a million times by now, and the wording still isn’t right.”
“Maybe you can practice with me,” I suggest. “I wrote a lot of blog posts for There’s No Escape—I know a thing or two about appealing to your audience. Ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, et cetera.”
I reach for her speech, hoping to find a line in it that I can cherry-pick to pivot into interrogating her about the fire, but her hand snaps across the paper before I can read a word. “Thanks, but I, um, also took AP Lang? And I’d rather fix it myself. It’s just, like, you know, your standard cookie-cutter SBP address: We’ve worked so hard and reached this goal after years of hard work; we’ll change the world; our future starts now. Obligatory Dolly Parton quote. Go, Warriors! Et cetera.” She abruptly stands, a tight smile plastered on her sharp face, and my stomach curls inward at the way she just mocked me. “Either way, you’re right—I agreed to be here, so I should probably be playing with everyone else. Catch you later, though!”
Before I can react, Charity adjusts her watch and hurries to assist Santo in searching through drawers in the kitchenette. Jesus, I already miss my plastic ducks. Worse, I only have one goal and I’m already failing. I suppress the urge to bang my forehead against the dining table. While our conversation amounted to nothing, it’s still early-game. The clock’s only at 58:43—I’m making good time, so I can’t be too dejected. I need to be more careful, though; there’s no way I’m finding out what happened to Matt like this. If I want to succeed, I’ll need to change my strategy. If I can’t learn about the fire through talking to my ex-friends, maybe I should focus on actually playing the game and praying the truth reveals itself as I’m going through the motions.
Chrrrk. The walkie-talkie in Santo’s hands hums to life, and Malachi’s baritone filters through the room. “The arsonist who kidnapped you returns at midnight, so be thorough,” he says. “Especially regarding objects above and below your natural eye level, like those framed black-and-white cabin photos.”
Damn. If Malachi keeps dropping hints we didn’t ask for, we’re going to escape with fifteen minutes to spare. Unsolicited GM advice is my biggest pet peeve; back when I ran There’s No Escape, I used to score franchises on Puzzle Autonomy in addition to Atmosphere, Merchandise Offerings, Prop Utilization, and a slew of other factors. Any company whose PA score was lower than three out of five always received an embedded GIF of a giant rubber duck with laser eyes and the text NO ONE LIKES AN OVERINVOLVED GAME MASTER burning into the screen. Malachi knows this, which is why he’s always been great at letting our friend group solve puzzles at our own pace. That’s one of the main reasons we’ve never escaped a BREAKOUT room before—opt out of the spoon-fed hints designed to make people escape faster, and you may never end up escaping at all.
So why is Mal urging us along tonight?
A flicker of uncertainty dances across my face as Tobias moves toward the black-and-white cabin prints and raises his lantern to assess them. I need to understand how Matt died—who planned the outing, where the fire started, why he didn’t escape the room in time—but I also can’t shake the weirdness of this entire night. There’s something off about Arsonist’s Revenge. And either our Game Master is in on it… or he feels it, too, and he’s trying to usher us out of the situation faster by spoiling the game.
I’m not sure which option I prefer.
“Again,” Tobias says as he cranes his neck upward, “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be looking at. Remember the communication breakdown I mentioned earlier? This is it.”
While he’s assessing the photographs, Guinevere grabs the walkie-talkie from Santo. “Malachi. Do not give us hints unless we explicitly ask for one. Got it?” she snaps, shoving the device back at Matt’s twin before Mal can respond.
I glance at the countdown before my gaze returns to her: 56:22. Time to try again.
“This is kind of disturbing, isn’t it?” I start. “Combing through a BREAKOUT room without your boyfriend?”
Guinevere scoffs. “Of course it’s fucking disturbing. In case you haven’t noticed, Stephanie, we were blackmailed into coming here. The little speech you gave in the lobby? Totally impressive and everything, but we would have done the room without it.”
I inhale, not knowing how to properly navigate a conversation with someone I haven’t spoken to since Matt’s burial; someone I’ve only seen in glimpses for the past year, through congested hallways and late-night news clips and a Warrior Minutes profile about reconnecting with her distant Cherokee heritage by studying the language. But then I pause. Blackmailed?
The gears in my head turn. “Wait,” I tell Guinevere, “can I see your invitation?” At her dark expression, I hold out my hand. “Seriously. Please?”
She snorts. “Knock yourself out,” she says, reaching into her patchwork pants and handing me her embossed card. I scan it and immediately blanch.
“Shit,” I whisper, my head pounding as I stare at the hot-pink wording. “Hey, um, guys, what do each of your invites say?”
Tobias turns away from the cabin photographs. “Why? Planning another blog post?”
“No, because I’m developing a theory that they were personalized to us.” I shove a random assortment of items cluttering the dining table aside—place mats, flameless LED tea lights, the fake fruit bowl that definitely seems like it’s going to be important later—to make room for the unique invitations in my hands. “See? These aren’t the same.”
In the kitchenette, Charity pulls out her own invitation. Santo does, too, but he and Charity swap each other’s and then throw them on the dining room table. I glance at Tobias. He sighs before he hands his card to Guinevere, who reads it and then places it next to mine.
The hairs on my arms stand on end as I stare at the variations of the black-and-pink cards. All five start the same—Ready to Play Again?—and continue with the venue information, but the final lines are different. Where mine reads Because secrets won’t keep themselves, Guinevere’s finishes with Or everyone will know what you did. Santo’s ends with This time, you’ll make it right. Charity’s reads For another opportunity to be a leader, and Tobias’s says Since you’re no stranger to friendly competition.
“Huh,” Guinevere says. “Look at that.”
Jesus, none of this feels real. Seeing my friends in the flesh, being back inside BREAKOUT, interacting with puzzles like I’m running There’s No Escape again… It’s hard to reconcile. Only a few hours ago, I was staring at the ceiling in my bedroom, listening to one of Dad’s King Crimson vinyls, avoiding Mom, and dreading the pomp and circumstance of tomorrow. But now…
“I can’t believe we didn’t notice this earlier,” Santo says. “This is weird, right?”
Charity frowns. “What’s interesting is that we weren’t all explicitly blackmailed. When you look at the rhetoric on these cards, in fact, a few of them present tonight like…”
“Like a second chance,” Santo finishes for her. His dark eyes meet mine across the dining room table, and I struggle to keep my expression neutral as I glance back at the message on his own invitation: This time, you’ll make it right.
Heat against bubbling skin. A neon green EXIT sign. Carcinogenic smoke. Blaring alarms. Screams.
I blink, and the vision disappears. Holy shit. That was a memory. A real one.
They’re starting to come back.
The walkie-talkie buzzes again. “Hey, y’all,” Malachi says, a note of uncertainty in his voice. “This feels strange to me. Are you sure you want to continue playing?”
Tobias nods. “One hundred percent.”
“Yes,” Santo says.
Guinevere’s lips twist with disdain. “I mean, we all want to get something out of this, right?” she says. “So we’re staying.”
“Besides,” Charity chirps, “this is, like, probably nothing.”
Or it could be a clue, the voice in the back of my head rasps, but I’m too rattled by the fact that my plan is actually working to care. I can’t afford to think about clues right now—not when I need to pull it together if I’m going to have any hope of making it to the end of the hour. Tonight’s objective isn’t escaping; it’s about staying here for long enough to force my brain to spontaneously recover my memories of Wanderland.
Santo claps his hands together. “Well, since we’ve already wasted”—he looks up at the monitor—“three minutes of our allotted escape time, and we’re all in agreement on staying, we may as well go back to playing. None of us have found anything important yet, right?”
I shake my head, thinking guiltily about the unknown cylinder hidden in the CCHS sweatshirt, when Santo grins. “Except for this.” He opens his burn-scarred palm, revealing a glinting key, and adrenaline zips up my spine.
“Where did you get that?”
“I found a magnetic chain inside one of the kitchen drawers, and Charity and I used it to fish the key out of the sink drain. All we need to do now is figure out what it unlocks.”
“Well, did you try that?” Guinevere asks, pointing to the padlocked trunk pushed up against the couch by the entertainment center. Santo moves toward it and the rest of us follow him, pulled in by the promise of a large prop being opened. Strategically, it’s not a good decision for all of us to be here—There’s No Escape Rule #11: Always work on a different puzzle than your teammates—but we crowd in around the trunk anyway, our breath collectively held as Santo fits the key into the metal and twists. The lock snaps open.
“Ready?” my best friend’s brother asks, sliding the shackle out of the lock plate. A wolfish smile plays at the corners of his mouth as he lifts the latch, his painted fingernails catching the light of Tobias’s lantern, but it disappears from his face almost instantly.
Inside the trunk is a body.
CEDAR CREEK CONFESSIONS
posted 15 months ago
I know you missed me, Cedar Creek, so let’s dive right in: We need to talk about Malachi James-May. That’s right—on today’s docket, I’m shouting the hallway whispers that have plagued our local Game Master since last Tuesday, when his parents announced the grand opening of yet another BREAKOUT location. Have you already been?
What unsuspecting patrons of BREAKOUT Escape Rooms Inc. may NOT know, however, is that they’re not only signing up to be recorded by the escape room’s security cameras with every game they play, but that the footage of their team stumbling around inside a dark room may also be used by CCHS’s very own amateur filmmaker—or that the audio may be lifted for one of his scripts. So if you were thinking about getting hot and heavy in Moonshine Cabin this weekend… think again.
Place your bets on how long it’ll take the James-Mays to put out an official statement… or go to their website and book a room to find out the truth for yourself. Of course, I encourage all of you to draw your own conclusions. I’m not here to make definitive judgments—I’m simply here to share relevant information with you, the good people of Cedar Creek High.
Go forth and play fair, y’all. Just remember… you may end up in more than BREAKOUT’s archival footage if Malachi James-May is your Game Master.
293 Days Before the Accident
While being the new kid is never easy, it gets significantly harder when your identical twin is behind the wheel. To be honest, I don’t know how Santo managed to obtain his license. But as we crest over the hill leading to our latest high school and a slew of kids flinch as my brother clips the sidewalk, I realize I might get attached to this view: lush blue-green mountains, a bright and cloudless sky, a marquee reading WELCOME BACK, CEDAR CREEK WARRIORS!—
Santo floors it over a speed bump. The cheap gas station black coffee I’m currently guzzling, too hot and weirdly sticky, sloshes all over my lap. “Shit!” I hiss. “Are you serious? We’re in a school zone, asshole. Stop going forty in a twenty-five—I look like I just pissed myself.”
“Not my problem!” Santo sings, jerking the steering wheel with a manic flourish. Our car skids into the upperclassmen parking lot and narrowly misses smashing the side mirror of a silver BMW. “I don’t want to be late.”
My hair is falling into my face again, but I make no effort to push it away. Instead, I open the glove compartment and stuff a million napkins into my pants. It’s currently 7:17 AM, which means classes won’t start for another forty-three minutes. This simple fact doesn’t stop Santo from dragging us inside the building, though, where we retrieve our matching class schedules from an annoyed-looking receptionist with an extremely heavy Southern accent and lipstick on her teeth.
“Thank you!” Santo tells her, waving, and then the two of us duck into the cafeteria, where the early arrivals are shunted until classrooms open. Every conceivable booth is filled, and my brother frowns. “What the hell? This is a rural school. Shouldn’t there be somewhere to sit?”
“I know,” a voice chimes behind us. “Unfortunately, it’s always like this. Totally insane, right?”
I turn around, spotting a girl with bright red curtain bangs sitting at her own booth with a group of her friends: a tall curly-haired ginger with a case of bad acne, a beautiful brunette, a dude with a locs ponytail and an anime T-shirt jamming out to whatever’s playing in his hot pink earbuds, and a short blonde.
“Uh, yes,” my brother says. “By the way, your hair is sick.”
The girl with dyed hair smiles. “Thanks. I’m Steffi, by the way. Do y’all want to sit with us? We have the room.”
“Do we?” the brunette says, raising a skeptical eyebrow at the napkin-induced bulge in my jeans. Fuck. But after the redhead gives her a look, the other girl sighs and slides over. There’s a general shuffling as the others move down the padded booth. Santo, of course, doesn’t waste a second before dropping down with a loud, appreciative sigh and an expectant look in my direction. Great.
I take the open seat next to the girl with dyed hair and try to stop my irritation from showing. At a few of our past high schools, we’ve run into the overly eager first-day types, but their enthusiasm never lasts. Once they figure out my brother and I are a package deal—and that we’re not interested in joining their D&D group or their lacrosse team or their HOSA–Future Health Professionals chapter—the bright-eyed student recruiters typically disappear into the throng with their flyers, their friends, and their hollow promises of free food, never to be seen again.
This group has clearly squished together to make room for us, though, and the seating situation isn’t as uncomfortable as I thought it’d be. Whatever. Baby steps.
