Text copyright © 2020 by Buena Vista Books, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published by Freeform Books, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Freeform Books, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
Designed by Marci Senders
Cover design and illustration by Andrew J. Brozyna
ISBN 978-1-368-04490-5
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For John Flynn, who forced me to type most of this novel with one hand
“Our puzzle will be your undoing.”
—DERRICK AND MELINDA BROWNE, FOUNDERS OF ESCAPE-CAPADES, LLC
“FOUR MINUTES.”
Persey tried to ignore the voice booming through the loudspeaker, but it was impossible with three people crowded in behind, desperately waiting for her answer. She could feel their dank breaths against her neck in a claustrophobic (creepy) way and fought the urge to start throwing elbows to get them to back off.
You don’t have time for that.
Which was true. Instead of starting a fight, she concentrated on not internalizing their tension. But between the ticking clock, the stress of the moment, and the physical proximity of their bodies, Persey could feel herself absorbing the anxiety that dripped off her teammates in heavy, saplike beads, which made it super freaking difficult to focus on the image before her.
Persey swallowed, her eyes darting around the touch screen at the sixteen cryptic squares filled with color and lines and shadows. Each depicted a snippet of a larger image, but they had been scrambled, rotated. Lines and curves no longer met neatly at the seams, and it was Persey’s job to rearrange them into something that made sense before time ran out.
Okay, well, technically it was a puzzle all four of them should have been unraveling together. But her “teammates” had all thrown up their hands in confusion and so the responsibility (stress) of completing this final task had fallen squarely on Persey’s shoulders.
“Hurry up!” a shrill female voice chirped from behind. “We’ve only got three minutes left.”
Persey didn’t even need to turn around to know the look on the woman’s face. Her beady brown eyes, flanked with creases as if they’d spent the better part of their five decades on this planet pinched in a scowl, were burned into Persey’s memory. Ms. Middle-Age Stress Case had been on edge since they met in the lobby before even entering the library-themed escape room, as if the whole thing was a matter of life and death instead of a silly competition with some prize money on the line.
And my dad called me the idiot.
“Maybe we should let someone else try,” the woman continued, her voice increasing in pitch as her anxiety swelled. “She’s what, like nineteen?”
Seventeen.
“Maybe an adult should do this.”
“Calm down, Sheryl,” her husband countered. The tall Black man with the distinguished gray hair. He exuded the kind of cool, professorial calm that Persey found comforting (intimidating). “She’s nailed everything else so far. Let her have at it.”
“Yeah, Sheryl.” The young, tanned guy in cargo shorts and flip-flops—with a surprisingly pristine pedicure—emphasized Sheryl’s name as if they were old friends, even though he had no connection to her and her husband. His pretend familiarity reeked of sarcasm. “Why don’t you just pipe down and let, uh…” He paused, and Persey felt his warm breath move from her neck to her cheek as he leaned closer. “What did you say your name was?”
I didn’t. “Persey.”
“Whoa!” He sounded (pretended to be) impressed. “I have a cousin named Percival.”
“Per-ci-val,” Mr. Sheryl mused, drawing out each syllable as if he was evaluating how they felt in his mouth. “You have an odd name.” He didn’t elaborate and seemed to be waiting for Persey to chime in with her thoughts on a name that wasn’t hers, had no connection to hers. Like, who the hell would name their daughter Percival? And why were either of them wasting even five seconds thinking about her name at a time like this?
Persey was fourteen when she decided to go by her middle name of Persephone instead of the one her parents had christened her. It felt more comfortable, somehow, even though her family refused to use it. And though she loved the nickname Persey, she hated explaining what it was short for. The moment “Persephone” left her lips, everyone within earshot chimed in with some little factoid about the name, gleaned from their eighth-grade Greek-mythology modules. As if Persey didn’t know exactly who her namesake was.
“The reason I say that,” Mr. Sheryl said, displaying a penchant for pontification, “is because Percival is generally viewed as a male name, from the Chrétien de Troyes epic poem Perceval, the Story of the Grail, set during the—”
“It’s short for Persephone,” she said with a heavy sigh.
“Fascinating!”
Here we go.
Mr. Sheryl cleared his throat. “You know, she was the queen of the underworld in Greek myth, destined to spend six months a year there due to the identical number of persimmon seeds she ate—”
“Pomegranate,” Pretty Pedicure said, correcting Mr. Sheryl.
“Eh?”
“Persephone ate pomegranate seeds in Hades.”
“As a professor of English literature,” Mr. Sheryl began, “I’m relatively sure I can distinguish between my fruits, young man.”
Persey retracted her previous assessment of Mr. Sheryl: although she’d nailed the professorial vibe, there was nothing comforting about his personality—he was as pompous as his wife was tense.
“Two minutes!” Sheryl squealed. “She hasn’t moved a single tile yet. We’ll never win that prize money now.”
As if you actually need it.
“It’s not about the prize, Sher…” her husband said, trying to placate her. Persey wondered if that ever worked.
“Don’t you ‘Sher’ me. I’m going to ask for our money back the second we get out of here. I don’t care if this is supposed to be the only unbeatable escape room in the world. We spent months on the waiting list for this spot and she’s been hogging all the challenges!”
Whose fault is that? It
wasn’t so much that she was hogging the challenges as she was the only one who’d offered a solution to them. Or at least, offered the correct one. After the first two puzzles, the other three participants had informally abdicated leadership of the team to Persey, and it was pretty much understood that it was now her responsibility to solve this final puzzle.
The unbeatable one. According to the propaganda in the lobby, several people had made it to this final challenge of the Hidden Library before time ran out, but no one had managed to solve it and claim the thirty-thousand-dollar prize. This escape room had been installed all over the world, and yet in its four months of operation, not one single person had unscrambled this tangled mess of images on a touch screen embedded in a narrow, old-fashioned secretary desk in the corner of the faux library.
What makes you think that you can, huh? You can’t even pass algebra.
The voice in her head was right. This was her first ever escape room, and it was crazy to think that she could succeed when literally thousands of Escape-Capades aficionados from around the world had already failed. Sure, she’d learned a fair amount about how these things worked—the challenges that built one upon the next, the red herrings and misleading clues, the attempts by the room designers to create a claustrophobic atmosphere—but that was a far cry from actually participating in one of these games. And now here she was, on the brink of solving the impossible. Was she delusional to think she could win this?
Persey closed her eyes and took a deep breath. If she refused to be bullied into action by Sheryl, she needed to be equally as stubborn in resisting her overwhelming (ever-present) sense of self-doubt. Neither would help her, and giving in to either would probably result in a wrong move. She was so close.
According to the counter beside the scrambled image, she could move or rotate only eight tiles in her quest to re-create an image, which would have proved difficult (impossible) even if she had the original in front of her to compare it to. Which she didn’t. She had no idea what the muted browns and reds, diagonal lines and sharp edges, were supposed to represent, but the clues they’d picked up over the course of the last hour should have helped her figure it out by now:
1. The large mural painting of skeletons and peasants dancing in a circle behind which Persey had found a key to the rare bookcase.
2. The eighteenth-century rhyming dictionary on said bookcase in which the word “saucer” had directed them to the half-consumed cup of tea on the librarian’s desk.
3. The tea-leaf motif around the border of the librarian’s framed certificate of completion in a language course on Old English, but written backward in a florid scroll so it looked merely decorative when viewed head-on, but became readable while viewing it in a mirror.
4. The pin on the lapel of the librarian’s tweed coat, slung lazily across the arm of his desk chair, which depicted a medieval cathedral.
They had all led Persey and her co-participants to this secret screen, hidden away in the back of a research cubicle behind a stack of books about the Black Death in Europe. They had to unscramble the image in eight moves or less….
She had missed something. Some connection between the previous clues and the jumbled mess before her.
Danse macabre. A cathedral. Old English.
“Sixty seconds!” Sheryl cried.
And what did a teacup and saucer have to do with anything?
“We’re gonna have to agree to disagree here, Prof,” Pedicure said, still arguing the persimmon-versus-pomegranate point. “But, hey, maybe you can answer me this—any idea what ‘Persephone’ means? Like in ancient Greek and shit?”
“None,” Mr. Sheryl said drily.
Persey froze, her brain fixated on the question. Mr. Sheryl may not have known the answer, but she did.
“Bringer of death,” she said, turning to face them.
Mr. Sheryl’s brows shot up. “Pardon?”
“Persephone means ‘a bringer of death.’” A slow smile spread across her lips as her eyes drifted to Pretty Pedicure’s face: he’d just given her the key to this puzzle. “And I know how to solve this.”
“Seriously?” he said.
“We don’t have time.” Sheryl grabbed her husband’s arm. “THIRTY SECONDS!”
Persey spun back to the screen, flanked by the research volumes on the plague in fourteenth-century Europe. A bringer of death. A bringer of Black Death. How could she have been so blind? She swept her fingers across the screen, swapping and rotating the image tiles as she went.
“A mirror to see the image in reverse, and saucer because it rhymes with ‘Chaucer’!” One more tile swap, then with a single pass of her palm across the screen, all the tiles flipped to their mirror images.
A photograph appeared. It was an old leather-bound tome, medieval in appearance, open to a weathered page with an elegant scroll of handwritten words beside an illustration of a red-robed man on horseback holding a cross. Embellishments of leaves and vines peppered the margins and the first letter of text had been given an elaborate treatment of interlocking scrolls and ribbons. The instant the image came together, the countdown froze and a bookcase on the far wall swung open, revealing the secret exit from the room.
With just three seconds to spare.
MR. SHERYL, THE ENGLISH LIT PROFESSOR, LEANED OVER Persey’s arm for a better view of the screen. “‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ From The Canterbury Tales.” His voice was breathless, disbelieving. “You’ve read Chaucer?”
Persey wasn’t about to admit that reading was not her strong point, or that audiobooks were the only reason she hadn’t failed out of high school yet. Mr. English Lit Professor would 100 percent turn up his nose at her for having listened to The Canterbury Tales instead of reading the words on the page. And she wasn’t about to give him that satisfaction.
“Yes.”
“‘If that ye be so leef to fynde Deeth, turne up this croked wey,’” he quoted in a strange accent. “I should have known.”
You really should have.
“You really should have,” Pretty Pedicure said. His voice was a smirk.
Sheryl embraced her husband. “We did it! We just beat the unbeatable challenge. And not like that Internet debacle last year with the Prison Break escape room. We did this on our own.”
Our own?
“Our names will go down in history!”
Our names?
Pretty Pedicure smiled. “My name does have an historic ring to it.”
“Which is?” Persey realized he’d never said it.
“Kevin Lima.”
“What an incredibly uncommon surname,” the professor said. “Are you of Portuguese decent?”
Kevin opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say a word, applause rang through the room. Persey turned to find a tall young woman with a severe black bob and red-lacquered lips entering the Hidden Library through the secret exit, clapping her elegant, well-manicured hands. She was professionally dressed in a cream pantsuit, which seemed out of place for a Saturday morning, and she was followed by a dozen people, all clad in matching lime-green polo shirts. The entourage beamed from ear to ear, twittering about like a flock of ravenous twentysomething geese, fresh out of college if not still students, and though they didn’t look much younger than their leader, she exuded maturity and authority.
“Congratulations!” the woman cried. Her impossibly high, pointy-toed stilettos clicked in discordant syncopation with her slow clapping as she crossed the library. “You’ve beaten the Hidden Library escape room!”
“Thank you so much!” Sheryl squealed, rushing forward. “Are you from the Five O’Clock News? Do you want to interview us? No one’s ever escaped the Hidden Library before, you know.”
No mention of the prize money, which she’d seemed so intent upon just moments ago—Sheryl was only focused on claiming her fifteen minutes of fame.
“My name is Leah,” the newcomer said, extending her hand to Persey. An intricately carved gold-and-diamond ring glittered in the ove
rhead lights. “And I represent the parent company of the Hidden Library—Escape-Capades.”
The lime-green-polo brigade behind her cheered dutifully at the mention of their employer as one of them scooted out from the pack, holding a large camera. Its shutter snapped rapidly, mimicking the escalating excitement from the Escape-Capades employees, but while Sheryl turned toward the camera and smiled, hand planted on her right hip, Persey flinched away.
They’re taking photos? Seriously?
Persey shielded her face from the camera, desperately hoping her picture wouldn’t turn up on Escape-Capades’ array of social media platforms.
“It’s just for our social media,” Leah said, reading Persey’s body language as she attempted to avoid the camera’s lens. “Don’t you want the world to know about your accomplishment here today?”
No.
Sheryl grabbed her husband’s arm and pulled him to her side. “Take one of Clay and me. And the cash prize! I almost forgot.”
I didn’t.
“It should be split evenly four ways.”
Leah ignored Sheryl for the second time in as many minutes and kept her focus on Persey. “It was impressive to watch you solve that final puzzle despite…distractions.”
Persey smirked at the idea that Sheryl and her husband, two highly educated adults who probably could have run intellectual laps around the academically challenged Persey, had been categorized as distractions. “Thanks.”
“I suppose you’re quite the connoisseur of escape rooms.”
“Obviously,” Kevin said, answering for her. “Persephone here is a champion.”
Leah’s eyes drifted toward Kevin; her smile softened. “Funny you should use that word.”
“Persephone?”
“Champion.”
“Champions,” Sheryl said correcting her with the plural. “We’re a team.”
For the first time since she walked into the room, Leah addressed the other two contestants. “Mr. and Mrs. Rohner, I sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed your escape room experience at Escape-Capades. If you’d give your information to the cashier on your way out, your prize money will be mailed to you.”
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