Now or never.
Persey held her breath and hit the nine.
PERSEY HAD OFTEN WONDERED WHAT IT MUST BE LIKE TO BE electrocuted. Such a punishment hadn’t been deemed “cruel and unusual” in the eyes of justice departments across the country, who used electrocution as a common means of execution, but Persey had seen a documentary on television once about a man named Willie Francis, who survived the first attempt to execute him by the electric chair. He said that when the switch was thrown, his arms jolted involuntarily and his skin felt as if he was being pricked by thousands of needles all over his body.
It was with a Riot-like intellectual curiosity (fatalism) that she touched the final number on the pad, half wondering if she might discover the truth in Willie Francis’s words for herself.
But instead of the sensation of transforming into a real-life voodoo doll, all Persey felt was the bolt sliding free inside the heavy door, releasing the lock. With her finger still pressed firmly against the glass pad, Persey pushed.
The door swung open.
Adrenaline still pumping blood through her ears with a thunder so deafening she couldn’t even hear the people around her, Persey felt a hand on her back, a figure brushing past her arm, and then her legs were moving as she was half dragged out of the classroom.
“You okay?” Kevin asked. He held her by the elbow, supporting her weight. Once again, he’d made sure she was safely out of a dangerous situation.
Persey nodded, not entirely sure she even knew what “okay” was anymore. “Yeah.”
He leaned closer to her. “Why did you volunteer as tribute back there? What if you were wrong?”
“But I wasn’t.”
“You could have been killed.”
“But I wasn’t.”
Kevin’s brow clouded, and once again, Persey was struck by the dichotomy of his personality: carefree and flippant one moment, deadly serious the next. “Just be careful, okay?”
Persey’s smile was tight. “Okay.”
Neela bounded up to Persey, hands clasped before her. “You saved me. I was so confident the correct answer was the algebraic solution, I didn’t even consider other options. I would have…I mean, it might have been my last…” She heaved a steadying breath. “This is why you solved the Hidden Library: you know how to step back and assess all the options.”
“It just reminded me of the ATM booth,” Persey said, uncomfortable (unworthy) with any kind of praise. “The first answer that popped into my mind was the atomic number for oxygen.”
“Lucky guess,” Mackenzie said, tossing her hair over her shoulder.
“Not so lucky if she’d gotten deep-fried from the inside,” Riot said. “It was pretty ballsy of you to put your life on the line like that.”
Mackenzie grunted. “I wonder if the keypad was really even that lethal.”
“Are there different levels of lethality?” Neela asked. “I was under the impression that dead was dead.”
Mackenzie ignored her. “Maybe Riot was exaggerating.”
Riot shook his electrocuted hand as if it still stung. “Or maybe you’re an ungrateful hag.”
“That room was meant to kill me,” Neela said softly. She seemed surprisingly calm and collected.
“We don’t know that,” Persey lied.
“It’s true.” Neela’s eyes drifted around the new space. “Now who is supposed to die in here?”
There was no mistaking the theme of the new room: if the giant Union Jack pinned on the wall beside a portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II didn’t tip you off, the four round tables, each set with a hand-painted teapot and saucer set, would have. It was High Tea. An English tearoom.
Was this meant for Mackenzie, Miss Royal College of Music?
As with every other room in the competition, the tearoom had been expertly appointed. A white chair sat at each table, the cushions upholstered in a mix of toile, plaid, and Victorian striped fabrics. The flowers in the little vases, which served as centerpieces, were Tudor roses, their virginal white centers offset by bloodred tips, the symbolism of which wasn’t lost on Persey. The walls were papered with a garish pink floral pattern, dotted with framed needlepoints that ringed three sides of the room, and the fourth wall, which housed the flag and the queen, also held a door. It was wooden, old and rough as if it had been taken straight from a thatched cottage in the Cotswolds, but more striking than its style was its functionality. Or lack thereof. This door had no handle.
“Is it too much to hope for that the door will just swing open when we push on it?” Kevin said.
Persey ushered him forward with a sweep of her arm. “You’re welcome to give it a try.”
With a characteristic shrug, Kevin charged forward, lowering his shoulder at the last moment as he drove it into the wooden door.
The thud of Kevin’s impact was quickly followed by a crash as he bounced off the wall, spun backward off-balance, and grabbed hold of the queen’s portrait as he attempted to break his fall, carrying it with him onto the floor. The frame cracked on impact, but thankfully, there was no glass.
“Good news!” Kevin said, popping to his feet. “I wasn’t electrocuted.”
“Is there bad news?” Persey asked.
“Yep. It looks like this door extends down into the floor.”
Mackenzie joined him, peering down at the base of the door. “You’re right. It just disappears down there. That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Kevin snorted. “No, it’s not.”
Mackenzie couldn’t stop herself from flirting, even in the face of death. “You know, I could show you…”
“Maybe later. Right now, I’m starving.” He bent over the nearest table and tried to lift the lid off the pot. “It’s stuck.” Then he tried to pick up the cup and saucer, also with no luck. Same with the vase of Tudor roses and a little tray that held a slip of paper. “I think they’ve been superglued to the table. Why would anyone do that?”
Persey wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.
“Hey, there’s even a check!” Kevin bent over the little tray. “Twenty-two pound fifty. That sounds expensive.”
“Like thirty bucks,” Mackenzie said.
“For thirty bucks, the queen better pour out herself.”
Persey approached the nearest table to see the bill for herself. Unlike Kevin’s, this bill was for seventeen pound even. Weird.
“These needlepoints are all poems,” Neela said. She slowly ringed the room, examining each frame. “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills / When all at once I saw a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils.’”
“Is that Coldplay?” Mackenzie asked. “Sounds like Coldplay.”
“Ew, no.” Riot reared back his head, offended.
“It’s Wordsworth,” Persey said quietly.
Riot’s face lit up with admiration. “Nice.”
It was the first time she’d admitted to anyone that she read poetry, let alone classic British poetry. Not the Elizabethan stuff that Riot specialized in, but the romantic poets. She loved the way they sounded when read by the English narrators in her audiobooks.
“Oh, yeah, and there are a bunch of volumes of Wordsworth piled up down here on the floor,” Neela said.
Kevin clicked his tongue. “Could we all stop quoting dead men before we become dead men?” He sounded annoyed by the poetry.
“And women!” Neela pointed out, way too cheerfully for the sentiment as she moved to the next frame. “‘For whatsoever from one place doth fall / Is with the tide unto an other brought: / For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.’”
Riot was crouched beside one of the tables, checking underneath, where the tables, like the items on them, had been secured to the floor. “Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.”
“Yeah?” Neela said, crouching down. “More piled books. The Shepheardes Calender, Complaints.”
“All Spenser.”
Neela moved on to the next
one. “‘Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.’”
“Milton,” Riot said quickly. “Paradise Lost. Let me guess, the books beneath are titles like 1645 Poems and Samson Agonistes?”
“Yes and yes.”
“Shit.” Riot stood up and raced to the nearest framed quote, moving around the room quickly. “Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare over here in this corner. All British poets.”
Persey immediately realized what he was implying. This room wasn’t meant for Mackenzie: it was meant for Riot.
“I wish a clock would start.” Mackenzie, always the whiner, stalked toward the nearest table. “Then maybe we’d know what we’re supposed to do.” She tried to pull the chair away from one of the tables to sit down, but it wouldn’t budge, so she slipped between it and the tabletop. “I’m tired of—”
The instant her designer jeans hit the damask cushion, the floor jolted.
The ground beneath Persey’s feet jerked sharply, causing her to grab hold of the nearest table to maintain her balance. Then, as she gripped the wooden tabletop by the sides, she had a strange sensation of vertigo, an out-of-body dizziness that made it appear as if the floor was tilting downward. It wasn’t until her feet began to slide against the concrete that she realized it wasn’t an optical illusion.
“The floor is moving,” Kevin said, stating the obvious. “That’s why everything is bolted down.”
Persey, Neela, and Riot were in the corner of the room farthest from the exit, while Mackenzie and Kevin were nearer the door, and while Persey’s side of the room was tilting downward, Kevin and Mackenzie’s corner was rising toward the ceiling, so that the floor at their end was blocking the door entirely.
“Neela!” Persey called, fighting to keep her balance as she sank down beneath the lower edge of the papered wall. Piles of books, the only thing in the room not securely fastened to the floor, toppled over and began sliding across the smooth wooden surface. “Get closer to Kevin and Mackenzie. See if we can even this out.”
Without a word, Neela edged her way toward the door, sidestepping a huge volume of Shakespeare. Persey followed her, slowly, waiting to feel the room equalize. For the first few steps, she was going uphill, fighting for balance on the steeply tilted floor, but as the shift in her and Neela’s weights changed the balance of the room, she felt the floor even out. Inertia slowed the books, scattering them about the room, and when Persey thought the ground had reached horizontal once more, she froze in place.
“You’re at the fulcrum,” Neela said. “The central balancing point between the weights on either—”
“We know what a fulcrum is!” Mackenzie snapped.
Persey stood with her knees bent, feet hip distance apart, as she tried to get a feel for the ground beneath her. She could sense the angles change as the floor moved like a Tilt-a-Whirl.
“Let me try something,” Kevin said. He inched his way around to the left, hugging the wall. Immediately, Persey felt the floor shift toward him, and she had to shuffle her feet to keep from falling.
“Okay,” Riot said, moving in the opposite direction to counter Kevin’s weight. “The whole floor is anchored at the center, and moves according to our weight distribution. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to open the door.”
BZZZZZ.
“Shit!” Four of them said it in unison, all but Neela, who merely sucked in a breath.
“Now what?” she squeaked.
Kevin pointed to the Union Jack. “Look at that.”
Shining through the thin fabric of the flag was a series of numbers. 263,550,198. Not a countdown, this time—it was too huge a number for that, plus it wasn’t moving—but the L-shaped symbol with a line through it signaled that this was a monetary sum in British pounds.
“Two hundred and sixty-three million, five hundred and fifty thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight pounds?” Mackenzie read. “What kind of random-ass amount is that?”
Persey stared at the flag, trying to wrap her head around that huge a sum of money, when a sound caught her attention. A whir of a motor. But when Persey glanced around, she noticed with a sigh of relief that none of the four walls were closing in on them.
Then an odd glint in the corner of her vision made her look up.
Gleaming in the darkness two stories above their heads, Persey could see the pointed ends of the spikes slowly descending upon them.
“GUYS,” PERSEY SAID, HEAD TILTED BACK. SHE COULDN’T TEAR her eyes away from the ceiling. “We’re in trouble.”
“And that’s news, how?” Mackenzie stepped forward away from the wall to get a better look. As she did, the weight distribution of the floor changed, and her corner was pushed farther toward the ceiling.
“Fuck!” Kevin cried, ducking. “You think they’d come up with something more original. Dudes, you’ve done spikes to death.”
Persey groaned. His humor was literally the worst.
The roof wasn’t close enough yet to prove immediately dangerous, but Persey recognized the dilemma right away. Unless their weight was evenly distributed, or they were all gathered at the dead center of the room, one side of the floor would be depressed while the other raised toward the murderous spikes.
Mackenzie froze, arms wide as if trying to keep her balance, then slowly scooted back until the floor was even again. “I thought we were done with those!”
“Thinking was your first mistake,” Riot said.
“Okay, kids, we must be missing something.” Kevin carefully stood upright again, hand still over his head for protection. “Everybody look around.”
Persey’s attention drifted to the number on the wall. 263,681,285.
Was that right?
“Neela,” Persey said, hardly daring to move as she spoke lest the floor might careen upward out of control. “Is that the same number that came up originally?”
Neela tilted her head to the side, lips pursed. “No.” Then she closed her eyes. “Two six three, five five zero, one nine eight.”
Kevin held out a thumbs-up. “Photographic memory for the win.”
“Did anyone see it change?” Mackenzie asked.
“No, but…” Riot’s voice trailed off. “Brace yourselves. I want to try something.”
Persey crouched as Riot took a few tentative steps forward. That moment, the weight balance in the room changed, shifting the floor back toward the exit. The force of gravity pulled on the scattered books, pulling them down toward the dipped corner, and as everything shifted, the numbers on the readout changed as well. The pound amount shot up, accelerating as the floor angle became more precipitous, and stopped when Riot froze, balancing with the floor at a thirty-degree angle.
“So the numbers are important to opening the door, I’m guessing,” he said. “But how?”
“Seems like a lot of money,” Kevin said. He leaned to his left, and the tally went up seven pounds. “Mack, what’s the exchange rate?”
She turned her back on him. “Don’t call me Mack.”
Kevin snorted. “An hour ago, you would have let me call you whatever I wanted.”
“Oh my God!” Neela cried, throwing her hands up in the air. “Is this really the time and place for that? You can lick your ego wounds later; just tell us the freakity frack exchange rate!”
It was the closest Neela had come to losing her shit, and even “freakity frack” seemed practically like a swear word coming out of her mouth. Mackenzie looked startled by the outburst and dropped her snideness for a moment.
“Seventy-five cents to the dollar,” she said.
“Thank you.” Then Neela closed her eyes again, lips working silently. “So almost three hundred and fifty-one million dollars.”
Kevin whistled. “That’d buy you a lot of escape room tickets.”
“Or a lot of tea services,” Riot added.
Persey looked around at the tables, all of which had been set for tea. Tea for four people. Because there were only supposed to be four of them left. Four survivors.
“I wonder…”
“What is it?” Kevin said, watching her closely.
“I don’t know.”
“We’re about to get skewered from above, which means we don’t have time for coyness.” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve got an idea.”
“Okay.” Persey’s eyes drifted to the nearest table. “There are four tables, and four of us should have survived Recess. Maybe everyone is supposed sit at a different table.”
Riot nodded. “Makes sense.”
Persey pointed to the center. “Neela, stand right in the middle. At the…whatever it’s called.”
“The fulcrum. Right.”
The floor tilted precariously while everyone took the nearest chair. Using the oscillations of the floor, Neela found the central balance point and tried to position herself above it without adding weight to one side or the other. Once everyone was settled, the side of the floor that abutted the door shifted up about two feet, and the numbers on the wall raced up and down as people reorganized themselves, coming to a rest at 377,042,581.
Neela did the calculation without being prompted. “That’s five hundred and two million, one hundred and forty-four thousand, three hundred and one.”
“Means nothing to me,” Kevin said. “Switch?”
They shifted chairs moving one seat clockwise, like a complicated game of musical chairs. This time the floor tilted back toward the door, but not far enough.
“Three hundred and seventy-two million,” Neela began, “nine hundred and—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mackenzie said, cutting her off. “We know it’s not right. Keep moving.”
They shifted again, and again the floor dipped toward the door. Again, not far enough.
“Neela,” Riot asked as he stood up from rotation number three, “how many different permutations are there for the four of us at four tables?”
She didn’t even hesitate to do the math in her head. “Twenty-four.”
Persey glanced up at the ceiling, close enough now that an NBA player going for a dunk might be in mortal danger. “We don’t have time to try all of them.”
#NoEscape (Volume 3) (#MurderTrending) Page 26