The fire was so realistic Plum almost dropped her phone for fear of singeing her fingertips.
“What the hell?” Cici jabbed at her phone.
Jude looked incongruously happy. “Wadsworth?” he called into his phone. “Is that you?”
His face fell when the virtual butler didn’t respond.
On all their screens, the flames burned.
“It’s . . . a fire?” Dude asked.
Marlowe looked up. “No, it’s a pyre.”
Sure enough, when Plum watched the video clip, the camera pulled back from the dancing flames at the end. The fire wasn’t shaped like a campfire. Or a bonfire.
It was oblong. The length of a body.
“Oh no,” Cici breathed. “Oh, ew, is that . . .”
“That looks like a body.” Shelley’s voice was thin with disgust.
“Whatever it is, I can’t get it to shut up.” Warix was holding a button on the side of his phone, his mouth a grim line of determination.
Around the room, each person had stood when the alarm sounded. Ready to spring into action, ready to run, ready to do anything.
They all just stood there with their phones in their hands.
The alarms suddenly cut off. The quiet was so deafening Plum felt as if her ears had popped.
The video looping on their screens changed. Each person in their group stood transfixed.
The shot changed, the screens filling with hectic flames—then the screen turned blood-red.
Words appeared on the screen, typing out one letter at a time.
D A N C E
P U P P E T S
“Um.” Jude’s voice was frightened. “What?”
“Well, that makes no sense,” Cici snapped. She cocked a hip and waved her phone in exasperation. “Is it a band?”
“No.” Plum shook her head.
“It’s a message for us.” Sofia picked up Henrietta, wrapping the hen in the now-soiled scarf.
“Those bastards,” Shelley hissed. She held out her phone, displaying the red screen. “We downloaded malware.”
Warix laughed. “Clever.”
“I’m uninstalling it,” Cici said. “If my phone stops this junk, I’m uninstalling Pyre Signs and running my antivirus.”
Warix actually snorted. “Like uninstalling the app will be enough to disable the malware. It was a Trojan horse, and now it’s in all our phones.”
“Do you mind not being so negative?” Shelley’s scarf skirt flared out wide as she whirled on him.
“But what does it mean?” Jude asked, an edge of panic to his voice. “Dance puppets?”
As if his question was what their mysterious killer had been waiting for, the room was suddenly filled with the scratch of a needle and the rasp and hiss of an old-fashioned record playing.
A jaunty band started to play.
“Oh!” Marlowe smiled reflexively.
The music grew louder.
Plum looked up. There were speakers all around the room, fastened to the ceiling, tucked in corners.
A man started singing a song about smoke, cigarettes, the dark all around. It was probably supposed to be romantic, but to Plum it sounded ominous. Gooseflesh rose on her arms. The brass section on the old-timey recording pumped a shrill, syncopated bridge.
Warix started thumping the panels set in the walls around the edges of the room.
Cici and Shelley huddled together, looking at their phones.
Jalen held his fingers in his ears.
Just then the music shifted. A heavy beat pounded over the jazzy 1920s tune.
Marlowe shrieked.
At the same instant, Plum felt the phone in her hand vibrate. She looked down. The letters deleted and reappeared in time with the beat of the club music flooding the room.
DANCE, PUPPETS!
Plum felt her heart plummet. Nothing was over. Brittlyn and Sean weren’t the only targets.
The killer was toying with them.
Coming for them all.
As if to confirm her darkest thoughts, the letters on the screen changed.
DIE, PUPPETS!