There’s daggers in men’s smiles.
—William Shakespeare
CELIA SLAMMED THE DOOR open, fully expecting there to be someone on the other side—some kind of guard, or even some office dweeb watching a monitor. Something. But there was only an empty hallway that was painted white like the wall outside. The end where Celia stood was set at a strange angle—her own door and another directly across, and then a third to the right where the hallway narrowed, almost but not quite making the point of a triangle.
The floor was covered in industrial gray carpeting, and there were two more doors like the one she’d just come through—blank and white, though she noticed that the two doors set opposite hers had deadbolt locks on them. The locks were not thrown.
She turned around and saw the door she’d come through had the same lock. Celia threw the bolt and then took a step back, wondering if the lock would work or if the faceless men chasing her would be able to break through. There were a lot of them. She didn’t want to think about how many there were, or what they might do to her if they caught her.
They can’t pretend anymore that I belong in that place, though. I know now. I know.
She was almost comically out of breath, clutching a stitch in her side. Celia couldn’t believe that anyone would ever think they could convince her that she was a runner. She hunched over a little, trying to catch her breath. One of these doors had to be a way out. And the locked door behind her wouldn’t stop those men for long. They would have another way in.
A moment later, someone tried to pull the door open. This was followed by the pounding of a heavy fist. “Bitch! You fucking bitch! Open the goddamned door now or you’ll be sorry!”
Celia backed away from the door, staring at it as if it were a hovering cobra. The door shook in its frame, and there was a cacophony of yelling voices.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Bitch locked the fucking door, that’s what!”
“How did she get this far anyway? I thought Pete was supposed to inject her again last night?”
Celia was about three feet away from the door, almost in the dead center of the hall, but she stepped a little closer. Maybe she would get some useful information.
“We’re not going to be able to break the fucking door down.” This man’s voice sounded wearier than the others. “We’re going to have to go around to the other exit.”
There was a rumble of protest, and Celia heard someone say, “That’s almost three miles in the other direction, and that’s where the actors are supposed to go! I told Ray that this design was stupid. There should be more access points for us. How are we supposed to run this place properly without enough people and with everything going to one central hub?”
“You hear that, Ray? Stupid fucking design!”
Celia had the distinct impression that this person was shouting up into the sky. Probably to whoever planted those cameras. The person who was watching me in the kitchen, watching me in the fake life they set up for me. But everything comes into this hub. Okay. That’s good to know.
“Ray, get off your goddamned ass and unlock this door!”
The door was pushed again, the lock rattling a little. But it looked like it was going to hold.
Then one of the doors behind Celia flew open. She spun around, her fist raised in the air like she was going to punch whoever came through.
Which is ridiculous, because I don’t know the first thing about hitting people.
She’d assumed it would be another one of the men in black, but instead it was a tiny brunette woman. She was splattered with blood—blood on her face and her glasses and her clothes. She was younger than Celia, maybe college-age. The brunette slammed the door behind her, the same as Celia, but she noticed the lock a lot sooner. The bolt had just clicked home when that door also began to shake from pounding.
“Bitch! Goddamned bitch! I will gut you! I will fucking kill you!”
The brunette turned her back to the wall and leaned against it. She looked as exhausted as Celia felt.
“Typical,” the brunette said, rolling her eyes at the door. “Some man doesn’t get his way and suddenly I’m the bitch for not standing still when he wanted to stab me.”
An involuntary giggle escaped Celia’s mouth and she covered it with her hand. The door behind her shook, and the men on the other side of it continued to shout at Ray (for being stupid) and Celia (for being a bitch).
“Looks like you’re having the same kind of day I am,” the brunette said. She held out her hand, seemed to register that it was covered in sticky blood and dirt, and then withdrew it with a chastened look. “Allison. Allie.”
“Celia. At least, I’m pretty sure I’m Celia.”
Allie raised her eyebrow at that but didn’t ask any questions. “Well, Celia, I’d like to know your life story up to this point, but I think there’s a more pressing need at the moment. We both seem to have arrived here while being chased by shouty men.”
“We’ve got to get out of this place,” Celia said, nodding in agreement. “Whatever this place is.”
“No idea, either? Or where we might be?” Allie asked hopefully.
Celia shook her head. “I mean, my driver’s license says something, but it’s a fake, because I’m not married to Pete and I don’t have a daughter either, and the whole town was a set, so . . .”
“Maybe I should hear your life story,” Allie said. “Yours seems a lot more complicated than mine. I just had all my friends murdered by a crazy slasher. The one shouting behind this door, in point of fact.”
Allie’s eyes welled up behind her glasses, but she sniffed hard and seemed determined to squash the tears down. Celia didn’t know if she should express sympathy or not. Something in Allie’s face told Celia that the younger woman wouldn’t want sympathy from a stranger.
“I don’t remember anything before yesterday, so my life story will be short,” Celia said.
Allie opened her mouth to respond, but as she did, yet another door flew open. This time, two women came through—a tall, slender Black woman and a fit-looking Latina, both wearing the same type of gray tee and black leggings. The Black woman slammed the door shut behind them, then locked it. The left side of the Latina’s face was swollen and blood had run out of her mouth and over her chin.
“Jesus!” Celia said. “What happened to you two?”
“Somebody’s idea of a funny game,” the Latina said, then put her hand to her cheek. “Ow. It hurts to talk.”
“Don’t talk, then. If we come across any kind of ice, we’ll put it on your face, but I think your cheekbone might be broken,” the Black woman said. “It doesn’t look right.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” the Latina said, wincing as she spoke.
“I’m Sanya. This is Maggie. And if you two are ringers like Beth, you ought to go outside and see what we did to her before you even think about taking us on.”
“I don’t know who Beth is,” Celia said. “I’m not even 100 percent sure who I am.”
Sanya raised her eyebrow. “Well, that’s a thing. Where did you two come from? Another part of the game?”
“What game?” Allie asked.
Sanya quickly explained that she and Maggie had been forced to participate in a sick survival game, and they were the last two survivors.
Celia shook her head. “There was a town, and they told me I was married and I lived there, but they were drugging me so I would forget who I really was.”
As she said this, Celia felt the same resurgent well of despair rise up in her that she’d felt over and over in the last day. Would she ever remember who she really was? Or was she broken forever by what they’d done to her?
“I was supposedly camping in the woods with my friends, and now they’re all dead. Except for one, that is. And he wasn’t really my friend. I think he was responsible, anyway. Sorry, I’m not really making sense. My brain is racing a hundred miles an hour, and all I can think is that I’ve got to get out of here,” Allie said.
Just then, the man on the other side of Allie’s door slammed against it, and it shook so hard that Celia thought it would actually buckle. He seemed to have taken a run at the door and tried to tackle it.
All four of them stared at the door for a moment, and then without another word they all started down the long corridor, away from the doors.
“How come the two of you didn’t have a shouting guy calling you a bitch trying to follow through your door?” Allie asked.
“The shouting guys were at the beginning,” Maggie said.
“Yeah, some wannabe militia types,” Sanya said. “But we haven’t seen them in a while.”
“Men in black? With balaclavas? And guns?” Celia asked, trying not to let the tremor she felt show.
“Yeah, did you get a look at them, too? I thought for sure they’d come pouring down the hall here,” Sanya said, pointing in front of them.
The hall seemed very, very long to Celia. It didn’t escape her that their only means of egress were behind them if the men did appear. And they’d all run through those doors, desperate to escape what had been following them. She wanted to run again, to pelt through the halls until she reached the outside world, the real world, but she knew that was foolish. She needed to keep calm, keep herself smart and safe until she was free. Then she could break down all she wanted once she was home.
But I don’t know where my home is. I don’t know where to go, where I belong.
Then she realized what Sanya had just said. “All those men who were following me, I locked them out. And I heard them shouting at someone called Ray to let them in, or else they were going to have to go a long way around. To where the actors come in, he said. The town must have been filled with actors, people who probably didn’t know what was going on.” But some of them had known, for sure. Jennifer, my “best friend.” Pete, my “husband.” I heard them talking about drugging me. So they knew for sure what had happened to me.
“How many men were chasing you?” Sanya asked.
“Maybe twenty?”
Sanya and Maggie exchanged a look.
“That’s about how many were outside our maze when they forced us in,” Maggie said. She spoke very slowly, every word obviously painful.
“But this can’t all be run by twenty guys,” Allie said. “Look at the size of this place. Look at the size of the . . . I don’t know what you would call them. Scenarios, maybe? They were huge. You’d need a lot of people to build and maintain all this.”
“Build it, yes,” Maggie said. “Maintain it . . . they probably have a cleaning crew or whatever that comes in to take care of certain things, a crew that doesn’t really know what goes on here. But otherwise they probably have a certain degree of automation controlling the climate and whatnot.”
“How long could this have been going on?” Celia said. “I mean, without people finding out about it? It can’t be that women go missing in huge numbers and nobody cares.”
“If you’re a blonde white woman, somebody will care, especially the major news networks,” Sanya said.
“They do love a missing white girl. Especially a young pretty one,” Allie said. “But everyone else—well, let’s just say that aside from their family and some close community members, there are varying degrees of concern.”
“Particularly from police,” Maggie said.
“And anyway,” Sanya said. “We’re all from different places. At least, we were in the maze. Maggie is from Arizona. I’m from Chicago. There were women from Florida and Virginia and Wyoming. So it’s not like these fuckers are scooping up a huge group of women from one area. They picked and chose. It wouldn’t look like a vast conspiracy of kidnappings. It would look like, well, the regular sort of girls-gone-missing stories that happen every day.”
Celia wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t, but it felt crazy to her that all of this could happen. She’d thought the worst of it was being drugged, or having a parade of people trying to convince her that the wrong life was hers. But the stories that Sanya and Maggie had told, about a kind of culling game, and Allie talking about all her friends being killed . . . How could this happen? How could so many women be kidnapped by one organization? How could authorities not be aware of it? She didn’t say any of this, though, because she still felt a little shaky and a little unsure of her ground. And if she was completely honest . . . she didn’t know if she could or should trust these women. They might be a part of the organization. This might still be part of the game, or the story, or whatever. Celia would just keep her mouth shut as much as possible, and watch and wait for her chance. And she would see if these women were the real thing, if they were what they said they were.
“But still,” Celia said, going back to the original topic. “Twenty guys to control three scenarios? To keep us from escaping?”
“Why not?” Sanya said. “As long as they have weapons and we don’t, as long as they outnumber us . . .”
She trailed off.
“It does seem crazy,” Allie said. “So many things could go wrong.”
“So many things did go wrong,” Maggie said. “We’re all here, inside the complex, instead of out there in their stories for us.”
“Besides, is the idea of twenty guys running all this crazier than being dropped into a survival game? Or being forced to live out a slasher movie? And I don’t even know what happened to her yet, but it sounds like some Stepford wife shit.” Sanya gestured at Celia.
“Stepford wife,” Celia murmured. “In that story, all the wives were replaced by robots, right?”
“Sounds kind of like what they wanted to do to you. Drug you, gaslight you, make you a robot that did what they wanted,” Allie said.
“But why?” Celia said. The word broke out of her almost involuntarily, the chorus to the song that had been playing in her head almost nonstop for two days. Why? Why? Why? “What did I do to deserve this? What did any of us do?”
“I’m not sure I care,” Maggie said. “I just want to find my daughter and get out of here.”
“Your daughter is here?” Allie asked.
“Yeah, they used hostages to force us to participate,” Maggie said. “They claimed that our hostages would be killed if we didn’t make it through the game.”
“But who built this place?” Celia asked. “It’s enormous. The town I just came from—there are two or three miles of road around it, and woods, and houses everywhere. And you say that you were in a maze, a maze big enough to send you running around for hours.”
“And the place where Brad brought us—Brad was my friend Cam’s boyfriend, and he disappeared in the night, and by the way, I definitely think he was responsible for what happened, and when I see him, I’m going to kick his balls into his throat,” Allie said. She took a deep breath. “Anyway, that place was a cabin in the middle of trees, and there was at least two miles of road leading up to it. And somehow all of this is inside.”
“Yeah, we noticed the fake light, too,” Sanya said.
“What fake light?” Celia asked.
“Like the sunlight wasn’t quite right,” Allie said. “You can tell we’re under a big dome or something. They did a pretty good job faking it, but once you notice it, you can tell that the sun isn’t like the real sun.”
“I didn’t notice. I mean, I kind of noticed there was something weird about the night sky, not enough stars, but I didn’t figure it out,” Celia said, feeling stupid. “I hardly noticed anything, because all I could think about was remembering who I was. Who I really was, not the me they told me I was. And they tried to set me up for a murder, too, and that was pretty distracting.”
“Damn,” Sanya said. “They went all out for you.”
“Seems unnecessarily complicated,” Maggie said. “To set up a whole storyline and force you to live in it.”
“Maybe that’s why they only put one woman in that position,” Allie said. “Just to test it out, like. To see if it would take.”
“But you had all your friends with you, and you thought it was just a regular trip,” Maggie said. “How did they get you inside here without you noticing, though?”
“Drugged,” Allie said. “All of us, except Brad. He drove the car. We were drinking from a cocktail that this guy Steve supposedly made for us, and then we all passed out.”
“And we were drugged and woke up in here,” Sanya said. “Somebody’s got a pharmacist on staff.”
“Yeah, the last thing I remember is going to bed,” Maggie said.
“Me, too,” Sanya said. “And then waking up here. Which means they must have . . . what? Come for us in the night? Drugged our mouthwash?”
Maggie shook her head. “I have no idea. I don’t remember anything after shutting off the light.”
As she talked, Maggie held her hand to her cheek and her eyes streamed. Celia had no idea how Maggie was dealing with the obviously profound amount of pain she was in.
They reached the end of the corridor. It only turned in one direction, so they followed it. Celia half-expected those twenty men that they’d just been discussing to be waiting for them, smug and secure in their conviction that they could overwhelm four women. But there was no one at all, and it was so strange. Almost as strange as finding a camera in the kitchen, or an empty house instead of a furnished one.
This complex was clearly enormous, and yet there was no hum of activity, no rush of people shouting, “Hey, you don’t belong here!” Was it all another trick? Another trap? Were the four of them being lured into some further game? Or was it another trick just for Celia? What if Maggie and Sanya and Allie were just really good actors, like Katherine or Jennifer in the town that had been made up for Celia?
At the end of the corridor, another door waited for them. Celia watched the door come closer and closer, closer and closer, and wondered what would happen to them on the other side. She wondered what she would do if none of these women were who they seemed to be.
MAGGIE’S FACE HURT SO bad she could barely think. She sincerely hoped that she’d broken a few of Beth’s ribs. Her left eye was blurry, too. She knew that if she didn’t get to a doctor soon, she’d be running the risk of complications and infections, and she did not need any more complications or infections in her life. She needed to find Paige and GTFO.
The tall woman, Celia, seemed really shaky. If what she claimed had happened to her was true, then she had reason to be shaky.
No, don’t think that way, she told herself. Don’t be like, “Oh, she claimed this happened.” We need to believe each other. We need to trust each other. Just because Beth turned out to be terrible doesn’t mean that everyone is out to get you.
Maggie knew she could trust Sanya, at least. Sanya had helped her take down Beth. If Sanya had been a part of the group, a part of the system that had imprisoned Maggie and killed Roni and Natalie and all those other women she only knew by number and not name . . . well, if Sanya had been a part of that group, then Sanya wouldn’t have helped Maggie. Sanya would have helped Beth instead. So Sanya was safe. Sanya was on her side.
Maggie knew she shouldn’t feel bad about what happened to Beth, but part of her did. It didn’t feel right to hurt somebody that way. It shouldn’t feel right.
That same part of her knew that Beth would have killed her, and that was unacceptable. Not for her own sake, but because who would rescue Paige if Maggie died? Noah wouldn’t, that was for sure. Maggie was still convinced that Noah had gotten her into this shitshow in the first place.
The four of them stopped in front of the door at the end of the corridor. They all looked at each other.
“So, we should go through,” Allie said. Her brows were pushed together and her hands were curled into fists.
“Yeah, I think we have to,” Maggie said.
“It’s go through here or go back the way we came,” Sanya said.
“No, thank you,” Celia said.
Maggie grabbed the doorknob, turned it and pushed.
They were in a large room, maybe the size of one of those floor-sized offices one might see in a downtown building in an urban area. The room was painted a flat white and the floor was covered in the same serviceable industrial carpeting as the hallway. It looked like it might be big enough to accommodate ninety or one hundred people in cubicles, but there were no cubicles. There was, again, no hustle and bustle of people. It seemed unbelievably strange to Maggie to have all this space and nobody to administer it.
Along the wall in front of them, there was a huge bank of television screens—about thirty, by Maggie’s calculation. Each set of ten screens seemed to accord with one section of this complex. Maggie recognized different areas of the maze she and Sanya had just run through. The second section showed a cabin, and inside the cabin were two dead people, a boy and a girl in Allie’s age range.
So that part is true, Maggie thought.
The third bank of TVs showed scenes from what looked like a restaurant kitchen, a suburban house, a parking lot, and a few other places.
Underneath the monitors, there was a long counter. There were three computers set directly in the middle, each with its own flat-screen, keyboard and tower. In front of the middle computer was one rolling office chair. The chair was empty.
At the far corner of the room from where Maggie, Sanya, Allie and Celia stood, there was another door.
Celia and Allie approached the monitors. Maggie turned around to see if the door they’d just come through had a bolt like the others. It did, and Maggie threw it.
Sanya nodded. “So they can’t sneak up on us.”
“They probably have another way of entering this part of the building anyway,” Maggie said. “But just in case.”
“Why make it easy on them?”
“Exactly.”
“Look!” Celia said, pointing at one of the monitors. “They’re all in a truck.”
One of the monitors seemed to be following the progress of a truck down a winding country road. Maggie assumed there must be several cameras, triggered by motion.
The truck was some kind of large pickup. The camera showed three men sitting in the front cab—one driving, one in the passenger seat, and one on the secondary bench behind them. Maggie only saw that guy because he leaned forward between the other two.
Several men were jammed into the back of the pickup. Maggie did a quick head count.
“There’s only eight of them in the back of the truck, and three in front,” Maggie said. “That means the rest of them are probably trying to get through the door you came through, Celia.”
“Or they have another way around,” Allie said, scanning all the televisions. “I don’t see the doors on any of these screens, though.”
“I think the cameras are triggered by motion,” Maggie said.
“Right, so we should be able to see the rest of the group moving around, but I don’t. Could they have shut off the cameras so we won’t know what they’re doing?”
Sanya shook her head. “Presumably someone would have to do that from this room. Unless they deliberately wrecked their own cameras, which seems shortsighted.”
“How come nobody is actually watching the televisions?” Celia asked. “They can’t all be out there, can they?”
“That would be amazingly stupid,” Allie said. “Even if they do think that we’re all under their control. It would be foolish not to assume that at least one of us wouldn’t follow their set narratives. I can’t believe they didn’t prepare for the possibility that there might be a breakout.”
“Men always underestimate women,” Celia said with an eye roll.
“And four of us got fucking out,” Sanya said.
Allie tapped the keyboard of the central computer. The monitor sprang to life, and it showed the area just outside the door where Maggie and Sanya had left the maze.
Allie tapped the second keyboard and said, “That’s the door I came in. You can see my personal psychopath is still there trying to break down the door.”
All four women watched in silence for a moment as a very large man wearing a black half-mask and a blood-spattered flannel shirt over jeans ran at the door with his shoulder down, like he was trying to make a football tackle.
“I used that move on him,” Allie said idly.
“You tackled that guy?” Celia said, startled. “He looks like he’s about three times your size.”
“I caught him off guard,” Allie said. “And then I didn’t hang around. I ran.”
“Good thinking,” Sanya said.
“Which is what we should be doing now,” Maggie said. “I have to find Paige and get out of here. Who knows when those guys will find their way back into this building.”
“Hang on a second,” Allie said, tapping the third keyboard to wake up the last computer. “It makes sense to try to gather as much information as we can before we go barreling forward.”
Maggie knew this was the smart thing to do, the right thing to do. She’d just run through a killer maze and she wanted to make it out of here alive. If they could find a way to the hostages using the cameras on these computers, then she would reach Paige even faster. But it was hard not to feel like she was wasting time in this room, like every second they stayed there, they were in more danger.
The third computer monitor showed the nine men who’d been missing from the truck. They had collected a big piece of wood, almost like a tree trunk, from somewhere and were using it to rush and slam against the door that Celia had come through.
“Okay,” Allie said. “So they’re all accounted for, at least all the men we know about. Some of them are in a truck trying to reach another way into this area, but it appears to be a long way around. The rest are trying to get through the doors.”
“Is there any way to see the rest of the facility?” Maggie asked. “I need to find my daughter, and so does Sanya.”
The door in the corner of the room swung open, and a man who looked like a Hollywood nerd stereotype stood there holding an armful of Dorito snack bags. He was almost painfully thin, his jeans and white polo shirt hanging off his body. He wore plastic glasses with those pretentious clear frames that Maggie hated, and gray Allbirds, which marked him as Silicon Valley basic. His mouth gaped.
Before Maggie realized her feet were in motion, she’d rushed at him, knocking the Doritos from his arms and pushing him to the floor.
“Where’s Paige?” she shouted as she kneeled on his arms, pinning them to the sides of his body. She grabbed hold of his polo collar and lifted his face closer to hers for a second before slamming his head to the floor. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Ow! I don’t understand—what are you doing here?” he said. He had very pale blue eyes behind the glasses.
“Where’s my daughter?” Maggie shouted again as the other three rushed over to join her. “Where are you keeping the hostages?”
“How did you get in?” he asked. He seemed strangely unfazed by the fact that Maggie was holding him on the floor. “It shouldn’t have been possible.”
“You mean, it shouldn’t have been possible that we would read an ‘exit’ sign and go through the door?” Allie said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
He shook his head. “No, it shouldn’t have been possible for any of you to outrun your pursuers. Women are slower runners than men, statistically speaking. Some member of the group should have caught you. Except for you and you.”
He used his head to indicate Maggie and Sanya. “It was Beth’s job to ensure none of you made it to the exit. Why didn’t she kill you in the ring?”
He said all of this like he was a robot caught on a “does not compute” cycle, like his expected programming had a bug in it.
“I’m not here to answer your questions. You’re here to answer mine,” Maggie said, slamming his head back on the floor again.
“Watch with the head slams,” Sanya said. “If he has a concussion, he can’t tell us anything.”
“A concussion is going to be the least of his problems if he doesn’t tell me where Paige is right the fuck now.”
He must have seen the deadly intent in Maggie’s eyes, because he said quickly, “She’s not here.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Maggie said. “I saw that video of her.”
He shook his head. “I swear, she’s not here. There are no hostages here. Those were tricks, deepfakes. We knew some of you wouldn’t participate if you thought only your own lives were at stake.”
“Deepfakes?”
Allie said, “It’s a video of a person who’s been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else. The technology is getting better all the time. Some of the videos really seem to be the person they are portraying.”
Maggie stared at the man. “You’re telling me my daughter isn’t even here?”
“No, she isn’t,” he said. “It would have been impractical to bring ten additional hostages along with the players. None of you were expected to survive.”
“Thought so,” Sanya said. “Number two was out there trying to run us over just because she thought she could win. But they didn’t intend for any of us to win.”
“Why would any of you win?” the man said. “I designed the game with the weaknesses of women in mind. You shouldn’t have had the strength or the stamina to make it as far as the exit, and if you did—well, there were safeguards put in place. Safeguards which seem to have failed.”
He frowned, but it seemed like an inward-looking expression, like he was contemplating the ways in which he would improve his system in the future.
“As I just said, men always underestimate women. Always,” Celia said.
“So we don’t have to worry about our girls,” Sanya said. “That’s good. That’s the important thing. Now we just need to get ourselves out of here and to the closest police station.”
The man gave a little barking laugh, and Maggie slammed his head down once more.
“Would you please stop doing that?” the man said, his voice strained.
“No.” Maggie slammed his head down again just on principle. “What’s so freaking funny?”
He gave a little shrug, and Maggie was struck by how blasé he seemed. He wasn’t enjoying the head slams, but otherwise he didn’t appear very concerned about their presence—more annoyed, really, like they were a calculation he’d figured wrong.
“There’s no escaping here, and there are no police to be found,” he said. “You’re on an island. My island.”
AT THAT MOMENT, ALLIE remembered a short story she’d read a while ago—maybe her senior year in high school or freshman year in college; she couldn’t recall exactly. It was called “The Most Dangerous Game,” and it was about a weird big-game hunter who called himself General Something. He had a private island where he lured people to be the prey in a sick hunting game.
“General,” she murmured, trying to remember his name.
“General what?” Celia asked.
“From the story,” Allie said, then snapped her fingers before pointing them at the man on the ground. “General Zaroff!”
The man gave another of his strange barking laughs. “Ah, no. If you’ll recall, in that story it was man that was the most dangerous animal. And none of you are men. Especially not you.”
He leered a little at Allie’s breasts. Nothing made her angrier than men gawping at her over a physical trait she could not control. It was one of the things that always pissed her off about Brad, the way his eyes always flickered down from her face. She slammed her sneakered foot into the man’s nose, and he screamed as blood spurted out.
Maggie had started when Allie moved next to her, but then she nodded up at Allie in approval.
“Bitch!” he shouted, and now he began thrashing underneath Maggie, trying to get out of her grip. “Fucking bitch! I’ll kill you for that!”
“How many times today have I heard that?” Allie said in a bored voice. “I outran your personal Michael Myers, and I’m pretty sure I can take down your skinny ass.”
“Fucking cunt,” he said, his voice full of venom. The malfunctioning robot was all gone now. “You’ll get what’s coming to you.”
“Try to catch me, asshole.” Allie peered more closely at the man. There was something about him that seemed familiar, like she’d seen his face before. He was older than her, and she didn’t think she’d seen him around campus. But there was something, something about his pale eyes and his stupid clear plastic glasses, something she’d seen pretty recently . . .
“So my daughter isn’t here?” Maggie said, her voice breaking into Allie’s thoughts. “You’re not lying about that?”
“No,” he said impatiently. His voice was thick, and the blood coming out of his nose was running back along his cheeks. “Why would I lie about it? It’s impractical, like I said. The logistics of transporting fourteen of you were enough.”
“Fourteen?” Sanya said. “There were only ten players in the maze. And one of them was yours.”
“First her,” he said, pointing his bloodied nose toward Celia. “Then the nine players. That was a lot of work on our part. We had to pick our times to grab you, keep you drugged until you were in the scenario.”
“And Brad brought me and Cam and Madison and Steve,” Allie said, her brows knitted together as she stared at his face. She knew him. She knew him, and the knowledge danced just out of reach. “Which means we can’t be too far off the West Coast, because we arrived here in his car.”
“Well, if they brought us here, then there has to be a way off,” Maggie said. “A boat or something. We can find the boat and get out of here while the rest of the dipshits are scrambling around trying to break down locked doors. We can flag down the Coast Guard on the way.”
“What do we do with him?” Sanya said. “There’s no duct tape around to wrap him up.”
“Wrapping him in duct tape seems awfully humane,” Celia said, practically spitting the words. “Maybe we should tie him up and drag him behind the boat. Then, if he’s still alive, we can hand him over to the police right away.”
“You’re not going to get anywhere,” he said, with a tone of such unbearable smugness that Allie wanted to stomp on his face again. “The others will be back soon, and they know that there aren’t supposed to be any survivors. Except for you.”
He frowned up at Celia.
“Why me?” Celia said.
“Well, Pete wanted to fuck you first,” he said. “But you shook off your dose a lot sooner than we expected, and he didn’t get his chance. We’ll have to re-dose you and drop you back into the scenario.”
“You did all this,” Celia said, her voice shaking, “all this, because some guy wanted to fuck me and he wanted me drugged so I would play along?”
He shook his head, and the blood from his nose sprayed from side to side.
“I mean, Will wanted to kill you, but Pete wanted to fuck you first, so we arranged a story where they could both get what they wanted.”
“Will,” Celia said faintly. She crouched down, her head in her hands. “Will, from the restaurant? What did I do to him? Why would he want to kill me?”
The man gave his strange barking laugh for a third time. “He was pretty angry when you reported him for assault. All this could have been avoided if you’d just taken your lumps and kept your mouth shut.”
“Assault,” Celia said. Allie heard the agony in the other woman’s voice. “I can’t remember. I can’t remember. Every time I think I can, it slips away from me.”
“Troy did a pretty good job with his formula, then,” the man said. “We were hoping for a complete memory wipe and personality replacement, and it looks like he didn’t quite succeed there, because your original self started to resurface a lot sooner than we expected. We could almost tell when it was happening because you seemed to be getting headaches. I don’t think we anticipated that your personality would be that strong. I think he’ll make some changes for next time, tweak some of the dosages.”
“Next time?” Celia said, and she stood up, glaring down at the man. “There won’t be a next time. I’m leaving, and this place, whatever it is, is going to be shut down. You can’t play with people’s lives this way. You can’t just do whatever the hell you want.”
The man didn’t say anything, just stared up at the four of them with the kind of smug certainty that Brad always had, stuffed with the knowledge that he was white and male and privileged, and that all ways would be smoothed for him. And it was that look, the ridiculously smug look that made Allie want to kick his face, that finally twigged Allie’s memory.
“Raymond Matheson,” Allie said. “You’re Raymond Matheson.”
“Who the fuck is Raymond Matheson?” Sanya said.
“One of these Silicon Valley assholes who made a zillion dollars on a tech startup and now spends all his time giving shitty TED talks and spending his money on idiosyncratic personal bullshit instead of helping the world.”
“Oh, I’m helping the world,” Matheson said, and Allie was sure all four of them heard the unsaid thought that followed—by getting rid of bitches like you.
“Are you one of these guys who builds rockets for your rich friends to fly in?” Sanya said. “I saw something about one of those guys. And another one who drank blood to stay young or something?”
“No, that’s not him,” Allie said. “I heard that you’d bought a private island off the Washington coast, and that you’d built a huge secret complex on it. The media couldn’t stop speculating about how many bathrooms you had in here, how many bedrooms, what you might do with all the extra space. But you wouldn’t let anyone in to see it, and all the workers who helped build the project had to sign NDAs. Everyone, down to the guy who swept up the sawdust. Apparently, you put the fear of god in them. Nobody would talk, not even anonymously.”
“Well, at least the fear of the legal system,” Matheson said with a little smirk. He jerked his head at Celia. “All those actors who performed for her scenario had to sign the same thing. Nobody will talk unless they want to get sued into oblivion.”
“But you killed someone! Mrs. Corrigan was killed,” Celia said.
Matheson gave Celia a dismissive look. “She wasn’t killed. You didn’t actually get close to the body, did you? You didn’t check it.”
“No, because I could see the cords in her throat, for god’s sake. There was blood everywhere.”
“Just like Cam. Exactly like Cam,” Allie murmured.
“Who is also not dead,” Matheson said. “I anticipated that if the bodies were gory enough, you wouldn’t actually get close to them, wouldn’t check to see if they were dead because it would be obvious. I hired a special effects makeup artist to create fakes. He did an incredible job, by the way. Both were astounding works of art.”
“Just a fake body,” Celia said, almost in an undertone. “All pretend.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Allie shouted. She was torn between fury and relief. “You made me think my friends were dead and it was all makeup?”
“Oh, Madison and Steve are dead,” Matheson said, with the same tone he might use to report that there was no milk in the fridge. “But Cam isn’t. Why would Brad want to kill her?”
“Why would he want to kill any of us?” Allie said. She wanted to pull on her own hair or start screaming endlessly. None of this made sense. None of it.
Matheson shrugged. “He didn’t want his girlfriend hanging around the two of you anymore. Said you were a bad influence. And Steve was an accident, I guess. Luke got a little overexcited. Brad was irritated about it at first, but he decided Steve would have been annoyingly mopey if his girlfriend was killed, so he’s not that upset about it.”
“Bad influence?” Allie said, her voice dangerous. It seemed to confirm everything she’d ever thought about Brad, and now here he was, in abuser fashion, isolating his girlfriend from anyone who might help her. Except that he’d gone way farther than isolating Cam. He’d tried to have Allie and Madison killed. He’d succeeded in one case, and Allie’s stomach felt sick and sore.
“Those actors have to get here every day,” Maggie said, cutting into Allie’s thoughts. “Right? They don’t live here?”
“Of course not,” Matheson said. “I don’t want that rabble poking around. People always get curious.”
“So there’s probably a ferry or something,” Maggie said. “We can go there and leave with the performers.”
“That exit is through Celia’s village,” Allie said. “We’d have to go back a long way, right? That’s what it sounded like when they were all shouting. That was one of the reasons they were mad.”
“All shouting?” Matheson said. “When was this?”
“Were you taking the world’s longest shit or something?” Celia asked. “When all your little fake militia friends chased me up to the door and I locked them out.”
Matheson’s cheeks reddened, and a muscle in his jaw twitched.
“You were in the bathroom,” Allie said, laughing. “You’re all pissed off that we made it in here, and you don’t even know how we got here, because you were supposed to be watching the cameras, monitoring what happened, but you weren’t.”
“I would have thought that the rest of them could handle a few women,” he said through gritted teeth. “They’re carrying Tasers. They’re all larger and stronger than you four.”
“But not smarter,” Maggie said.
“Definitely not smarter,” Sanya said.
“Why haven’t they made it back here yet, though?” Allie wondered. “It’s been a while now.”
“I bet the only access from the performers’ entrance is from the water, right?” Celia said. “So they have to get a boat and come around to this side of the island.”
“He’s not answering, which means you’re right,” Allie said. “And he can’t stand it.”
“You’re not as smart as you think you are, you little bitch,” Matheson snarled. “It doesn’t matter what you try to do. You can’t get away from here. None of you can. I know you can’t. I planned this place so that nobody could leave unless I wanted them to leave. Besides, women are inferior to men. They talk big but they can never prove that they can actually do what they say.”
“Prove . . .” Allie said. Just before she’d found the exit out of her personal Nightmare Forest, she’d been thinking prove it. Somebody had said those words to her recently. “Prove it. That was you. The guy who was being a dick online.”
“Prove it,” Maggie repeated. “It sounds familiar.”
Sanya snapped her fingers. “There was some guy on a message board I was on. He said that to me! We were talking about books, about YA dystopias . . .”
“Wait, I remember that, too!” Maggie said. “The conversation took a real turn after some guy insisted that I prove that I could do what I said in the chat. I remember that I blocked him.”
Maggie stared down at Matheson’s face.
Allie shook her head. “That was you? You took what some people said online, just messing around, having a conversation with like-minded folks, and turned it into some kind of real game? You built this complex just so you could fuck with people who pissed you off in a chat?”
Celia had her hands around her head again, like she was trying to shake something loose. “Prove it, prove it—I remember! I remember this. I was on a message board and we were all chatting about how much we love mysteries, especially cozy mysteries. And then there was some guy who just went off completely, totally lost his mind.”
“This guy,” Allie said, nudging Matheson’s head with her foot. He glared up at her. “Right? You have no actual life, so you just lurk around on message boards, looking for people to fuck over?”
“But how did you find out who we were? There are privacy settings, and I know that I, at least, have a username that’s not my full name,” Maggie said.
Matheson blew a raspberry. “Please. I can’t believe anyone thinks their information is private online. It’s literally the easiest thing in the world to track someone back to their real identity.”
“And, what? Once you found out who we were, you put a target on us?” Celia asked.
“Not everyone. I don’t have that kind of time. There are dozens of bitches like you everywhere, running their mouths off because they know there are no consequences,” Matheson said. “I selected women who had someone in their lives willing to pay for their punishment.”
“Willing to pay?” Sanya said.
“Like my shitty ex-husband, I’m sure,” Maggie said. “I knew he was a part of this.”
“Brad,” Allie said. “Brad paid you to set up that horror-movie story, because he knew that I liked those kinds of movies and it would be the perfect way to get rid of me and Madison.”
Matheson didn’t say anything, just gave them a self-satisfied look. Allie actually felt her leg twitch, felt the longing to smash his face with the heel of her shoe some more.
Allie felt very vindicated at that moment, remembering how she’d insisted that Brad was a part of the terror at the cabin. Steve had scoffed, and Madison hadn’t wanted to believe it. But she’d been right.
You were right, but you lost your friends. The only real friends you had.
Allie felt her eyes welling up, felt tears choking her throat. She turned her face away so that Matheson wouldn’t see, so that he couldn’t get any satisfaction from her pain. But it was too late.
“Aww, missing your widdle girlfriend Madison?” he said in a mock-baby voice. “I don’t know why. She was only good for one thing, and you don’t swing that way, as far as I can tell.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Maggie said, hauling Matheson to his feet. “Celia, Allie, search his pockets. See if he has a cell phone, maybe a badge or something to get through doors in this complex.”
Allie had already noticed the bulge of the cell phone in Matheson’s left pants pocket. She pulled it out, noticed that it required facial recognition to work, and stuck it in front of Matheson’s face before he realized what had happened.
“Bitch! That’s a violation of my privacy! There is important company information on that device, and you have no right to take it,” he shouted, and he really struggled for the first time in Maggie’s grip.
Maggie kneed him in the balls so hard that Allie swore she saw them come out his ass. Matheson’s face purpled and his knees buckled. Maggie released him and let him fall to the ground, where he moaned, putting his hands over his crotch.
Allie looked at the phone. She noticed that the recorder was on, and that it had been recording for the last fifteen minutes or so. “Oh-ho! What is this? A recorded confession of all of your misdeeds?”
“Fucking cunt,” Matheson wheezed. “You are going to be destroyed, I swear to Christ.”
“When did he turn on the recorder?” Maggie wondered.
“Asshole was probably recording a voice memo or something in the hallway before he came in here,” Allie said. “And lucky for us, the phone was still recording the whole time we were talking. I wonder what the world will think when this is released online. I bet the police will be more interested in your little misogynist’s playland then.”
For the first time, Allie noticed a flicker of concern in Matheson’s eyes, quickly swallowed by rage.
“I’m going to get you. I’m going to get all of you. You will pay for this, you—”
“Fucking bitch,” Allie said in a bored voice. “Mix it up, why don’t you?”
“All right, let’s take this piece of shit with us,” Maggie said. “If we run into any members of the goon squad, we can throw his body in front of us if they shoot.”
“Do you think they have guns?” Celia asked in a small voice.
“I’m sure,” Maggie said. Despite her obvious pain, she seemed to have gotten a surge of energy from manhandling Matheson. “Whether or not they’ll actually use them on us is another story. Maybe some of them, at least, won’t be able to kill a woman when she’s looking him in the eyes. It’s really easy to kill us when you’re just watching and laughing through the screen, though, huh? Real easy to set off your little tricks and traps.”
Sanya ran back to the monitors. “I can’t see the truck anymore, so I’m assuming those men are either on a boat or boarding it. But the ones who followed Celia and Allie here are still outside—Allie’s psycho killer and the group that was trying to bust down the door with a tree like they’re in The Lord of the Rings.”
“Great. It’s time to get out of here before any of them work out how to find us,” Maggie said.
“OKAY, LET’S GO,” MAGGIE said, indicating to Matheson that he should get up.
Matheson shook his head. “You can’t make me.”
“Seriously? How old are you, five?” Allie asked.
“Get up now or I’ll break every bone in your right hand,” Maggie said. Before today she would have said that she abhorred violence, that she could never hurt someone unless in self-defense. But Ray Matheson and what Ray Matheson had done to her and Sanya and Celia and Allie, what he had done to all the other women in the maze—that seemed to more than justify any amount of violence. “I am absolutely goddamned done with you and your bullshit.”
Matheson must have seen the truth of it in Maggie’s eyes. After all, she had slammed his head to the ground enough times to give him a concussion and had kneed him in the balls hard enough to prevent future generations of Mathesons. She couldn’t take credit for his swelling nose, though. Allie had done a good job there.
Matheson stood, his movements slow and careful. His eyes weren’t on Maggie, though. They were on Allie and the phone she had in her hand.
“You’re lucky you outran Luke, you dumb bitch. Luke and Brad and a couple of others were planning on reenacting that scene from I Spit on Your Grave.”
Maggie didn’t know what this meant, but she knew it was a barb meant to hurt Allie. Instead of responding to the provocation, Allie very deliberately slid Matheson’s cell phone into her front pants pocket and covered the top with her sweatshirt, so it couldn’t be seen.
“Trying to piss me off so that you can grab your phone back?” Allie said. “Try again. You’re pathetic.”
Matheson’s face reddened again. “I am not pathetic. I am a goddamned billionaire. I have more power than you could ever dream of.”
“Yet you’ll be going to jail for murder all the same,” Allie said. “And none of you watched that movie closely enough. She got her revenge on all of them in the end.”
“We should move,” Celia said. “He’s probably just trying to delay us at this point, hoping his little buddies show up in time.”
“Move it, rich boy,” Maggie said, spinning Matheson around and pointing him at the door.
“Wait, let me go out first so that he can’t sprint down the hall,” Sanya said. “Then when he’s through the door, we can both hold him.”
Sanya went out, Maggie pushed Matheson out after Sanya, and the rest followed after Maggie. They were in another white-walled, gray-carpeted hallway. This one had many more doors off it.
“Bet some of these lead to the residence,” Allie said.
“I sincerely hope you have a better decorator for your living space,” Sanya said. “This color scheme is a little too ‘doctor’s office’ for me.”
Matheson had started muttering under his breath. Maggie curled her fingers into his skinny bicep and squeezed.
“What are you saying, rich boy?”
“He’s saying he’s going to get us all later, that we’re a bunch of bitches,” Allie said. “You don’t actually need to hear the words to know what he’s saying.”
“Should we just try all of these doors?” Celia asked.
“Nah, we can just go right out the one marked ‘exit,’ ” Allie said, pointing at the door at the farthest end. “Bet Ray-Ray here didn’t want any of the dipshits accidentally poking around in his stuff, so he marked all the doors they’re allowed to walk through.”
They were halfway down the hall when the exit door swung open. Maggie’s stomach turned over. They were here. The rest of the men were here.
But it wasn’t a large group carrying Tasers and butterfly nets to capture the escapees. It was one man, his black clothes soaked to the skin like he’d swum all the way around the island.
Maggie recognized him immediately. It was cattle-prod guy. And he didn’t have his cattle prod.
“You!” she shouted, releasing Matheson’s arm. She sprinted down the hall, the other women shouting after her, and tackled him right out the door before he realized what was happening.
Maggie landed on top of him, but he bucked her off and she rolled away. The sun blared down on them—the real sun, and it was absolutely blinding after the fake sun of Matheson’s maze. Cattle-prod guy—Clark, Beth said his name was Clark—grabbed Maggie’s ankles and yanked her so that she was underneath him. He grabbed her by the face and pressed onto her broken cheekbone, and Maggie howled.
“I told you women are to be seen and not heard,” Clark said. “I think you need to be taught a lesson.”
His hand closed around her throat. Maggie’s eyes were blurry, her vision covered in black dots. After all of this, after all she’d gone through—would she die on the shore of this island, far from home and her daughter?
Then Clark’s hands loosened, and he was the one howling, because Sanya and Allie had descended upon him. Sanya grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled so hard that his head was bent backward, and Allie pressed her thumbs into his eyes.
Clark screamed, and the pressure of his legs loosened around Maggie. She wriggled out, gasping for air.
“Don’t . . . pop . . . his . . . eyes . . . out,” Maggie said, wheezing. “I want him to see me when I testify in court against him.”
Sanya slammed Clark’s head down to the ground and Allie released him. When he fell, Allie and Sanya each stomped on one of his hands, almost as if it were a planned, coordinated movement. Maggie heard the sound of crunching bone.
“You’re not going to be strangling any more women, motherfucker,” Allie said, stomping again and again. “You’ll be lucky if you can pick up a sandwich.”
Clark had stopped howling and now whimpered for them to stop.
“All right, ease up, cowgirl,” Sanya said. “You’ve got some unfocused rage issues, huh?”
“They’re not unfocused,” Allie said, but she eased back. “They’re very, very focused on a certain type of person.”
Maggie noticed that Celia was holding on tight to Matheson by the door. She looked around. They were on a small stretch of grass that led down to a little rocky beach and a rather unassuming wooden dock. There was a small speedboat tied to the dock. On the other side was a Jet Ski. Clark must have used the Jet Ski to beat the rest of the gang to this side of the island.
“Where are all of your little buddies?” Sanya asked. “Did they all drown in the bay?”
“Fuck you,” Clark said.
“Such terrible language when speaking to a lady,” Allie said, and stomped on his hand again.
“They’re . . . they’re stuck. The ferry wasn’t running right now because of engine trouble at the other end. It’s delayed.”
Maggie laughed. Her laugh sounded a little wheezy, a little crazy. “Saved by mechanical trouble. All right, let’s get into the speedboat with rich boy there.”
“What about him?” Allie asked. “Should we take him with us, too?”
Maggie stood up, and stared down at Clark, and thought about him using the cattle prod on the screaming woman. For a moment, she felt the same murderous rage that Allie had expressed a moment before. Then it ran out of her, leaving her exhausted.
“Leave him,” she said. “We don’t need any more shit stinking up the boat. We have Matheson, and that’s enough.”
CELIA PUSHED MATHESON IN front of her, guiding him toward the boat. The fight seemed to have gone out of him as he watched Allie and Sanya kicking the shit out of the man in black. Celia had watched his shoulders droop, his body become boneless with shock. He stumbled toward the speedboat with the air of a man who didn’t know quite where he was.
“Watch him,” Maggie said. Sanya had slung her arm under Maggie’s and was helping Maggie walk. “He might break and run.”
Allie hurried to join Celia. She grabbed Matheson’s arm and dug in her nails, causing him to cry out.
“Don’t try anything funny,” Allie warned. “Remember, I’ve got your phone.”
“You beat the shit out of Clark,” Matheson said. “Just . . . beat the shit out of him. Without mercy.”
“We used just as much mercy as you showed to us,” Allie said. “Now get in the boat.”
They all climbed in. Sanya carefully settled Maggie next to her in the front. Allie and Celia sat in the back with Matheson between them.
“Do you know how to drive one of these things?” Maggie asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Sanya said. “I live on Lake Michigan. I pretty much spend every summer on a boat. And Genius back there left his keys.”
Sanya started up the boat and pointed its nose toward the coast, just visible in the distance.
Celia leaned her head back against the seat. She still couldn’t remember all of her life. She wasn’t sure if she ever would. But she was ready to put this chapter behind her. She’d never read another mystery again.
“You know, when we get to the other side, no one is going to believe you,” Matheson said.
Celia opened her eyes and stared at him. Sanya and Maggie appeared not to have heard him. Allie had her eyes closed and Celia thought she might have fallen asleep already.
“We have the recording of you,” Celia said. “And there are all the dead bodies on your island.”
“You don’t think the police will arrest me just on your say-so, do you? If anything, they’ll think you kidnapped me instead of the other way around. A bunch of crazy-looking women with a crazy story, and one of the country’s wealthiest, most influential men? Whose side do you think they’ll be on?”
Matheson seemed to have gotten his swagger back. He’d been shaken up by their attack on Clark, but now he was thinking about how easily he’d shake them off, how he’d literally get away with murder.
“Bitches like you never win. You know that. The world was made for men. Men like me never pay. I’ll get what I want, and you’ll get nothing.”
Celia stared in front of her for a few minutes, thinking about what he’d said. She didn’t need all of her memories to know that what he said was probably true, that his money and his gender would protect him, that she and Allie and Sanya and Maggie would seem insane, that he’d never pay the way he ought to.
She was moving before she knew what she was doing, yanking him backward, pulling his body over her own, letting his torso dangle over the water. Matheson began screaming and thrashing. Allie shouted something, and out of the corner of her eye, Celia noticed Maggie turning around to see what was going on.
“I’ll get nothing, right?” Celia said. “No matter what I do, you’ll never be punished, you’ll always win, is that right?”
Matheson screamed incoherently as Celia pushed him out of the boat. She heard the thud of his head against the side, and thought, with no small amount of satisfaction, that it was probably awfully hard to swim with a concussion.
“All right then,” Celia whispered. “Prove it.”