I tuck the photograph safely into my bra and double back through the vent, retracing my shimmied route until I’m back at the tri-fork. I take the leftmost path, like I originally intended, and follow it through its dips and curves until I emerge into the central area the schematics labeled as the plenum chamber. There’s enough overhead space here for me to straighten slightly, but the crown of my head brushes the sheet metal above me even when I’m on my hands and knees. According to the blueprints, the various rectangular holes pocking the circular metal around me lead to other ducts. I’ve successfully made it to the beating heart of the entire system; now I just need to figure out which one of the connecting arteries will take me back to BREAKOUT’s main complex and straight into the arterioles of Suite 263’s control room.

  I chew on my lower lip, trying to visualize the building schematics while also assessing my options when a draft of rancid, rotting air blows across my face. I blink tears out of my eyes, coughing, and attempt to duck under the collar of Matt’s torn coat to shield myself, but that doesn’t stop the stench from coating my tongue. Whatever is coming from the duct right in front of me, the smell is foul.

  I cough again. “Jesus,” I breathe, eyes still watering. Am I not alone? Is there a dead animal or something trapped up here with me? I know raccoons, mice, and even cats like to crawl into warm spaces during the winter, and that sometimes those animals curl up on a warm generator and get fried as a result, but it’s the middle of May. We’ve had nothing but too-hot spring days for the past two months because East Tennessee’s weather creeps into the high sixties as soon as we hit mid-March. And besides, Malachi said the HVAC was installed as part of this branch’s recent renovations, which means the vents should be completely decomposing-carcass-free. There should be nothing here smelling like… like rotten eggs?

  A distant warning sounds in my mind, but I ignore it in favor of crawling toward the putrid duct. I didn’t build my blog empire on wussing out. Even if it’s basically defunct now and I doubt it’ll mean anything to SCAD, There’s No Escape is the culmination of years of signing waivers for escape rooms wildly out of my comfort zone. My newsletter subscribers craved insights from thrilling, immersive, high-octane rooms, which meant I had to deliver, year after year, until I built enough of a following to monetize my hobby. Despite the terror I occasionally felt when interacting with live actors in different escape rooms across the county, forcing myself to be brave—if not for myself, then for my audience—made me stronger. Better. More resilient. I clench my teeth and square my aching shoulders. I may no longer be undergoing shit-your-pants levels of danger for the clamoring horde known as #TheresNoEscapeNation, but there’s still a piece of me that knows how to push through fear. In a way, all the rooms I conquered for There’s No Escape prepared me for this one.

  BREAKOUT. Arsonist’s Revenge.

  I duck my head and clamber through the vent. The rotting smell gets stronger with every inch I gain. Desperate to find out what’s causing the odor, my heart beats faster and faster until it’s a reverberating buzz that propels me toward the looming grate ahead. I press a hand over my mouth to muffle my own breathing, but it’s hopeless—the clanging of my knees against the HVAC’s galvanized steel is pathetically loud as I peer through the metal grille. Instead of spotting an assortment of screens displaying BREAKOUT’s live feed, however, I see a sprawling boiler room, complete with a working thermostat and a hissing emergency generator.

  There’s no one in it, but that doesn’t matter, because the odor I’ve been following isn’t coming from a putrefied animal. It’s coming from here.

  Across from me, the carbon monoxide alarm is blinking.

  My heart stutters. Holy shit.

  There’s a gas leak inside BREAKOUT.

  I close my eyes, newly hyperaware of every time I blink. I can’t tell if it’s my nerves exacerbating my physical reactions or the actual carbon monoxide gas messing with my breathing. If the alarm isn’t blaring, the concentration can’t be high enough for the gas leak to be life-threatening—at least, not yet. But it will be. I don’t know when, exactly, but the leeching CO is probably already affecting our logic and reasoning skills.

  Fuck. If we don’t find a way to escape Arsonist’s Revenge soon, the four of us are going to run out of air.

  Even though watching the sputtering generator is kind of fascinating in a morbid way, this vent is a dead end, so I force myself to tear my gaze away from the boiler room and focus on the remaining paths of egress within the huge duct system. I should be close to the control room. I still need to find Malachi.

  Moving through the rest of the HVAC is harder than I thought, though, especially now that I’m worried about every breath I take. I double back once again, terrified that I’m going to get lost up here like a twitchy-nosed rat scrabbling around in a maze, when a new metallic grate appears in the waiting dark like an answered prayer. I hold my breath as I creep toward it. Closer, closer, closer still, until I can press my face against the grille to reveal the room underneath me.

  “Malachi?” I whisper against the metal slats, wriggling until the grate pushes into the skin of my jaw. I need to see the full picture. Our Game Master is here; I can sense it. He’s just out of view, out of sight, out of reach. I reposition myself, tilting my right shoulder, craning my neck until every tangible thought in my head—memory or otherwise—evaporates.

  Directly below me sits the array of HD monitors displaying three live feeds from BREAKOUT’s rooms: Alien Abduction, Haunted Mansion, and Arsonist’s Revenge. And slumped atop the control panel: Malachi Ashton James-May. Dorky glasses askew. Lanky limbs splayed. Arcade nachos abandoned, his knocked-over company thermos steadily dripping black coffee into a dark puddle on the epoxied floor.

  I stare at him for a second, waiting for the telltale rise and fall of his chest, but nothing changes. There’s just the steady drip-drip of the coffee, and the blur of my ex-friends inside Arsonist’s Revenge on the monitors, and our Game Master below me, immobile, in a room I can’t reach.

  Panic claws its way up my throat. How long can a person go without breathing? I need to inhale for four seconds and keep the air trapped in my lungs for as long as humanly possible to figure out the answer, but my traitorous body starts hyperventilating instead. Why isn’t he moving? Who’s doing this to us, and why, and what do they want? My vision swims. Through it all, Mal doesn’t move.

  Which means that we were wrong. The person holding us in the escape room isn’t our Game Master.

  Our Game Master is dead.

  yelp.com | Recommended Reviews: BREAKOUT Escape Rooms Inc.

  Located in Cedar Creek, TN | Have you been here?

  Write a review!

  Did not like the food

  Posted by Kristen Saunders at 5:16 PM

  The rental shoes and bowling lanes were okay but the food was not good. Greasy pizza and flat, warm soda… GROSS! Our son wants his next birthday here, but we will not be paying for anything from the food court.

  Response from BREAKOUT Escape Rooms Inc. at 11:00 AM

  Hi, Kristen! We are an escape room business, not a bowling alley. Hope that helps! —The James-Mays

  Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 11:30 PM

  I press a fist against my trembling lips to suppress my rising scream. Even if our Game Master isn’t gushing blood from his neck, the sight of his lifeless body still sends hot nausea swooping through my stomach. Because if Mal isn’t running our game, then who’s puppeteering us?

  Six friends, six secrets. One hour to spill them, or everyone dies.

  Egg-scented bile rises in the back of my throat. I’m running out our countdown with every puzzle misstep, every bungled clue-solve, every mechanical error, and now my former friends are paying the price: Charity got her skull caved in. Malachi is face down in a carton of melted cheese. The emergency generator is gurgling poisonous gas into each of BREAKOUT’s game rooms, we’re all being blamed for what happened to Matt last year, and we’re probably going to die in the same way he did.

  My temple throbs, although I’m not sure if it’s from the toxic fumes I’m definitely inhaling or the fear sledgehammering my pulse. There’s a darker question at the heart of all this—the deadly revenge plot, our festering secrets, my desperate search for the truth—but because I don’t feel ready to ask it yet, I force myself to push past the existential dread I feel about our imminent asphyxiation and refocus on the grille in front of me.

  Unfortunately, one quick glance at the inch-thick steel sheet separating me from sweet freedom is enough to dash all my hopes of breaking into the control room to swipe Malachi’s master keys. The vent cover is mounted from the outside, and there’s no way my fingers can fit through the narrow slats of the grille in order to loosen a single screw.

  In other words, I need to get out of here. I need to warn the others. I need to find my way back to Arsonist’s Revenge.

  As I retrace the path I army-crawled through the ductwork, though, I can’t help registering the telltale signs of another anxiety attack tugging at my skin. Once I’m inside the escape room again, it’ll be up to me to figure out who’s picking us off. Which means that the goal of tonight is no longer using this hastily cobbled-together form of exposure therapy to recover the memories my TBI stripped from me, or piecing together the night that resulted in my best friend’s death, or even fighting for closure from my ex-friends. It’s about surviving. It’s about catching a criminal. It’s about breaking out.

  I drag myself back through the vent branching off the boiler room to my left. Back through the plenum chamber dividing the control room from the main ductwork. Back through the tunnel leading to the immobile axial fan, the one I braved crawling through to get here. The whole time, though, I’m thinking about the generator and Malachi’s too-still shoulder blades and the blinking light in the boiler room. If the four of us don’t find a way out into the blissful open-air release of the Sevier County Plaza parking lot soon, we’ll all die well before BREAKOUT opens at 10:00 AM tomorrow.

  Jesus.

  I’m almost done retracing my route through the HVAC—there’s only the giant central fan left to drag myself through before turning right and emerging back at the mouth where I started—when Not-Matt’s velvet voice bounces off the steel walls. “Hello, players. Are you ready for more?”

  I freeze halfway through the axial fan’s stationary blades. I can’t help it—deepfaked or not, Matteo Cesari knows how to hold a captive audience. At the same time, every new syllable uttered by my dead best friend feels like getting hit by a train in slow motion, if that train also happened to know every salacious detail about the fire I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to piece together for the past year.

  I shake my head to snap myself out of the trance and move to clear the rest of the fan, but then I realize that I can’t move my right leg. Another piece of Matt’s long leather trench coat is snagged on something behind me, preventing me from crawling forward.

  I’m stuck.

  Above me, a growing hum reverberates through the HVAC. Shit, shit, shit.

  “Malachi. Because you have failed to escape in time,” Not-Matt continues as I ball the peeling fabric of the stupid fucking coat in my sweat-clammed hand, cursing, “you have been eliminated, and your secret will now be revealed for you.”

  I can feel the hum in my ribcage, in my eardrums, in the soles of my feet. It’s like the metal itself is singing. But I know the truth isn’t nearly that beautiful.

  It’s the fans. They’re turning on.

  “Now, this is a tough one. After all, he’s everybody’s favorite Game Master… but is he actually good at his job? Let’s consult the footage, shall we?”

  “Please, please, please,” I whisper, jerking the material of Matt’s coat as hard as I can. Tears well up in my eyes. There’s not enough room in the vent to wriggle out of it. If I can’t free myself—

  Blinding pain explodes through my calf.

  Blood. A constellation of white stars. Light, and darkness, and pain. I’m going to pass out. I’m going to black out and inhale too much carbon monoxide and no one will ever find my fucking body.

  I’m on the verge of succumbing to the blissful darkness when I hear Dad’s voice in my head: Stay awake, Peanut. There’s always a way out.

  Is there? I don’t know if I believe that anymore. But at the same time, I can’t afford to fall unconscious when I still need answers about Matt’s death. When I still need to interrogate my ex-friends about the pact, and the circumstances of the fire, and the part I played in Wanderland exactly a year ago. When I still need to hear the reasoning behind our group’s subsequent friendship breakup. When I still need to find out if I’m actually the monster I’m terrified I am.

  There’s No Escape Rule #5: Embrace the burn.

  New determination shoots through me, temporarily overpowering the agony, and I grit my teeth as time flashes and steadies for long enough for me to finish dragging myself through the last few feet of ductwork—forward, right, forward—before I’m almost at the open vent leading back into Arsonist’s Revenge. White-hot fire surges through my muscles with every inch, but the screaming nerve endings in my leg are nothing compared to what we’ll all suffer if I can’t warn the others.

  Right before I reach the metal lip of the exit, the HVAC judders threateningly. I yelp, startled, but the metal settles. “Okay,” I whisper. False alarm.

  A second later, the vent gives out from under me.

  There’s no way the ductwork was built for this, I realize, desperately attempting to avoid projectile-vomiting as I free-fall toward the tiled bathroom floor of Arsonist’s Revenge. No one will be able to crawl through the HVAC after this. We’ve completely exhausted this escape route.

  There’s a shrill shriek, and for a second I’m terrified that the falling duct crushed someone on its descent, but when I crawl out from the dented, broken-off piece of the HVAC that cushioned my landing the first thing my blurred vision registers is Tobias, Guinevere, and Santo, all alive, staring at me open-mouthed.

  “Hey,” I tell them. “I’m back in the game.”

  And then I promptly pass the fuck out.

  When I come to, the first thing I notice is that the bathroom set LCD monitor is at 28:21.

  The second is that there’s an expression I haven’t seen before on Santo’s unguarded countenance. His mouth is twisted, and his dark eyes glitter with calculated hate as he dabs at my bloodied calf with the sleeve of his crewneck. The migraine pulsing against my temples turns into a battering ram. Am I imagining things? I know that the swirling mix of adrenaline and pain in my bloodstream is probably making me dizzy, sick, and delusional. Santo doesn’t hate me; Matt does. Or at least, he did. Right before he died.

  “Feeling any better?” Santo whispers. “You’re bleeding a lot.”

  When I blink, his bleached brows are furrowed in perfect concern. God, I must have imagined it. I start to nod—

  Matt, exactly a year ago, baring his teeth in the dark UV glow of Wanderland. There’s a barrier between us—a door made to look like a plastic hedge—and I’m advancing, speaking words that are just out of reach, as my veins pulse with rage.

  I gasp as I’m pulled out of the murky shadows of memory and back into the second room of Arsonist’s Revenge. The stars swell, threatening to whiteout my vision, but I don’t let them. “Malachi,” I rasp instead, about to share the awful news of what I found in the control room when a surge of nausea lodges itself in my throat. Wait. We’re locked in here with a murderer. A killer. Someone who must have set up the cinder block electromagnetic sensor mechanism. Who must have messed with Malachi’s coffee. Who must have slipped out through the doors of the control room the second they heard me clanging in the ceiling overhead.

  Or maybe, the dark voice in the back of my mind whispers, the mastermind behind all of this—the invitations, the photographs, the deaths—is you.

  Santo freezes. “What about him?”

  I shudder. I went into the vents. I saw Malachi dead. I found a photograph from Egyptian Tomb with another chilling message. And I need to be careful with how and when I reveal those breadcrumbs to the others, because the next—I glance up at the LCD monitor—twenty-eight minutes and twelve seconds will change everything.

  I lick my lips. If I can recall what happened in Wanderland last spring, I’ll be able to deduce what’s going on tonight. I just need to survive on enough borrowed time to figure it out—and especially now, because rooting out a psychopath depends on it.

  “I… I didn’t see him,” I lie. “There’s no way out through the HVAC. None of the vents are viable; I couldn’t unscrew anything from the inside, especially without my Swiss Army knife. And part of the HVAC b-broke on my way back, obviously, so—”

  Agonizing pain shoots through my nerve endings. The walls of the bathroom set stretch out in front of me, turning into sparkling tea party vials and spewing generators and the sight of Malachi’s breathless body all at once.

  “Steffi, what happened to you?” Tobias asks, his freckled face swimming into focus: wide hazel eyes, dark bruise bleeding black-and-blue around the edges, gore-sprayed glasses tangled in his russet hair. Guinevere stays back, her full mouth pinched, her crossed arms shaking.

  “There was… a fan,” I whisper. “But that doesn’t m-matter.” My hair is plastered to my face; my palms are soaked with blood. “I found… a generator. We’re… we’re being poisoned. With a gas leak. Here, within… inside BREAKOUT.”

  “Yeah?” Tobias says, his voice cracking as he swipes a hand across his sweating forehead.

  “Yeah,” I whisper. “It’s just like last year. Except instead of a f-fire, we’re dealing with carbon m-monoxide poisoning.”

  Which means the question is no longer a matter of how.

  It’s when.

  CEDAR CREEK CONFESSIONS