In my hands, the knife blade glints. On-screen, Tobias captures his opponent’s rook. He lost this game, and afterward, Cedar Creek Confessions accused him of fixing his matches. The post—whether true or not—provided enough evidence for Tobias to get quietly pushed off the CCHS chess team.

  And after that, Matt took his place as the star player.

  Behind me, Guinevere’s staccato breaths steady into an almost-rhythm. My throat thickens. I saw tonight playing out differently. I thought I’d have more control. I thought if we followed the rules from my blog, if we worked together, then we’d escape Arsonist’s Revenge and I’d leave BREAKOUT at midnight with all of my newfound memories. With real answers. With the knowledge that I’m not a monster.

  I was so wrong.

  “After I ratted you out to the chess team, you were dying to get me back. But humiliating me within BREAKOUT wasn’t enough for you, so you proposed keeping me in the room overnight—and fought for the idea until everyone agreed.” Not-Matt’s voice pauses, and I lick my bloodied lips. “Without your actions…” the disembodied voice of my dead best friend continues, but I can’t hear him, can’t focus on the rest of his words when Tobias’s purpling body is still sprouting new hives, can’t understand anything except the knife I’m cradling awkwardly in my hands.

  “Christ,” Guinevere whispers. Her body is upside down and mirrored in the knife blade in front of me: muscled track-and-field legs, nicotine-patched olive-skinned arms, beautiful face all thunderstorm. She still looks indestructible. Divine. Phantasmal, even.

  And now, she’s the only ghost from my past still breathing.

  “It’s not what you think, Gee,” I croak, turning to face her. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. There’s blood slimed in the spandex fabric of my knit I LOVE PRAGUE socks, and dirt caked under my battered nails, and a migraine behind my eyes that intensifies the longer I stare at the worn leather trench coat now hanging limply around Guinevere’s sweating shoulders. I ruined the garment in the HVAC, and I ruined my friendships inside Arsonist’s Revenge, and nothing I say is ever going to be enough for the girl reflected in the metal of the knife I’m holding.

  I try anyway. “This is—I found it in—” I take a breath. “Tobias.”

  She needs to hear me. It wasn’t me who did this, who set up the escape room, who sent the invitations. Even with my warped memories, I would have remembered. I would have.

  But it’s not Guinevere, either. If I can make her listen, make her understand, show her that Tobias Quinton Matthews has been torturing us all night—

  Her eyes meet mine, and hope swells in my chest as I remember the birthday cards she sent me every year, or the way her collarbones glittered red and blue while we watched the Fourth of July fireworks at her grandparents’ lake house, or the scent of her Marlboro smoke soaking my skin as we shared a cigarette up at the water tower on one of the last normal nights before the fire. I can almost feel the thick paper of her handmade cards and the messages in them, written year after year in her signature blocky script: YOU LIVED ANOTHER YEAR, BITCH. I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE HERE. I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING. I SWEAR TO GOD, DON’T READ THIS OUT LOUD OR I’LL KILL YOU. XOXO.

  But then Guinevere’s hurricane gaze drops to the blade, and the wind-whipped rage in her expression as she flicks her eyes back to mine, seeing me see her, is enough to drown me.

  Desperation floods my neurons like static as the two of us lunge to our feet: muted, buzzing, gray. She reaches me one millisecond before I realize I can’t compete with her track-toned muscles or the heft of her rubber ax, so there’s nothing to do but act on instinct: I turn the handle of my reclaimed Swiss Army knife, blade against my forearm, like Dad taught me, and hit the tiled floor right as she swings the ax toward my skull. Whoosh. A near miss.

  Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. She’s trying to kill me.

  I catch her arm with my knife and the blade tears the leather of Matt’s jacket. Horror buzzes behind my temples at the fact that I’m fighting her, but I primed her for this. She believes it’s her or me.

  “Are you serious, Stephanie?” she screeches, readjusting her grip on the bludgeoning ax, and I prepare myself for another clash. “Are you going to kill me now, too?” Her nails are digging into the ax handle, and when she aims her next swing at my injured calf and I just barely roll out of the way I’m suddenly aware that it doesn’t matter how much I’ve accomplished to make it out of Arsonist’s Revenge alive, because Guinevere Mitchell-Moore can still pulverize me into nothing.

  A sneer curls her mouth as she adopts a high falsetto. “What a poor little blogger! She’s the only survivor of the second BREAKOUT fire! She has no idea what happened to her FRIENDS!”

  Another swing and a miss. I scramble backward, but Guinevere fills the space, tracking blood across the tile. “Maybe you’ve convinced the rest of Sevier County that you’re innocent, but I know you. I know you, Stephanie. I watched your knees buckle from that beam. And you know what?” Her chest heaves; like this, with her bare shoulders bathed in magenta floodlights, she looks angelic. “It didn’t hit you HARD ENOUGH!”

  She swings again, but I duck, and this time her weapon shatters the mirror above the industrial sink. Guinevere hisses and jerks the ax free, her face contorted with anger, and I use the moment she’s distracted to break for the walk-in shower. If I can just get to the third room—

  I’m almost at the LCD monitor when the weapon sings through the air and embeds itself in the screen above me with a sharp THWACK! Broken glass rains on me, Gaga-style, and I immediately throw up my arms to shield my face from the damage. Jesus. She threw the fucking ax at my head.

  Above me, the LCD monitor rainbows out. Not-Matt’s fake face is splintered into a million fractals, his dark eyes immobile; as if to prove a point, the edges of the screen bleed hot pink and bright cyan. “You missed,” I breathe, turning back to Gee, a stupid joke about her dad wasting his money by sending her to Lenoir City Wild Hearts Equine Therapy & Outdoor Sports if she can’t even throw an ax after an entire summer waiting at the tip of my tongue, but it dies as soon as I register the pain in Guinevere’s expression. She can’t kill me.

  She overshot on purpose.

  Gee wipes her bloodied mouth with the back of her hand. “Christ, Stephanie. When will you drop the act? You set this escape room up to kill us because you couldn’t let the past go. Because it wasn’t enough for you, after all this time, to stay blameless.” She shakes her beautiful head. “When Matt destroyed our friendships, it happened because he publicized so many of our secrets on Cedar Creek Confessions: Charity’s eating disorder. Malachi’s master key misuse. Tobias’s cheating. My hazardous resin-pouring practices.” Her eyes spark, smolder, ash. “Don’t you remember, Stephanie? Why you found out? What you did afterward? How much it cost us?”

  “I didn’t,” I protest. Panic metastasizes through my chest. “I couldn’t have.”

  “No?” Guinevere advances. “You’re the one who swore we’d humiliate Matt as revenge. You’re the one who used our secrets as leverage in your master plan.”

  I can’t speak. I can’t move. My tongue is locked to the roof of my mouth; my heart is slamming against my rib cage. Above me, the shattered LCD screen pulses, sputters, swells.

  “One year ago,” Guinevere starts. Her whole face is bathed in floodlights—her pointed chin, her canine teeth, her high cheekbones with their smattering of freckles. A waterfall of tangled hair tumbles down her torn crop top. “One year ago, you set up Wanderland to fuck up Matt and roped us into it. Because of Cedar Creek Confessions. Because of what he wrote about your blog. Because you needed to keep him from posting it.”

  She stops close enough for her breath to ghost my face, and I fight the urge to reach out and steel my fingers against the familiar leather of Matt’s trench coat—the trench coat she’s wearing—to keep from screaming. She’s staring directly at me. There’s a cut on her forehead. The whites of her eyes are fluorescent; her Cupid’s-bow lips look exactly like they did on that night in my beat-up Jeep after her boyfriend’s funeral a year ago.

  Let me give you a ride, Gee. You won’t be able to drive yourself anywhere when you’re crying too hard to see.

  No, no, no.

  “And now you’re here,” she whispers, “putting on this desperate amnesiac act as if you need to find out what happened to him or you’ll just die, when you’re the one who killed him, Stephanie.” She swallows. “It was all because of you.”

  Wednesday, May 20, 2026,11:52 PM

  “You’re lying.”

  The rebuttal comes easily; right now, it’s all that does. In front of me, Guinevere’s hurricane gaze swirls with indignation. Her mascara—pristine just an hour ago—is now smudged across her eyelids; her caramel-brown hair is a whirlwind of blood, sweat, and drying snot.

  “I’m not,” she says. The dancing LEDs cast parts of her in shadow, and others in blinding relief: the gore-splattered mini claw clips snaggled in her hair, the crescent gouges on her arms, the blood-stained linen of her crop top. “You claim you’re so desperate for the truth, Stephanie, so here I am, giving it to you.”

  I inhale, flicking my gaze from the ax-head embedded above my head to Guinevere’s burning face. “I’d never hurt Matt. I didn’t kill him.”

  “How would you know?” Guinevere says quietly, and this stumps me, because it’s exactly what the dark voice in the back of my mind says all the time. How would I know? How would I?

  “Santo, Tobias, Charity, Malachi, and I all formed a pact after the fire last year,” Guinevere continues. “Tell no one. That included you.”

  The others don’t want to tell you—they think you can’t handle the truth—but the truth doesn’t matter if the only way we’re leaving BREAKOUT is in body bags.

  “Besides, you claimed you lost your memory,” Guinevere continues, “and Matt was dead, so we promised one another we wouldn’t tell you anything. But one year ago, you decided to get back at Matt for running Cedar Creek Confessions. You convinced Malachi to let us into BREAKOUT after hours, and you roped in the rest of us to help, because Matt planned to reveal your secret to the entire fucking school, so you planned out Wanderland to get revenge.”

  “What are you talking about? What post? What secret?”

  “Your blog,” Guinevere says, closing the space between us. “Your brand deals. Your sponsorships. You took bribes, Stephanie. You let companies buy your praise, and your dumb ass told Matt, and he decided to tank your credibility.” She scoffs. “You didn’t pull back from There’s No Escape because of Matt’s accident. You were forced to abandon the blog because you’re a fraud.”

  I shake my head. This isn’t real. This can’t be happening. I don’t remember any of this.

  “And you’re so fucking fragile that after Santo found the post in Matt’s drafts,” Guinevere adds, “you went into the garage and turned on your Jeep and just sat there. Your mom freaked. Called my dad, got you a hypnotherapist, had me take you out to talk.” She snorts. “So you came out with me, and that’s when you got the idea to hurt Matt before he could destroy you.”

  The speakers boom. The spiderwebbing monitor flickers—Not-Matt with another video, maybe?—before it flashes bright green and stays that way. Guess there are a few technical difficulties that not even our true Game Master can override.

  For once, though, I’m not paying attention to the LCD screen. Instead, I’m staring at the girl in front of me. Even if what she’s saying is true, then why did Matt write a post about it? He was my best friend. He wouldn’t have intentionally damaged my reputation.

  Right?

  “Carbon monoxide is your MO, Stephanie, so tonight has to be you—your setup, your idea, your plan. It was the last time: We’d invite everyone to Cedar Creek’s BREAKOUT: Wanderland escape room for the Cesari twins’ birthdays, but halfway through the game we’d purposefully trap Matt inside the Queen of Hearts’s Rose Garden, reveal that we knew he ran Cedar Creek Confessions through a series of pre-filmed videos we’d work with Malachi to show on the LCD monitors, and force him to publicly apologize to all of us—and to everyone he hurt through his posts—before leaving him inside the escape room overnight. In the morning, we’d snag the security footage from Malachi, post it on Matt’s own Cedar Creek Confessions Instagram along with @Mal.The.Reel.King and There’s No Escape, and publicly humiliate him for ruining the lives of so many members of our student body.” Guinevere crosses her arms. “It was completely your idea—your drunk and stupid idea—and I was worried you were going to try and kill yourself again if I didn’t go along with whatever you proposed, so I agreed to help you. I convinced everyone to pitch in, actually, but then it all went wrong.” Her voice darkens. “As it turns out, everyone had their own agenda once we got inside Wanderland and the door locked behind us. Charity wanted to back out as soon as the game started; Tobias thought our plan didn’t humiliate Matt enough. Malachi got cold feet about implicating his parents’ business in a revenge plot. You almost blew everything by attempting to confront Santo about whether he told Matt about our plan, and the whole thing stressed me out so badly that I lit a cigarette to take the edge off and accidentally—and it really was an accident—started the fire.” Guinevere is shaking now. “Matt died. He died, and while we were watching the whole plaza burn in the parking lot, you couldn’t stop laughing, Stephanie. I told you to call 911, and you couldn’t, because you couldn’t stop laughing.”

  Her mouth twists; strands of caramel-brown hair fall in wisps around her contorted face. “So how dare you,” she finally says. “How dare you come here tonight and pretend you can’t remember anything. As if that’s fucking fair.”

  “That’s not… it’s not true,” I rasp, backing away, but there’s not enough space—my back hits the tile of the walk-in shower. There’s nowhere else to go.

  “It is,” Guinevere says. “And you know what, Stephanie?”

  I reach beside me, fumbling for the lever of the walk-in shower, and then the door swings inward and I’m blasted by cold air. The change in temperature is a welcome balm after the sweltering interior of the other sets inside Arsonist’s Revenge. My Converse sneakers crunch under a fine layer of white powder—fake snow, maybe?—but there’s not enough time to examine it because Guinevere is still advancing, is still taking up space, is still pressing forward.

  “I’m done,” she says, following me into the third and final room. “I’m done watching you act like you did nothing wrong. I’m done trying to protect you from attempting again. And I’m done dancing around your fuckups when you’re the one who lured us here for another insane revenge plot, except this time you’re making sure there are no survivors.”

  “Shut up,” I hiss, my throat tightening at the closeness of her: bougainvillea and white sage. The metallic tang of nicotine and sweat and want.

  Guinevere takes one last step forward, and for a half second, I’m convinced she’s going to kiss me and that I’m going to kiss her back, but then the walk-in shower door clicks closed and the moment disappears.

  “Christ,” Guinevere whispers, the fear in her tone finally unmistakable. And I think she’s talking about the door, about the fact that we’re definitely locked in here, but then her storm-gray eyes move above my head, the glassy panic swirling there now replaced by full-blown dread, and when I turn to follow her gaze, my own adrenaline spikes.

  The two of us are trapped in an industrial meat locker.

  And we’re surrounded by six burlap-sacked bodies, hanging upside down by their wrapped-up ankles like slaughtered lambs.

  “You were right,” Guinevere whispers. The words come out in a puff of vapor. A filament in the fluorescents above us flashes, illuminating her blood-matted streaks of hair. She’s pathetic, just like me. She’s suffered, just like me. And as much as she hates me, as much as we’ve gone from being friends to enemies to almost-lovers to enemies again, right now we’re on the same side. “This is just like where Matt.… Her beautiful face crumples. “You didn’t do this.”

  I want to tell her that we’ll get out of here, that we just need to stay calm, but my mouth refuses to form the words. Everything around us is awash in a soft UV glow, illuminating the gore splattered across our skin like the ceiling stars in the childhood bedroom I had before Dad left. Above us, the life-size twine-tied corpses—the ones I’m praying are made of Flex Foam—hang still and silent. They’re clearly representative of us: Charity. Malachi. Guinevere. Santo. Tobias. And me.

  ONE BY ONE.

  Gee’s hand lands on my shoulder. “Stephanie,” she says, her fingers squeezing the hard bone of my shoulder blade, but I can’t hear her. I’m floating away, outside myself, watching my body contract until I’m a pinprick of LED light, until I’m a glow-in-the-dark rubber duck, until I’m nothing at all. My chest is tight. The bloodstained knife edge cutting into my sweating palm is so sharp, and Guinevere and I are inside the sister room of the franchise that killed my best friend exactly one year ago, and I am going to die here, too.

  Ringing. Humming, buzzing, grating. Louder and louder and louder. Guinevere whirls back and tries to lift the door handle. It doesn’t budge. Now she’s pounding on the smooth one-way mirror and calling for help despite there being no one left alive to help us. Now she’s shaking my shoulders again. Now there’s a light blinking at the edge of my vision like I’m already dying—

  No. No, it’s a working screen. There’s an LCD monitor in this room, too, counting down from 7:02.

  Jesus. We have seven minutes left to break out of BREAKOUT.

  “Steffi, please,” Guinevere says, her blood-splattered hands cupping my cheeks, and a dim part of me realizes that this is the first time she’s actually called me by my nickname tonight. My eyes refocus, taking in her tear-streaked face. Two minutes ago, Guinevere was trying to kill me, and now she’s acting as if she didn’t just throw an ax at my head. “I need your help.” She licks her lips, and there’s a wildness to her expression as her eyes flit from the LCD monitor and then back to my face. “You want to redeem yourself for everything that happened last year? Then redeem yourself. Find a way to get us out.”