“How do you know?” I ask quietly. “What happened to you?”
He ignores me, gives my ear a cursory inspection, and apparently doesn’t deem it problematic because he’s heading over to Jules and Lilly now. “We can’t stay here,” he says over his shoulder. “This room isn’t rigged, but there’re some traps between here and where we need to be.”
“Oh, and where do we need to be, Hayden?” I say, spiteful, because if he’s a hallucination he’s a stupid know-it-all one. I wave my arms anyway, sitting on the ground and swinging them in circles like some sort of demented flightless bird.
“I found a panic room,” Hayden says. “About six rooms that way.” He jabs a finger toward a door in what I think is the western wall.
I drop my arms. “A panic room?”
Someone, I think Jules, mumbles: “They have panic rooms inside their panic rooms? What is wrong with these people?”
I drag myself to my feet. The painful swarming feeling is subsiding, dulling to a prickly, sandpapery itch. “Show me your neck,” I say.
“Anouk, we don’t have time—?”
I stagger toward him and grab at his arm. “Show me, Hayden.”
Hayden stares at me. I think I see disdain somewhere under all that grime, and I wonder if he’s going to throw me across the room. I don’t let go of his arm. He rips free and turns, dropping his chin to his chest.
The wound on the back of his neck is raw. Deep. It looks like he tried to clean it—the edges have been wiped—but it’s still exposed, a glimmering dark-red hole driving right into his spinal column.
“Happy?” he says, facing me again. “Look, I want explanations as much as anyone, but right now we need to move.” His voice explodes. “Get up, people!”
I want to barf again. I bend over, gasping. “I saw you die, Hayden. I saw you stop breathing, how are you—” Alive? Anouk, what is your problem? He didn’t die. He’s standing right in front of you. This is a good thing!
“Hayden?” Lilly manages. “Hayden, you’re okay?”
I go to her and help her up. We totter a few steps over to Jules. Hayden hoists Will up and the three of us follow them, half jogging, half dragging each other into a bedroom.
The chandeliers are off here, too, the furnishings just spiny shapes in the gloom. I really need some water. We get to a bathroom, the scallop-shaped marble tub in the center straight out of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. It’s dry as a bone.
In the next room even the emergency lighting is gone. It’s pitch-black. And now a flashlight clicks on, a searing white beam.
“Move it,” Hayden says, gesturing us forward. He sweeps the light over the wall. Stops it on a point low to the ground. He ducks down. I see a panel clicking out, sliding to the side on invisible tracks. Behind it is a square metal hatch. He jerks it open.
“In here.”
Seriously? Hansel and Gretel, the old paperback, upside down on the couch in the playroom: “Creep inside,” said the wicked witch. “And see if the oven is hot enough.”
“What’s in there?” I ask, but Lilly is already pushing Will through, and Jules is following. I watch them go, look to Hayden holding the hatch open.
“Idiot, it’s the panic room!” he says, and his eyes are wide, scared. “Get in!”
I hear Jules’s voice, tinny, somewhere inside the wall: “Anouk, come on!”
I drop onto all fours and crawl through the hatch. Stale, metallic air envelopes me. The panic room is tube shaped, a gray metal capsule like a storm shelter. Six feet wide, five feet high. Maybe fifteen feet long. A strip of dim, flickering light runs along the ceiling, barely illuminating the space. An unmade bunk folds out of one wall. Sleek plastic containers fill a shelf on the other.
I’m thinking: Who built this panic room and what exactly is it for? And now I hear Dorf’s voice outside, sharp, so loud it sounds like he’s standing a foot away. “Anouk. Will. Jules. Lilly. I hope you’re doing well––”
Hayden clangs the hatch shut.
The light buzzes.
The only other sound is our breathing, fast, getting slower. Slower––
Will lets out a muffled groan. I snap out of it. Push past Jules and start scooting along the shelves, picking up boxes, clicking them open and upending them.
“How did you survive?” I snap at Hayden. I wriggle around him. The capsule is way too tight. The light is so weak, barely enough to see by, and the shadows in the corners are pitch-black.
Hayden makes an angry noise and dives after me. “Stop messing with things,” he hisses, grabbing at scissors, a fleece, a bunch of little bottles that go rolling and bouncing off the shelf.