Chapter 7 Sierra
Sierra
“Beck,” said the fourth member of Sierra’s team. Finally. “My name is Beck.”
Hopefully he was better at decoding than he was at speaking.
“Let’s take a tally of our clues,” Sierra said, sweeping her attention over the room she’d been studying from the moment the blindfold came off. She didn’t have much. A sign on the door that read silence me and a clipboard on a peg.
“Wait,” said the girl, Carter, “you didn’t tell us your name.” She sounded suspicious.
Rather than answer, Sierra read through a series of lab notes that detailed various experiments.
Experiment 1: 2 parts solution A + 1 part solution J
Result: forest green, mostly opaque
Experiment 2: 3 parts solution A + 1 parts solution K
Result: violet purple, gummy texture
And so on, for seven experiments total. She flipped the page up, but there was nothing else. “I’ve got a clipboard with a list of lab experiments talking about different solutions, coded alphabetically, and some colorful results. Beck, what do you have?”
“Uh—okay, right.” Beck cleared his throat.
“I’ve got a three-digit padlock on the door, plus a bunch of jars with random things in them.
A battery, a glove, a bone, a . . . I think this is a ball of crumpled foil?
A silver earring and . . .” Slight pause.
“Huh. The last one’s empty. Oh, and there’s a neon sign that says ‘escape.’”
Sierra grunted. “In case we forget why we’re here?”
Beck gave a nervous chuckle. “That’s what I thought.”
“I’ve got a bunch of books,” said Carter. “Textbooks. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology.”
“Look closely,” said Sierra. “There could be something hidden in the pages, or writing that could be useful.”
“This is supposed to be a chemistry lab,” Beck added. “Maybe start with that one?”
“Good point,” Sierra said. So he did have a brain, thank god. “Let me read these lab notes to you. Maybe it connects with something in those books.”
She read off the experiments, from beginning to end. Even as she did so, she thought of how this would be edited out during production. Reading arbitrary lab notes did not make for great television.
“I’m not seeing anything, but I’ll keep looking,” said Carter. “What happened to our other teammate?”
“I’m busy,” said Adi testily.
Sierra scowled. She had a reputation on this show. She wasn’t about to be out-sulked by an amateur. “Play the misunderstood loner later. Right now we need to know what you’ve got.”
“I’m trying to decipher a code,” he said. “Got a fake name that’s an anagram, and a whiteboard to work it out. ‘Deleted.’ ‘Timeline.’ ‘Middle.’ ‘Meddle.’ ‘Divide’—there are heaps of options.”
“Okay . . .” said Sierra. “But we need numbers to open our pad-locks.”
“I get that. I can make ‘ten’ or ‘eleven,’ but that’s it.”
“Will each door unlock with the same three-digit combination, or will they be different?” said Carter. “Anyone got a twelve-digit number? Person with the whiteboard—Adi, right? How long is the fake name? Maybe you can replace the numbers with letters, like A is 1, B is 2, you know.”
“Nah, it’s fifteen letters long.”
“Try it anyway,” Sierra said, and she hated that she heard Elijah’s voice in her head, telling his team that every idea was worth exploring. He’d been wrong. Most ideas were worthless. But time was ticking.
Adi rattled off the numbers faster than she’d expected, which was a promising sign. But the numbers didn’t amount to anything.
“Does anyone else have a piece of torn paper stuck to their door?” asked Beck. “I’ve got ‘no one nor.’”
“Right!” said Carter. “I was so busy looking at these books, I forgot about it. Mine says ‘anything can.’”
“‘Silence me,’” added Sierra.
“Oh, the torn paper is where I got the name,” said Adi. “Dmitri Mendeleev.”
“Dmitri who?” said Beck.
“Exactly. I’m working on it. Give me a sec to—”
“Mendeleev-comma-Dmitri,” said Carter. “Found him!”
“Found . . . who?” said Adi.
“Dmitri Mendeleev.” Then, more hesitantly, “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Hold on,” said Adi. “He’s a real person?”
“Says here he was the creator of the periodic table of elements.”
“Oh,” said Adi. He sounded disappointed.
“The words are a quote,” said Carter. “No one nor anything can silence me, credited to Dmitri Mendeleev.”
“What does that mean?” Adi said.
“Elements!” Beck sounded like a sugared-up preteen. “All these things in the jars. They’re elements. Like the battery. Lithium, right? The glove is a dishwashing glove. So maybe latex or . . .”
“Silicon?” said Sierra. “Hey, Carter. Do you have a periodic table in that book?”
Flipping pages, then—“Yes, but . . . I don’t see anything unusual. Nothing handwritten on the page. Oh, maybe we use the page number? I’m gonna try it on my lock.”
“Wait,” said Sierra. “Beck, you tell us the elements. Carter, look them up. Adi, write them down.”
“I’m not your secretary,” Adi said.
Sweet Jesus.
“You’re the only one with a way to record anything,” she said. “Let’s start with lithium.”
“Um, yeah, lithium,” said Carter. “Li. Number 3.”
“Silicon for the glove,” said Beck.
“Silicon. Si, 14,” said Carter.
“The bone. Calcium?”
“Ca, 20.”
They quickly worked out the rest.
Earring—Silver—Ag—47
Foil—Aluminum—Al—13
The empty jar—
“Oxygen,” Carter and Adi said simultaneously, followed by a giggle from Carter and an annoyed huff from Adi.
“Oxygen is O—8,” said Carter.
“That gives us ten digits,” said Adi. “We need two more.”
“Maybe it’s the jars themselves?” said Carter. “They’re glass, right? Glass is made of sand. Um . . . that doesn’t seem right.”
Carter continued to ramble nervously as Sierra ran her finger down the lab notes on the clipboard, which had yet to be used. She was missing a clue.
“The sign!” said Beck. “Neon is an element, isn’t it?”
“Wait . . . yes,” said Carter. “Neon—Ne—10!”
“Ne,” Adi said thoughtfully. “It feels like these letters are supposed to mean something.”
“Don’t worry about the letters,” Sierra said. “We have our twelve digits. That’s our code.”
“But how do we know what order to put them in?” said Beck.
A silence followed.
“Twelve digits,” said Carter. “That’s over four thousand combinations. We already took out some of the guesswork, given the multiple double-digit combos, but even if you consider there are only seven numbers to put in order, there are still hundreds of possible answers—”
“What about the lab notes?” said Beck.
Sierra studied her notes. “Was there a J in any of those element abbreviations? Or a K?”
“Nope,” said Adi.
Sierra tapped her clipboard. The solutions, the experiment numbers, the results . . .
“Colors,” she whispered. “Carter, the elements on the periodic table. Are they all different colors?”
“Not all of them,” she said. “But the elements are grouped into various colors. It explains in this sidebar that the elements are often color-coded by specific properties, such as the metalloids and non-metals, or something about electronegativity—”
“Yes, fine,” Sierra interrupted. “But are the elements we have all different colors? Like—forest green or violet purple?”
“Yeah. Silicon is in the dark green section, and calcium is purple.”
Sierra’s lips curled upward. “That’s the order. It’s tied to the experiments on this list. Adi, write this down.” She read through the list of colors in the experiment results. Carter found each one on the chart, and Adi put the numbers into their new order.
14-20-8-3-47-13-10
“But if those twelve digits correspond to our locks,” said Beck, “how do we know which one to start with?”
“Guess and check,” said Adi. “I’ll go first. 142 . . .”
“No, the quote,” said Sierra. “We put them in order of the quote. “Who had ‘no one nor’?”
“Me!” said Beck.
“And I had ‘anything can,’” said Carter.
Adi read off the numbers so everyone could input them. One by one, the locks clicked.
Sierra pulled off the padlock. She hesitated, knowing that as soon as her teammates laid eyes on her, everything would change. They’d be distracted. Confused. Curious. And she didn’t have time for any of that. They needed to win those snags.
She pushed open the door, entering a large central room that was severe in its cleanliness.
A metal table held an assortment of chemistry equipment—Bunsen burners and test tubes—like something from the lab of a mad scientist. Seven large beakers were suspended over a series of twisty tubes that fed into one central glass pot.
Each beaker was filled with a liquid, making up the colors of the rainbow.
They were stoppered with individual wheels that would let the liquids flow down to the pot.
A gasp drew her attention to her left, where a Black girl with bright red curls, round glasses, and a green lab coat was staring at Sierra, a hand to her mouth. This must be Carter.
“It is you,” the girl whispered.
Beyond her was a boy—Adi?—in a yellow lab coat that stood out against his brown skin. He was obnoxiously good-looking, though his astonished expression marred the effect.
A door clicked and Sierra turned to their fourth teammate.
Beck. Their gazes met. He had a swoop of brown hair, moussed into perfection.
His blue lab coat highlighted his bright blue eyes, but the most striking thing about him was that he didn’t act surprised to see Sierra. In fact, he seemed grimly resigned.
It was Beck, not her, who said, “Process later. We’re almost through this.”
Well. Proof he had his head in the game, at least.
He approached the table full of lab equipment. “Let’s assume we need to turn some of these wheels and combine certain chemicals. Sierra, think there could be a clue in those lab notes?”
It took her a moment to recalibrate. Adi and Carter were still gawking at her, so she studied the suspended beakers and said, “The colors don’t match up with the ones on the clipboard.
And I don’t see anything to indicate which experiment we’d want to replicate.
But if we get it wrong, then . . . that’s it. We can’t take it back. We’d fail.”
She paced in front of the table. There had never been an automatic fail option on the show before.
“Well then,” said Beck, “let’s get it right.”
He started turning one of the wheels.
Sierra’s pulse jumped. “What are you doing?” she shouted as blue liquid coursed through the tubes.
Beck turned the next wheel. Red flowed into the pot, mixing with the blue.
“Stop!” said Sierra. “You can’t do this without consulting me! Us. Without consulting us.”
“It’s okay. I have a theory,” he said.
Another wheel. Green combined with the liquids.
“Beck! You’ve—ugh!” Sierra threaded her fingers into her hair, nails digging into her scalp, as Beck tuned a fourth wheel, adding yellow to the mix. “If you ruin this for me, I will murder you in your sleep!”
Beck spun to her, and now she had his attention, but from his horrified expression she realized it wasn’t the sort of attention she wanted.
She had to stop saying stuff like that.
Carter gasped again, even louder than when she’d recognized Sierra.
The pot of liquid was glowing.
A bell chimed.
“Congratulations!” rang out Fitzy’s familiar voice. “You’ve escaped!”
A door hidden in the wall swung open, revealing Fitzy and Louis Augustus Russell.
Sierra’s mouth fell open. Beck had actually done it.
“Crikey, Beck, what a ballsy move!” said Fitzy. “How did you solve that final puzzle so fast?”
Beck shrugged, his gaze fixed on Sierra.
“I thought of what the Game Master said before we started. The best teams have the best chemistry, right? And when we met up, I noticed our different lab coats matched some of the liquids. So . . . I figured those had to be the colors we were supposed to pick.”
Sierra looked down at her own red lab coat.
The best teams have the best chemistry.
She knew the Game Master’s clues were important. And yet, with the adrenaline rushing through her veins—and her distraction at wondering what her teammates would think when they saw her— she’d forgotten all about it.
“Sierra,” said Fitzy, sidling up, microphone in hand. “What do you think about being back on The Escape Game?”
Everyone waited for her answer, including the Game Master, who had a carefully neutral expression. She grabbed the mic out of Fitzy’s hand, ignoring his “Oi!” of surprise.
“You want to know how it feels to be back?” she said, staring straight down the barrel of the robotic camera. “It feels fantastic. Not only is there a bigger prize, but this time, I’m in charge. And I’m not going to let anyone get in my way.”