Chapter 18 Carter
Carter
Carter crunched on a chip and transferred another video from her phone to her laptop’s editing program.
She’d been sifting through footage for hours, trying to strike the right balance of exclusive, VIP, behind-the-scenes!
stuff her followers craved while also keeping everything hush-hush enough that Ranielle Russell wouldn’t yell at her.
It didn’t help that she’d also spent an hour editing content of herself only to decide that, nope, her own footage couldn’t compete with her avatar. She redid everything, inserting the filter over herself.
That’s what her followers really wanted, anyway.
Her phone dinged with a notification from the Clue Master forums.
It was late enough that the overseas crowd was starting to wake up.
Fitzy had garnered attention from his home audience, and also from the Brits, who loved him from his Australian soap opera days.
Now that it was easily accessible to everyone on a streaming service, The Escape Game was officially an international success.
Being a contestant hadn’t hurt Carter’s brand. There’d been a huge uptick in followers when she first announced she was going to be on the show, along with an outpouring of encouragement from her longtime fans.
After the snag round had aired, things had been . . . more subdued. Some fans had defended her, but the online trolls had claimed that surely the highest-ranking Solve Specialist should’ve done better. Clearly, Kick It Carter was all talk.
Their words nagged at her. She’d been so eager to be on the show, to surround herself with other Clue Masters, people she could actually relate to.
It hadn’t occurred to her when she’d sent in her audition video that not only might she remain alone .
. . she might lose the online support she relied on to get through each day.
What would people say when the next episode ran? The fortune teller room hadn’t been as terrible as the chemistry lab, but she wished she could have contributed more. She was letting her followers down. She was letting her team down.
And maybe, a little, she was letting herself down.
Another ding from the Domain.
Then another. And another. Seven more in fast succession.
Carter finally stopped organizing the video files to check her phone. A new episode wouldn’t drop until next Sunday; there wasn’t anything to be excited about.
She pulled up the forums, and there, at the top—a headline that hadn’t been there when she’d checked an hour ago.
RIP ALICIA
She clicked the link.
Someone calling themselves the Real Game Master had posted a bunch of screen grabs from the snag round episode showing the different elements from the periodic table, and ultimately the anagram that Adi had figured out. Alicia Angelos.
The comments were lighting up. A whole lot of WTFs and talk of Easter eggs and in memoriams. But no one knew why the Game Master would have hidden Alicia’s name inside a clue. Carter certainly didn’t.
She clicked on the profile of this ‘Real Game Master,’ but it was blank.
As she was reading the rush of new comments, another post popped up, this one a photo of a ribbon covered in code. Carter zoomed in on the image. She could have sworn she’d seen—
She gasped.
She definitely had seen it before.
Clambering from her bed, she rushed into the villa’s living room, where Beck was sitting on one side of the couch reading a magazine and Sierra was on the other doing a crossword puzzle.
“Where’s Adi?” Carter said.
They both jumped and looked at her.
“What happened?” Sierra asked as Beck pointed to his and Adi’s shared bedroom.
Carter spun around and knocked on the door. “Adi? Are you awake?”
She was about to knock again when the door opened. “What?” said Adi. He was wearing gray flannel pajama pants and nothing else.
Carter screamed, pressing her hands over her eyes. “Oh my god, why do you boys never have shirts on? You’re as bad as Jarius!”
“I was getting ready for bed,” said Adi, grabbing a T-shirt off the dresser. “And I am definitely not as bad as Jarius.”
Carter peeked through her fingers as he yanked the shirt over his head, and even she had to admit that, yeah, okay, he wasn’t as bad as Jarius. In fact—
Oh god, Carter, no. You’re here to win.
She spun away, forcing herself to picture anything else, but for some reason now she was thinking of Fitzy shirtless and where were all these hormones coming from?
“What did you want?” asked Adi.
She took a deep breath. “The ribbon. From the fortune teller room. It’s been uploaded onto the Domain. Did you ever figure it out?”
He frowned.
“There was a ribbon, with a code? It came out of that box with the scarves.”
Adi’s eyes widened. “I forgot about that.” He disappeared into his room and emerged a moment later with the ribbon in his hand.
“Hold on—what ribbon?” asked Sierra.
Carter showed them the post on the Domain.
“It’s definitely the same one,” said Adi, perching on the edge of the couch cushion and spreading the ribbon out on the coffee table.
Oaelnibtskati klciIcectiphc ailedthoileee yvuBihiufltfw teeydanliehii eSstftdderinl aeshiwAndwsal mapenanoBotlb srocdsatuniee lctoAlrbttmjm ohtfrereteeui othfefejhsAsn kheiltsuectte
“Another anagram?” Beck asked. “Though that would be one heck of an anagram . . .”
“I’ll plug it into a decoder,” said Carter, opening her phone.
Adi shook his head. “It’s not an anagram.”
“Oh, come on,” said Carter, nudging him. “You think everything’s an anagram.”
He scowled half-heartedly. “This one’s not. I can tell by the feel of it.”
“It wasn’t necessary to complete the room,” Beck said with a frown. “Do they normally put extra clues in there? Big red herrings like this?”
“No,” Adi said. “Did you say it was on the Domain? The episode hasn’t even dropped yet.”
“The person who uploaded this picture figured out the Alicia Angelos anagram, too,” said Carter.
“It’s someone involved with the show, if they have access to the ribbon,” Beck said.
“It has to be Louis,” Carter said.
Adi snapped his fingers at Beck. “I need a pen and paper.”
“Am I your maid?”
Before Adi could respond, a ballpoint pen smacked him in the forehead. It rebounded onto the table as he reeled back, pressing a hand to his forehead and gaping at Sierra.
“Oops,” she said unapologetically.
Carter passed him a notepad. They gathered closer as he copied down the first line of the note, squished together on the sofa, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee.
“A one-letter Caesar cipher gets us . . . P-B-F-M . . . That’s not it. Two letters . . . Q-C . . . obviously not. Three letters . . .”
“Could be a keyword cipher?” said Carter.
“Was just thinking that.” Adi doodled a question mark on the page. “Does anyone remember some sort of keyword planted in the room?”
“Try ‘Alicia,’” said Sierra.
“It’s not ‘Alicia.’ The two As throw it off, and keyword ciphers work best if they include at least one letter from the end of the alphabet.”
“‘Voyance’? As in, Clara Voyance?” Beck suggested, but that didn’t get them anywhere, either.
They fell silent, thinking. Adi tried redoing the cipher using “Angelos” and “escape” and “tarot” and “hermit” and “tower” before he finally snapped at everyone to stop throwing out ideas because they weren’t helping.
“There must have been something else in the room,” he said, tapping the pen rapidly against his knee. “A keyword no one picked up on, or a cipher wheel or something.”
“You’d think we would have noticed a cipher wheel lying around,” muttered Sierra.
Adi tried “Louis” as the keyword for the cipher. Nothing.
“There are eight capital letters,” said Carter, running a finger along the message. “O-I-B-S-A-B-A-A.”
“You’re right,” said Adi, circling the capital letters.
“Is that an anagram?” asked Beck. “Sob . . . Bib . . . Abba?”
“I don’t think so. Could indicate names or initials or . . .” Adi’s breath caught. “Or . . . poetry.”
“Poetry?” Carter said with an abrupt laugh. “Now you’re going romantic on us?”
Adi lifted his focus from the paper and peered at her. “She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes; thus mellowed to that tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies.”
Beck whistled lowly, while Carter blushed.
Sierra rolled her eyes. “Exactly how many books did you bring with you on this trip?”
“His entire duffel bag is full of them,” Beck said in slight awe. “He has one change of clothes and one bag of toiletries, and the rest is books.”
“How do you not stink all the time?” Sierra demanded.
“I send my laundry bag out like everyone else,” Adi said, putting on exaggerated affronted airs, but his focus was already lost in the ribbon again.
“I think we’re looking at a poem . . . or seven sentences.
Maybe less, given that the I could be a pronoun, and some of these could be proper names.
What’s interesting is that the very first letter is one of our capitals, suggesting it might actually be the start of the note.
It could be . . .” He paused. “That’s it. ”
He flipped to a clean sheet of paper and started writing again— copying down the letters from the note, but instead of writing them left to write, he wrote the first line in a column, top to bottom.
O
a
e
l
n
i
b
t
s
k
a
t
i
“What are you doing?” asked Carter.
“There are thirteen lines, and each one is exactly thirteen letters,” he said, starting in on a second column.
Ok
al
ec
li
nI
ic
be
tc
st
ki
ap
th
ic
“That’s awfully symmetrical,” he went on, “which means we could be looking at a simplified columnar transposition cipher.”
“Yeah, sure,” Beck said. “I totally know what that is.”
Adi ignored him, adding a third line, then a fourth, continuing the painstaking process of writing down each letter, each line, each column, until they were staring at a block of text.
Okayteamslook
aliveSearchth
ecluesspotthe
lieBythecoffi
nIdidfindArel
icthatwasleft