35 Students Remaining
My bones vibrate. White noise fills my ears like cotton.
Where am I? What just happened? Am I okay?
I feel marble beneath my cheek and palms. I blink and blink until, finally, the stars exploding in my eyes clear. The marble is tile, the kind of alternating black-and-white checkerboard you usually see inside expensive mansions. I’m lying on a floor, in a hallway.
Gingerly, I lift my head, struggling to all fours.
There aren’t any lights, but moonlight spills in through windows at the far end of the hall, drenching everything around me in the blue of nighttime.
I look over my shoulder, toward the door we just crawled out of.
I need to see for myself the explosion that nearly killed us.
But there’s no explosion. The door to the room hangs open, just as we left it, and there appears to be smoke coming from somewhere. But no flames, no signs of destruction. The room beyond is perfectly intact.
I stare at the smoke, my brain struggling to make sense of all this. How can there be smoke but no flames? And that roar I heard as Ian and I dove from the room, the way the floor trembled. That had to be the dynamite exploding. Didn’t it?
“Smoke machines,” Ian murmurs, seeming to read my mind.
“What?” My voice sounds far away, like I’m hearing it underwater.
Ian’s beside me, half propped up on the floor, his breath ragged. “There are smoke machines in the corners. Just there.” He nods to a black, boxy object hanging from the corner just above the door.
“Smoke machines,” I repeat. I stare hard at the boxy objects, trying to work out whether Ian’s being obnoxious, if I have to come up with some retort. I don’t think I could if I tried.
Something cold brushes against my arm and I flinch backward, jumpy as a rabbit. Ian’s hands come up before his chest: Sorry!
“Hey, calm down,” he says, and I realize, beats too late, that the cold feeling was him, his skin. He’d touched my arm.
I blink again, slower than usual. “I’m calm,” I say. “I just don’t understand. There wasn’t an explosion? But I felt the ground tremble. I don’t—”
“I think they played the sound of an explosion over the loudspeakers,” Ian says. Then, as if to make me feel better, he adds, “I thought it felt real, too.”
Felt real. Because of course it wasn’t an actual explosion. This is a school. Schools don’t blow up their students.
I release a little laugh that sounds like a hiccup, still trying to get my mind around the fact that we were never in any real danger.
It feels silly now, that I’d let myself get so scared.
But the whole thing felt real. Maybe it was the red lights, or the fact that they took me out of my bed in the middle of the night, or the ticking clock.
My heart is still beating too fast. I don’t know how I’m ever going to sleep.
“Congratulations, you two,” says a voice from just in front of us, and I jerk my head up as Ashlyn steps out of the shadows, smiling broadly. “You’ve passed your History and Politics module.”
It turns out the escape room was in the basement of Sullivan Hall this whole time. As we make our way toward the stairs, I think I hear classmates working through their own tests. The sounds of anxious voices and shuffling feet carry through the vents.
“The tests are staggered,” Ashlyn explains. “The next one ends in fifteen minutes.”
“Does every subject have a different escape room?” I want to know.
Ashlyn shakes her head. “No, just the History and Politics classes. Studies have shown that students struggle to apply certain lessons to their everyday lives. After they’re done learning about a period of history, for instance, all the relevant data is easily forgotten.
Wyatt wanted to find a way to make the information stick.
That’s how he came up with this lesson. Once you all experience the reality of the periods you’re learning about firsthand, it’s so much easier to understand what the real people went through.
What did you think?” She looks at me, the intensity in her eyes unnerving.
I give an involuntary shiver. I have no idea how she expects me to respond, so I just mumble, “It was…realistic.” Ian doesn’t say anything, but I think I notice the corner of his lip twitch, like he’s trying not to laugh.
But Ashlyn seems to appreciate my answer. “Wasn’t it? Learning like this is so much better than trying to memorize facts and dates from a book,” she prattles on. “I can never remember what I read. But a night like this stays with you forever.”
I make a noise in the back of my throat: It certainly will.
Something chimes, and Ashlyn stops walking, pulling a phone out of her pocket. Her face falls. “Oh no,” she murmurs. To us she says, “Can you give me a second?” And then, answering, “Kev, hey…what’s…”
Kev’s the TA for Protector. He’s the kind of bro-ey guy who seems to be wearing a backward baseball cap even when he’s not.
I can’t hear what he says, but the sound of his voice on the other end of the line is hurried, anxious.
Ashlyn’s expression darkens as she listens.
“Kevin, it can’t be…” she tries to interrupt.
Then: “No…no, I didn’t hear that…Okay, listen, I’m right by the Records Room…
Yeah, sure, of course I can…Okay…give me five minutes. ”
She hangs up and turns back to us. “So, Kev’s having some trouble with one of the other teams. I was supposed to stay with you until you get back to your dorms, but he really needs me to check something for him.
And seeing as it’s you…” Ashlyn glances at Ian.
“I can trust you to take the trolley on your own, right?”
I frown at Ian. What does she mean by seeing as it’s you?
“Of course,” Ian says smoothly. “We’ll head right back. Won’t we, Lia?”
“Oh, uh, yeah, sure we will.”
Ashlyn’s shoulders slump in relief. “Thank you.” She turns and hurries back the way we came, pulling her cell out of her pocket as she walks.
I hear the muted rise and fall of her voice trying to talk Kev down as she stops at a door at the end of the hall and unlocks it with her key card: The Records Room, I’m guessing.
When Ian and I get to the first floor, I see the trolley through the glass in the front doors.
It’s parked at the curb, ready to take us back to our dorms, but I don’t head toward it.
I need a second. Now that we’re alone, I can’t help but notice how shaky I still feel.
My legs are like jelly, and my heart is beating so hard it hurts.
I lean against the wall and close my eyes, trying to calm myself down. It seems obvious now that Wyatt never would’ve allowed a bomb to go off and kill two of his students. But back there, in that red-lit room—
Ian touches my arm. I flinch a little, but I don’t pull away as he presses his fingers into the skin just inside my wrist.
Is he trying to hold my hand? I can’t decide whether to yank it away or start laughing or throw up. Are Ian St. Clair and I friends now? Does making it out of an exploding escape room in the middle of the night mean you’re friends?
And then I realize: He’s not trying to hold my hand; he’s taking my pulse.
“Your heart rate’s high,” Ian says, dropping my arm. “I think you might be in shock. You need something to eat.”
It’s the last thing on earth I expected him to say.
“Food, Michaels,” he says when I don’t respond.
“You do know what food is, right? They have that in the condemned junkyard where you grew up?” He’s talking even slower now.
I’m still a wild animal, only now I have a brain injury.
I’d be more offended if I was capable of holding information in my head for longer than a few seconds.
“Food,” I repeat. The words are slowly starting to make sense in my brain. Something deep and hollow opens up inside me, and I realize he’s right: I am hungry. My stomach grumbles.
“Want to go to the cafeteria?”
I force myself to laugh because he has to be joking. He raises his eyebrows: Do you?
“We can’t do that.” I glance through the front doors, at the trolley. “We’re supposed to go right back to our dorms.”
“Carl won’t rat us out.” Ian sounds weirdly sure about this. For some reason it reminds me of how Ashlyn said seeing as it’s you. As if Ian’s different from the rest of us.
“Carl?” I ask.
“The trolley driver,” Ian explains. And when I don’t say anything else, he adds, “C’mon, I thought you were hungry.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Then trust me.”
I’m opening my mouth to remind him that until very recently—like, an hour ago—our relationship wasn’t based on trust so much as it was based on mutual simmering hatred when Ian takes me by the arm and pulls me down the hall.
He leads me down a service hallway, which you reach by going down the back stairwell, as he explains that only the teachers and the TAs know about these halls.
“Then how do you know about them?” I want to know.
“I have a photographic memory,” Ian says. I can’t tell if he’s joking.
“That explains why you would remember them, but not how you found out about them in the first place,” I point out.
“Huh,” Ian says. “I suppose that’s true.”
The kitchens are right next to the cafeteria where students all take our meals. But the door is, of course, locked.
Ian pushes past me, producing a key card from his pocket.
“Our key cards don’t work after curfew,” I point out.
“No, but the TAs’ key cards are basically master keys. They always work, and they open every door. I swiped this one from Ezra, the TA at Visionary.” Ian holds the card up to the lock, which immediately flashes green.
I stare at the card. “He didn’t report it missing? Get it disabled.”
“Not yet.”
Interesting. The old Lia would figure out how to slip that key from Ian’s pocket. In fact, the old Lia would only need sixty seconds with her trusty iCopy machine, and she, too, would have a master key to the Luminary campus. The old Lia never would’ve been able to resist.
But that’s not me anymore. I don’t break the rules.
Right?