lips with each word. “I had nothing to do with that, okay? It was all Wes. All of it.”
“I don’t know about the Black Widow over there,” Kevin said, speaking directly to the camera, “but I’m just an innocent bystander.”
“Are you?”
Kevin threw his arms up in a gesture of blamelessness. “Dude!”
Persey stepped around Kevin, whose protection she wasn’t sure she wanted. She felt stupid addressing a black domed camera. It was like talking to someone in dark sunglasses—you could never tell if they were looking at you, paying attention, or even awake behind those shades. “What do you want from us?”
“Justice.”
“This isn’t justice!” Mackenzie screamed. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Kevin shot her a look. “Why, because you didn’t actually put the Glock in Melinda Browne’s hand?”
Neela crept up beside Persey, staring at the camera. Unlike Mackenzie, she was perfectly calm. Resigned, perhaps, to their fate. “I know we can’t bring them back,” she said. “And I know this doesn’t make up for anything, but I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”
“Neela,” Persey said, “this isn’t your fault.”
“I’m the one who solved the puzzle.”
“But you didn’t know what you were doing.”
Neela swallowed. “Does it matter? People died because of what I did. Because I wanted to show off that I could solve the puzzle when no one else could. Because…” She paused, brow pinched. “Because I wanted to impress Arlo. She was cute and smart and so fajita-ing cool, and I thought maybe if I did solve her puzzle she might, like, want to meet me or something. See? I was totally selfish about the whole thing. I wasn’t solving a puzzle to, like, end world hunger. It was ego. I deserve to die here.”
“There!” Mackenzie pointed at Neela. “She’s accepting blame. You want to punish someone? Punish the nerd.”
Persey wanted to smack Mackenzie across her cowardly face, but that wouldn’t solve their problem. She took Neela’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re not going to die here,” she said under her breath, then stepped toward the camera. “What do you want, L. Browne? That’s who you are, right? The child of Derrick and Melinda Browne? The sole inheritor of Escape-Capades?”
“What are you doing?” Kevin hissed. For the first time that day, he looked afraid.
She didn’t stop to answer him. “You want justice for your parents’ deaths? Wes, Arlo, Shaun, and Riot have already paid that price. Don’t you think that’s enough bloodshed for one day?”
There was a pause during which time Persey’s heart thundered. Kevin’s words rang in her head. What are you doing?
“I want the truth.”
“The truth?” Did anyone even know what that was anymore?
“We haven’t heard the whole story yet.”
“We haven’t?”
“One of you is holding back.”
Persey groaned. How many more secrets in conjunction with the Brownes and the Prison Break disaster could there possibly be? “Who? Who isn’t telling the truth?”
The voice on the loudspeaker paused; then instead of answering her question, he launched into what sounded like a prewritten speech.
“The piece of machinery in the middle of the room is a wood chipper, an industrial model. It can reduce an entire tree to pulp in seconds.”
“I do not like the sound of this,” Kevin said.
“It can also render a body unrecognizable. There is one person in this room who is still lying about what happened last year, but I’m not going to tell you who. That’s the final puzzle—the one you need to solve in order to escape.”
Persey stiffened. “Puzzle?”
“On the table, there is a Glock 29 Gen-Four Subcompact. Like the one used in the Brownes’ deaths. Loaded and ready to fire. Identify the guilty party, dole out justice, and get rid of the evidence. If you get it right, I’ll let the rest of you go.”
“And if we get it wrong?” Kevin asked.
Again, a pause. This time Persey was pretty sure it was for dramatic effect. “Then we keep trying.”
Time seemed to slow down. While Persey and Neela were still processing the meaning of his words—that one of them might get shot and pulverized, but it could be the wrong person and they’d have to do it all again—Mackenzie and Kevin had jumped into action. They each lunged for the gun, knocking the table over in the process. The Glock slid across the floor like a puck on ice and slammed into the wall, ricocheting off at an angle.
“You’re not going to make me the scapegoat!” Mackenzie raced after the gun, reaching down as the weapon’s momentum slowed, but Kevin was faster. He shoved Mackenzie