“‘No empty-handed man can lure a bird,’” Mackenzie said, not to be outdone.
“Not the Middle English,” Riot said, wiggling his hand from side to side to denote he thought her quote was iffy. “But I’ll allow it.”
Can everyone on the planet quote Chaucer but me?
“But the images in the final scramble,” Shaun said, refusing to be derailed by a Chaucer quote-off. “They were nonsensical.” His brows knitted together, wrinkling the area above his nose ever so slightly. It was the first hint of emotion he’d shown since Persey arrived. “Even unscrambled, there was no way they would form a cohesive picture.”
“You had to use the mirror,” Kevin explained. “They were all backward.”
“I see.” Shaun clearly didn’t.
“Are you serious?” Wes sat up, staring at Kevin as if he didn’t quite believe him. “How is that even possible to solve?”
Kevin shrugged. “I dunno. Ask her.”
Persey groaned, the weight of eight sets of eyes boring into her as everyone in the room focused on her. She tried not to blush, to let her eyes drop to the floor, to flee in abject terror—all of which were signs of weakness. If she was going to do this thing, really do this thing, she needed to project strength. Confidence. Even if it wasn’t real.
Fake it till you make it.
“You just had to see the whole thing in reverse, I guess.”
“Wow,” Neela said under her breath. Which made Persey smile despite her extreme discomfort.
“Then what’s he doing here?” Shaun asked, nodding toward Kevin without actually looking at him.
Kevin held his hands up before him, palms out—the universal symbol for I didn’t do it. “I’m just a lucky loser, my man.”
Arlo looked skeptical. “Loser, maybe. But lucky?”
“Wow. You are charming,” Kevin said. “I’m just here because of her. We were randomly paired up as teammates, and she wouldn’t agree to participate unless I did, too.”
That is not how it went down.
“Well, isn’t that precious?” Mackenzie sneered.
“So she did have help,” Arlo said with a smile.
“No, she didn’t.” Leah meandered around the room as she spoke, snaking through the different contestants. “Persey is the only person out of one-point-four million participants who has been able to solve the Hidden Library. And she did it single-handedly.”
Arlo and Mackenzie closed in on Persey immediately, shooting rapid-fire questions at her with such ferocity that she couldn’t even tell which of them was talking.
“How many escape rooms have you done?”
“You got lucky, didn’t you?”
“Did you talk to someone who’d done the room before?”
“How many times did you try it?”
“Did you get some insider information?”
Persey’s head whipped around toward Mackenzie, who had asked that last one. “Why would you think that?”
“Pretty sure she’s referencing the scandal from last year,” Kevin said. “She doesn’t think you could actually solve it yourself unless you stole the secrets from someone at Escape-Capades.”
Wes sat up straight, his sleepiness either forgotten or discarded, depending upon whether it was real or feigned. Persey wasn’t sure which. “Is that what they think? That someone bought info on Prison Break?”
Bought? Persey was pretty sure that wasn’t what Kevin said. “Prison Break? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“The. Fuck.” Mackenzie threw up her hands. “You can’t be for real.”
Riot, still gripping the copy of the Voynich manuscript Leah had pulled for him, joined the half circle that had formed around Persey. “You’ve never heard of the Prison Break escape room scandal? The prize money. The secret that was leaked and ended up all over the Internet…”
“The owners of this company,” Kevin added, “who went bankrupt because of it and decided to take their own lives rather than deal with the consequences?”
“It was covered on the national news approximately twenty-three times between May and July of last year,” Shaun added. “You must have seen it.”
Kevin blinked at him. “Did you actually have that statistic at the tip of your tongue, or did you make it up?”
Shaun’s gaze was as flat and emotionless as ever. He would have made an amazing poker player. “I do not make up statistics.”
“You’re a weird dude,” Kevin said after a pause. “Like an android with less personality. Gonna call you Shaun-bot.”
“Please, don’t,” Shaun said, sounding very much as if he didn’t really care either way.
“Too late, Shaun-bot!”
Meanwhile, Mackenzie and Arlo were still circling Persey, like a pair of mean-girl sharks swarming before a kill. “How is it that you solved the single most impossible puzzle in the world,” Mackenzie began, “and yet you’ve never heard of Derrick and Melinda Browne?”