restless fluttering in her extremities, and the telltale tightness in her chest, as if someone was lacing a corset too tight, crushing her ribs and her diaphragm and her lungs in the process. A panic attack was lurking in the depths of her belly, ready to take over her entire body.
You shouldn’t be here, she argued with herself. Tell them you made a mistake.
She was just about to leave (flee) through the still-open door when she heard it click into place, simultaneously cutting off even the slightest glow of light from the outside.
Calm down, she told herself, fighting back the spreading anxiety. You just have to get through this. Eyes on the prize.
“Now what?” Arlo twittered nervously. “Are we just supposed to stand here?”
In an instant, Persey’s anxiety vanished. It was comforting to think that the self-confident Slytherin found this experience as off-putting as Persey did, and it reminded her that she wasn’t alone.
“I don’t see a countdown clock,” Shaun replied. “The game must not have started yet.”
“Maybe we have to turn the lights on?” Neela suggested. “Find the mechanism and—”
Without warning, overhead lights flickered, then buzzed to life, flooding the room.
“Oh,” Neela said, almost disappointed that there wasn’t an immediate puzzle to solve. “Well, that works too.”
Meanwhile, for the second time in as many minutes, Persey’s eyes needed to adjust to harsh, blue-hued fluorescents. Only, unlike the futuristic feel of the hallway, Persey now found herself in the most depressing-looking space she’d ever seen: an office full of cubicles.
The ceiling was low, paneled, and lined with said fluorescents. The walls were gray, the high-endurance industrial carpeting picked to match, and all the common office-place necessities had been included, like a water cooler, complete with a dispenser for teensy paper cups, and two side-by-side coffee machines, each with half-filled carafes resting on their hot plates. The walls on either side of them were blank, just textured wallpaper that looked as if a rake had been scraped through wet plaster, and in each corner of the room sat an indoor office plant—ficus, if Persey wasn’t mistaken. Mounted on the far wall at the end of the room was a whiteboard covered in handwritten notes in red, blue, and black ink.
Two rows of desks stretched before them, each with a low wall around it on three sides, creating individual cubicles, the nearest of which had been decorated as if someone actually worked in it. The details were impeccable, the ambiance suitably drab—it was as if Leah had ushered them onto the research-and-development floor by accident instead of starting the game.
BZZZZ!
The sound of a buzzer pierced the tense silence and made Persey jump. Beside her, Neela let out a muffled yelp. Mackenzie seemed to find that incredibly funny: she snorted and buried her face in Kevin’s bicep to prevent herself from laughing out loud, while Arlo rolled her eyes, but whether it was at Mackenzie, Neela, or both, Persey wasn’t entirely sure.
“Thirty minutes.” The voice was feminine and almost sarcastic in its sweetness, a far cry from the monotone announcer in the Hidden Library, who counted down the minutes near the end of that challenge, and as with the narration in the introductory video, Persey wondered if this voice also belonged to Leah.
“Shaun, your countdown clock.” Arlo had turned around and was facing the door they’d come through, her chin raised toward the ceiling. Following her gaze, Persey found a digital clock face, which read twenty-nine minutes and forty-three seconds in blazing red numbers.
“Okay, then,” Wes said, and without a further word, he started to perv through the nearest cubicle.
Spurred into action, the rest of the contestants scurried away from the entrance, each taking a different part of the room in a form of self-segregation that seemed tacitly agreed upon. Mackenzie gave Kevin a wink before dashing off to the water cooler, pulling out the paper cups one by one and checking their surfaces. Kevin gave a sigh as he watched her, but Persey was pretty sure it was a what a hot mess she is kind of sigh as opposed to a what a hottie kind of sigh. Then he half-heartedly headed for the end of the cubicles, glancing over each wall as he passed.
Riot headed straight for the whiteboard while Shaun-bot 2.0 spun around, like a Terminator running a search-and-destroy program. After a few seconds, he turned toward the nearest potted plant and meticulously combed through its copious leaves. Arlo hesitated a moment, which seemed strangely uncharacteristic for someone who presented