LOGINDAVINA'S POVHe was there, standing at the door in his expensive jacket with his phone already in his hand and his mind already somewhere else entirely. I told him to be careful like a devoted woman who was terrified of losing him.The door clicked shut.I remember when I was lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling, and Michael was in the chair beside me, one ankle crossed over his knee, scrolling through his phone, and I looked at his face in profile, and I remembered everything.The mansion, the twins, and months of watching, waiting, and positioning myself carefully inside Michael's world, learning his rhythms, making myself indispensable in the small, invisible ways possible. I remembered being good at it. I remembered being proud of how good I was at it.I remembered the baby…. my baby. I was rushed to the hospital. Michael's hand was over mine, warm and firm, telling me to stay strong. I opened my eyes, softened my face. I let a small, confused sound come out of my throa
MICHAEL'S POV"Stay."Davina's voice was soft like dew. And before I knew it, her hand found my arm in the pale morning light filtering through the suite's curtains, not demanding or performing any drama. Simply warm, and I'd noticed this was the same way she had been every morning for the past three weeks without variation or agenda."I have calls," I responded."You always have calls.” She sat up, the sheet pooling around her. She looked at me with those clear, trusting eyes that had been looking at me the same way since she woke up in that hospital bed. She found a stranger holding her hand and decided he was someone she could trust. "Five minutes, I repeat, just five."I sat back down.The thing about Davina is that she never pushed, demanded, manipulated, or positioned herself for an angle.She existed in whatever space I gave her and made that space feel like something it had no business feeling like.Peace. That was the word that kept arriving uninvited. Three weeks of this wo
TOM'S POV"Find the mechanism, always find the mechanism."I said it out loud to no one because there was no one in the room with me, and because Vera used to say it every time we entered a new game chamber. Her voice in my memory was so clear it almost sounded as if she were standing behind me.She was not standing behind me, though; she was dead.I kept moving.The room was small, grey and already wet. Water pushed through the floor channels in thin, steady streams. The overhead light was dim and yellow… four walls and one door sealed behind me. No windows.I started on the left wall.The puzzle chambers in the Trial House were never random. That was something I learned during my first cycle, over three months of surviving rooms exactly like this one. Controller built each one with a specific logic and a specific solution, and the solution was always hidden in the details most people panicked about, and panic had killed more players in Game Two than the water ever did.I did not pan
SARAH’S POVThe hall did not erupt; the shift was only quieter and more dangerous, with heads turning, eyes recalibrating, and small conversations stopping and starting again with a different subject. Four hundred people doing the same arithmetic simultaneously and arriving at the same answer.We were worth more dead than alive."Move," Tom said. "Now, don't run."Tom led us through the hall like a shepherd, without making it seem like we were going anywhere specific. We reached the east wall… a structural pillar, wide and solid, sat at the junction of two camera angles that Tom had apparently spent three months identifying."Here," he said. "They cancel each other out, and nothing we do in this space gets recorded."We pressed in tight. Five people in a dead zone while four hundred calculated our worth around us."How long do we have?" Garrett asked. His leg was freshly wrapped with a strip torn from Tom's shirt. The blood had slowed, but his colour was still wrong."Until the game h
SARAH’S POV"Say that again."My voice managed to escape through my lips as everything else in the room had gone completely still in my head. The blood on the floor, Garrett's leg, the four hundred strangers moving around us. None of it existed anymore."Thomas Henderson," he said again. “Your twin."I searched his face.That was the problem…I could not find him in it. The face I had seen in photographs in the barn, the tiny boy in the crib reaching toward me with small, soft hands, that face was gone completely. The scarring had swallowed it. The jaw was the same shape. The eyes were the same dark brown. But time and pain had taken everything else and rebuilt it into something I had never seen before and did not recognise."You don't look like me," I protested. "No," he said. "I don't.""Did the experiments do this to you?” I asked."Partly." He touched the scarred side of his face briefly, the gesture of someone who had made peace with something they stopped being able to change a
SARAH'S POVI screamed.He dropped straight down, collapsing on my legs as I knelt over Garrett. Dead before he hit the floor. The gun clattered out of his hand and spun across the tile.I scrambled back, pushing his weight off me, my hands slipping in something wet and dark."Get up." A voice. Low, male, urgent. "All three of you, now."I looked up.A man stood over us in the strobing dark. He was tall and broad-shouldered. His face was badly scarred down the left side, with deep grooves that caught the light every time the bulb flashed on. He held a gun in each hand, and his eyes were moving constantly, scanning the room in every direction like a machine running a threat assessment.He was not looking at us like prey."Follow me, or you’ll die here.” Alvin looked at me. I looked at Garrett on the floor, his hand clamped over his leg, blood soaking through his fingers.Two shots cracked the air directly to our left. A figure screamed and went silent."Moving," Alvin said.He hauled
FRIEDA’S POVMy head pounded as if someone were hammering nails into my skull. Everything hurt. "Where am I?" I tried to sit up, but the room spun violently. "What happened?""Oh, so now you're awake? Perfect timing!" Serena stood in the corner, arms crossed, glaring at me with pure hatred.I blink
PATRICIA MOORE’S POV"Subject shows promising response to the new dosage. Memory fragmentation increasing as predicted."I spoke into my recorder, watching Frieda's brain scan flicker across the monitor. Beautiful. The hippocampus was lighting up exactly where I needed it to. The drug was working it
MICHAEL'S POV"Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful."I leaned back in my leather chair, watching the chaos unfold across twelve different screens. Camera 7 showed the car crash in perfect high definition. Camera 9 captured Garrett's pathetic attempts to fight his brother. Camera 3 gave me a close up of
GARRETT’S POV We cried together for what felt like an eternity.I held her tight, refusing to let go for a second. It felt like if I did, the world itself would collapse on us again.I managed to calm her slightly, and we both sank onto the bed.“Garrett… I… I can’t… it’s just too…”I kissed her be







