“Rose?” I whispered, my grip tight on the knife as I inched forward, resisting the urge to outstretch my hand toward the darkness.  While the thought of warding off the darkness with my hand was enticing, the idea also brought images of heroines reaching out, calling into the abyss, and finding themselves dragged to the bottom without any hopes of escaping.  I was already calling into the darkness.  I was not going to reach for it as well.

Something rustled to my left.

I froze, eyes narrowing as I tried to see clearly.  But the darkness was everlasting.  It wasn’t actually everlasting, of course, seeing how I was staring into what appeared to be a shallow closet (one that you could barely walk into before hitting the wall), but as cold sweat trickled down the back of my neck I could truly believe that this darkness had no end.

The question “Hello?” sprang to my lips, but I swallowed it down before it could escape.  “Rose?” I whispered instead.  It wasn’t much different from saying hello, but it made me feel a little less like the girls in the movies and more like the girl who was on a fervent search for her comrades.  It would have been better to say nothing, but with no light to help me see, I didn’t have much of a choice.  “Valarie?”

I bit back a yelp as a figure shot forward.  Their hand raked the side of my cheek, and I stumbled backward, barely regaining my balance before I fell to the floor.  The person disappeared as soon as they appeared, enveloping completely in the darkness.  My hand flew up to my cheek, and I winced.  Their nails had drawn blood.

“Serenity?” Coden whispered from behind me.  I spun around to see a concerned expression on his face.  “What happened?”

“Someone—someone scratched me,” I replied, sparing one last glance at the closet before moving toward Coden.  I pulled my fingers away from my face, wincing again as my eyes landed on the blood coating them.  It wasn’t much, especially compared to the amount I’d seen tonight, but it still hurt my stomach to see it.  After tonight, if I survived, I had a feeling that even just a dot of blood would be enough to make me sick.

Coden’s eyebrows furrowed, and he glanced toward the closet.  “Let’s get out of here,” he said after a short moment.  “They’re not in here.”

I nodded and, without another word, followed Coden out of the room.  In the back of my mind I knew that whoever had scratched me was just trying to defend themselves, but for the most part I was just shocked that of all things I’d gotten scratched.  In here, I could expect to be chased, stabbed, or shot.  But scratched?

○

“Are you okay?” Coden asked softly as we emerged from the room. 

My eyes reached for his and then fell down toward his cheeks, where Al’s cuts remained.  His response to that same question rang through my head.  I’ll live.  He’d been cut with a knife and he’d shaken it off as though it was nothing.  To think that I’d be anything but okay with something as trivial as getting scratched on the cheek seemed ridiculous and comical at the same time.  “Yeah,” I said softly, shaking my head.  “It was just a scratch.”

Coden nodded, frowning as he rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand.  It was then that I noticed just how truly exhausted he was.  Though he tried to hide it—or maybe he just didn’t notice—I could tell.  How badly was his body begging for him to lay down, to rest just for a little while?  Could he even register the fact that his body was tired, or was he so pumped up on adrenaline that it didn’t cross his mind?  My eyebrows creased as I asked those same questions to myself.  Honestly, I didn’t know for sure.

We fell quiet for a little while after that.  I continued to grip the knife securely in my hand, my heartbeat and our steady breathing the only background noise as we searched fervently for any sign of Rosalie and Valarie.  Sometimes a scream or a gunshot would join in with the dysfunctional melody, but other than that, it was almost silent.  And that set me on edge.  This wasn’t the closet, where Coden and I had completely closed off the world around us.  We were out in the open.  Not that there weren’t periods of time when it went quiet like this, but just a little while ago it felt like the world was nothing but cries and screeches of terror and pounding footsteps on the floor.  Or maybe it wasn’t a little while ago at all.  Who the hell knew anymore?

“It’s so quiet,” I said finally, voicing the thoughts that had been swimming around inside my head.

“I know,” Coden replied.  He glanced at me from the corner of his eye.  “That’s either a good thing or a bad thing.”

“I really doubt it’s good.”  I paused.  “How many people do you think are left?”

Coden took a moment to think that over before replying.  As he thought over my question, I struggled to do the math inside my head.  Coden and I were still alive, and as far as I knew, so were Rosalie, Valarie, Annabeth, Tyler, Cole, and the person from the closet.  That was eight.  And what about that boy who Dan had shot earlier?  Was he still alive, or had he bled out?  I knew for sure that two people were dead, and from the amount of screams I’d heard, I was sure they weren’t the only ones.

“At least eight,” Coden said eventually, concluding the same that I had.  “If I’m correct in the assumption that the people we saw last are still alive.”

He didn’t have to say anything for me to know that he was referring to Rosalie and Valarie.  My stomach twisted, and I swallowed.  My mind tried to conjure horrific images, but I refused to let them take control of my thoughts.  I’d done enough of imagining the worst.  For now, I just had to concentrate on the possibility that Rosalie and Valarie were still here, breathing.

“I wonder what time it is,” I said, veering into a new topic before it became too difficult to control my thoughts.  Better to distract myself with something as simple as the concept of time than to think about the odds of at least eight of us still fighting this seemingly endless battle.  Of course, it wasn’t a very simple concept at all, seeing how time seemed to reshape, twist, contort into something unrecognizable.  It wasn’t to be trusted.  A moment felt like an eternity, but an eternity felt like only a moment.  But it was something. 

My eyes darted downward as Coden’s free hand went for his jeans pocket.  Out of it, he pulled his cell phone.  For a moment my mind was thrown back to that brief time before Al attacked Rosalie—to the time when Coden and I hurried to check our cell phones, hopeful that maybe, just maybe we’d be able to call for help and get out of here.  And then that moment, just like the brief hope that I'd be able to get out of this quickly, faded away from my mind as I was brought back to reality. 

“Dead,” Coden said dully, shooting me an apologetic glance before stuffing his phone back in his pocket.  “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Can’t say I am either,” I muttered, flicking a hand through my hair.  I sighed.  Though, the thought of my phone outliving me in this situation would have been…what was the word I was searching for?  Ironic?  After a moment I mentally shrugged it off.  I didn’t have time to fumble for the right words to say.  Not here.

Without another word, we headed into the next room available to us.  It was a somewhat familiar room, and I was hit with a distant sense of déjà vu.  Whether that meant this room had a similar setup to a different room we’d been to or if we were travelling in circles, I had no idea, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.  Instead, I just stepped inside and headed straight for the closet, ignoring the various pieces of furniture scattered around.  This was the system Coden and I had created.  If there was a closet, I’d search that first while Coden looked around the room.  If they weren’t in the closet, I’d help look around the room—even though by that time we were both pretty certain as to whether the girls were there.

This closet, like most others in the building, was a walk-in closet.  I stepped inside, eyes searching for a sign of blond hair as I called out a small, “Rose?  Valarie?”

No answer, but by this point I wasn’t surprised.

After calling another time, I got ready to leave the closet.  However, something caught my eye before I could.

“Coden,” I whispered, twisting around to glance at Coden as he peered underneath a desk.  “Come here.”

Coden looked up.  “Are they in there?” he asked.  From his tone, I knew he could tell I hadn’t found the girls but felt the need to ask anyway.

I shook my head.  “Come here.”

Coden glanced around for a short moment before coming over to me.  “What?” he asked, twisting his head to look behind him before looking back at me.

I pulled the object from the single shelf on the closet’s wall, holding it out in front of me.

“A flashlight,” Coden said.  He cracked a small smile before it faded.  “It’s too dangerous to use it,” he told me, lips pursing.  “We could be spotted too easily.”

“I know that.”  I shrugged, pocketing my knife and plucking the flashlight from the shelf, unable to help myself.  I didn’t know what it was about the damn flashlight that made me feel even the littlest bit better.  Coden was right: we could never really use it.  That’s what Samantha and the others did; they gave us small bits of hope—placing us right in front of a sure exit, letting us keep our cell phones, leaving things like scissors and flashlights around, etcetera—but crushed them the second we thought that we’d found something that made our situation seem less impossible to survive.

Covering the head of the flashlight with my hand, I flicked it on.  “Don’t worry,” I assured Coden, who stiffened as dulled light poured through my hand.  “I just wanted to see if it works—in case we need it later.”

Coden nodded, and I was about to turn it off when I saw something out of the corner of my eye.  I jerked to the right, eyes widening, stomach dropping, hand slapping to my mouth to block out a loud gasp of horror.

Without my hand to block it, the light shined brightly on the sight I wanted nothing but to block from my mind.  “Oh god,” I breathed through my hand. 

Coden grabbed the flashlight from my hand and switched it off, but it was already too late—I’d seen him.

It was the boy from earlier, the one who’d been fleeing from Dan.  It wasn’t the gunshot wound to the leg that had killed him, though—it was the gunshot to the head, the one right over his left eye.  When he died, he’d collapsed in an aimless heap on the floor, the blood from his leg creating a small puddle on the floor.  His eyes—they were so—blank.  Lifeless.

This was the third dead body I’d seen, and it was just as horrifying, just as heart-wrenching as the first time.

“Serenity,” Coden murmured, putting his hand on my shoulder and twisting me around.  He looked me straight in the eye, as though he was trying to make sure I wasn’t about to have a mental breakdown before he tried to console me further.

I shook my head.  “I’m fine,” I muttered.

I glanced toward the closet’s wall, the closest I could get to looking at the boy without turning around.  I didn’t want to see his body again, but it wasn’t exactly easy to forget that there was a dead body behind me.  After a short moment, I twisted back round to face Coden.  He stared at me for a short moment as though making sure that I wasn’t about to fall into a heap like the boy on the floor before pulling away and handing me the flashlight.  I took it from him and stuffed it in my pants pocket, silently praying that we wouldn’t have to run for our lives any time soon.  It would follow out in half a second.

As Coden headed out of the closet and made one last run through of the room, I turned around and looked down at the boy again.  In the darkness, all I could make out was the outline of his body.  I had the sudden urge to say something, as though that would make any difference.  But it wouldn’t have.  This boy was gone, just like the girl on the floor and Emily.  They were all gone.  Just gone.  Because these three sick people decided it would be fun to murder us all.

Coden called my name, and I left.  I could feel his eyes on me as I emerged, but I kept my gaze on the floor, struggling to keep my breathing steady.  There was a part of me that wanted to collapse on the floor and cry until my tear ducts stopped working, but it was smaller than it had been when I’d seen the two girls.  Not because I cared less that this boy was now dead, but because it only added to the list of reasons why we needed to find Rosalie and Valarie, and we needed to find them now.  Collapsing in a sobbing heap on the floor would do nothing—not for anyone.

We left the room, and went back to searching.  Neither of us discussed what we’d seen, because there was nothing to say that hadn’t already been said before.  I kept all the words I wanted to say inside, suffering in silence as my mind replayed the sight of the boy’s body over and over again, only stopping to show me the other bodies I’d seen tonight.  The defenses I put up—the ones blocking out images of Rosalie and Valarie—were barely contained behind crumbling walls.  I wanted—needed—a distraction, but it felt like my mouth had been glued shut. 

And then the flashlight fell out of my pocket.

There was no real reason for it falling.  It just did.

“Shit,” I hissed under my breath, dropping down and scooping the flashlight from the ground.  As I straightened, I kept my eyes on the hallway, silently praying that Samantha or Dan wasn’t nearby.  That would be my luck, of course, for them to be somewhere close when I made a noise that sounded louder than a bomb going off.  Of course, that could have just been my paranoia and my ears having learned to tune in on any noise, big or small.  But it didn’t matter.  Not to me.

I probably should have just left the flashlight where it was, but something kept me from doing so.  I didn’t know what it was, exactly.  All I knew was that I needed to have this flashlight on hand.  So, instead of leaving it in the middle of the hallway or moving it to the side (so no one would trip), I held the flashlight out in front of me for a short moment before stuffing it into my bra.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, as I tried to find a way to make the flashlight not as much of a hindrance. 

Coden didn’t reply for a moment.  When I glanced his way, I saw that his eyebrows had risen considerably.  “I can’t possibly imagine how that’s comfortable,” he muttered.

I blinked, suddenly realizing that I’d just been adjusting my cleavage in front of a guy.  And then it struck me how much I really didn’t care.  Just like I hadn’t cared that Annabeth referred to us as a couple—this wasn’t the place where things like that mattered.  That was for out there, back in the world I knew and loved.  “It’s not,” I replied.  “But—I just need the flashlight.”

Coden nodded, and though I didn’t know for sure, I had a feeling he knew what I meant.  That I had no explanation, but I just needed the damn flashlight.  Like I was clinging to any sense of hope I could find.

“You’ll be able to run, right?” was all he said on the subject, and when I nodded, he let it go completely. 

○

“Which way?” I asked as we reached the next hall.  It stretched out on either side of us, left and right.

Coden glanced between our two options before rubbing his eye.  “You pick,” he said softly.

Lips pursed, my eyes drifted from left to right.  It felt like my decision took hours, but I’m sure it only took a few moments.  “Right,” I said.

“Okay.”  Coden took a step forward.  “Right it is then.”

We fell silent again as we moved down the hall, checking each room we happened upon.  Rosalie and Valarie weren’t in any of them, but there weren’t any other bodies either.  Coden offered to check the closets instead, but I refused.  There was no avoiding tonight’s horrors, and I wasn’t going to ask Coden to search the closets just because I was anxious I’d find another dead body.  It wasn’t like I was the only one afraid of seeing another teenager dead.  Coden may have been able to mask his fear, but he still felt it.

“Not here,” I proclaimed as I emerged from the closet and started looking around the room.  This room had a living room sort of set-up, with two couches, a recliner, a TV stand, and a coffee table.  I checked under the two couches, though I was sure Coden already had, and shifted the recliner from its spot (kitty-cornered on the wall).  No one.  Though, I was pretty sure someone had moved the recliner to conceal themselves.

Coden, who was now heading toward the doorway to make sure that no one was coming, nodded.  “I know,” he said softly.  I watched as he stood next to the doorway, just out of view from the hall, and peeked outside.  “The coast is clear.”

I didn’t say anything, just followed Coden out of the room.

As we were about to enter the next room, I heard it: the sound of pounding footsteps.  It was distant at first, but a moment later it felt like the person was right down the hall.  My stomach dropped and my heart began to pound loudly in my chest, so loud that I almost didn’t hear Coden curse.

“Shit,” Coden hissed, and when my gaze turned away from the doorway and followed his, I realized why.

We were standing in a room with nowhere to hide.  There were a couple knocked-over chairs and a table, but that was it.  This room didn’t have a closet, either, so there was no hope of hiding anywhere in here.

This room had signed our death certificates.

“No,” I whispered.  “No, no, no.  We haven’t found them yet.  Maybe we can find another room in time—”

But as soon as the words escaped my mouth, the footsteps grew even closer, and I knew that we would never have time to find another room without being caught.  I shoved myself as close as I could into the wall, and Coden did the same, his free hand finding my own.  Even when it became clear that I couldn’t press myself any closer, I tried anyway, as though if I shoved hard enough, I would go through the wall itself.

The footsteps were closing in, and I struggled to quiet my breathing or stop it altogether.

And then the footsteps were right in front of the door—and just as soon, they were gone, the person belonging to them pelting past without a second thought to the rooms they were passing.  I didn’t dare relax as the footsteps faded and near-silence fell upon us once again.  I stood completely still, just waiting for the following footfalls—the ones belonging to one of our captors.  No one would run in here unless they were being chased.  That would be like begging for the evil to chase you down and rip you away from the land of the living.

However, as the moments passed, I realized that no one was following the person who’d run.  Either they’d lost the captor or they’d stupidly run through the halls as though nothing could touch them.

“Should we leave?” I said as loudly as I dared, which was barely even a whisper.  I swallowed, my eyes slipping shut as I willed my heart to slow down, even just a little bit.  When it didn’t work by sheer willpower, I struggled to breathe in, out, in, out.  Slowly.  But it was hard to just concentrate on breathing when someone just tore through the hall and someone else could follow at any second, while we were here, in a room where there was no place to hide.

“Yes,” Coden replied.  “But if someone was following them…”

“I think enough time has passed.”  I glanced toward the doorway, throat dry.  “If we wait too long, then Samantha or Dan is going to come down here and find us in a room with absolutely nowhere to hide.”

Coden nodded.  “You’re right,” he said.  He spared me a glance before letting my hand go and stepping away from the wall.  I did the same, and then we left the room.

It didn’t take much thought to decide to head in the direction the person had run.  While heading toward the noise wasn’t a smart move, heading toward what the person was running from was an idiotic move that would no doubt render us dead.

“We’re still going to look for them right?” I whispered urgently, suddenly afraid that we were going to put our search on hold because of this new threat.  While I could agree that we needed to hurry and put as much distance between us and this hallway as fast as we could, I couldn’t bear the thought of deserting Rosalie and Valarie—not again, not even in thought.

Coden seemed to agree with me.  “Yeah,” he said, and then looked over at me as though to make sure I actually agreed with him, though I was the one who’d asked in the first place.  “We’ll have to be quick though.”

I nodded.  “Yeah, I know.” 

Our once relatively calm searches turned into quick run-throughs and hurried callings.  There wasn’t much of a difference, in all honesty, but it felt different, worse.  So much worse, like we were being timed and when the timer went off, all hell would break loose.

“It feels like we should have found something by now,” I said softly, my feet slowing as we passed through yet another hall.  I had no idea how many halls we’d been through before even contemplating slowing down, but I knew that over the past two or three hallways, we’d slowed our pace, even if it was just a little bit.  “The girls, the door, another person—something.”

Coden scratched an itch on his cheek and nodded shortly.  “I know what you mean,” he murmured.  “Along with the girls and other people, one would think that we would have found the door by now.  It feels like we’ve been through every hall possible.” 

“Maybe there isn’t one,” I said, though there was no need to.  We’d all noted the possibility that there was no door at all, except for the one door we couldn’t open. 

“Maybe not,” Coden agreed.  “But they’re playing a game, and a game has rules.  And the rules of this game say that if we find the door, we can leave.”  He frowned.

“People cheat in games all time.”

We turned down a hall that appeared to be shorter than the others.  There were no rooms in this hall, just the door at the end.  It reminded me of the hallways in homes that lead to a single room—a dead end.  But I knew that this didn’t lead to a dead end.  It lead to the room we’d initially been brought to.  This was the entryway opposite to the one that Rosalie and I had gone through when we were first told to hide.

“I know.  But something tells me that the door is here; we just been going about it the wrong way.”

I would have asked Coden what he meant by that, but an eruption of screams and gunshots cut me off before I could.  I froze where I stood, eyes widening so largely that I was surprised they didn’t fall out of my skull.  These screams didn’t sound like the fright-filled cries we’d been hearing all night.  No, this sounded like—like a war cry. 

My eyes wanted to veer over to Coden, to see what he was thinking, but they were locked on the scene before me.  We were close enough to the door now to see inside the room, so I could see everything.  I could see Samantha and Dan in the midst of a small crowd of teens (six at the most) looking somewhat surprised but mostly angry as they fended off the abductees.  I could see a girl fall to the ground with a bullet in her head, could see a boy collapse, a knife in his chest. 

“She did it,” was all I could manage to say. 

“She did.”

We should have left right then, but my feet wouldn’t move.  My eyes were much too busy taking in this horrific event.  I spotted Tyler and Cole as they backed away from the small crowd, terrified expressions on their faces.  My gaze fell to their feet, and I realized why they were backing down from the fight.

Annabeth lay there, unmoving.  I didn’t have to see her face to know that she was dead.

“We have to go,” Coden whispered hurriedly in my ear. 

I heard him, distantly, but I continued to stare, frozen with shock.  The scene was overwhelming.  Too many kids were fighting, dying, crying, screaming, bleeding.  The only ones still standing were Tyler, Cole, and a boy I distantly recognized.  While it was true that there were only three kids sprawled on the floor, there were still three kids sprawled on the floor.  And not only that, if Annabeth was only able to gather three people besides herself, Tyler, and Cole…did that mean that these were the only people left alive?

No.  Valarie and Rosalie were not dead.  They couldn’t be.  They couldn’t be.

“Serenity, they’re going to notice us over here any minute.”

I agreed wholeheartedly, and despite the part of me that yearned to stay here and save the remaining teens all from the fate they’d thrust upon themselves, I knew that if we wanted to find the girls and the door, we had to get out of here before either of them saw us standing there.  However, as my gaze trailed to the other side of the room, the sight of two blonds in the corner of the room made me forget everything about having to run, to get away.  “Oh my god,” I whispered.  “Rosalie.”