Margot returned to the hallways, this time following them to the second floor. Marsh padded in her wake, which she was grateful for. She paused outside her bedroom door. It had been left open a few inches, though the space beyond was pure black. She knew there wouldn’t be anything inside…but it still took her a very long moment of gathering courage to reach her arm through the opening and turn on the light.

Kant had been in there earlier, to gather her jacket and phone, but he hadn’t touched much else. The bedside table was jammed between the door and the wall, forcing Margot to turn her body sideways to slip through. The axe lay on the ground. A thin smear of dried liquid coated its tip. Margot stepped over it.

The only other trace of Kant’s presence was the window; it was closed again. Margot circled her bed, which still held rumpled blankets from her disturbed sleep, and retrieved her phone charger from the wall.

She scanned the space to be sure there was nothing else she wanted there. Her books were strewn across the floor, but she didn’t think she had the focus for reading that night. Spare clothes were in the wardrobe. The jeans she was wearing would still be fine, but she took a new top and a new bra and tucked them under her cast as she left the room.

Instead of returning straight to the ground floor, Margot circled through the upper level, trying to give herself some familiarity with the layout and which doors would lead to dead ends.

The house had almost been designed to give her escape routes, she realized. There were two staircases on different sides of the building. The hallways looped like a race track. Even many of the bedrooms she looked into shared en suite bathrooms with the room next to them, giving her a path to slip through should she need it.

She wondered how much of the design had been coincidental and how much had been intentional.

That’s probably something my parents could have told me. She swallowed thickly and held a hand out to call Marsh closer to her. He’d begun wandering farther down the hall but happily returned at the gesture.

She kept moving, trying to form a mental map of the house. As she paced through rooms, her eye kept being drawn toward hiding places: closets, the narrow spaces under beds, behind shower curtains. She had to force her mind to disregard them.

The others had warned her about hiding places with no exits. She supposed it was still human nature to want to get somewhere small or somewhere with solid walls on three sides.