If he’s in that room with Lucie, I do. If Lucie is in room five, I fear that Kevin is already gone. They want to murder. They’ve had over a year of watching people, and now they’re starting to get hungry for the kill. They could easily have started with Kevin.

“I really hope so,” I reply, not wanting to lie.

Nothing is certain in here, and with each passing day, I can feel the negativity seeping into my pores.

I hate it. I’m positive. I always have been. Even in our dead-end town, I see the bright side. But it’s difficult to see a bright side when you’re surrounded by darkness.

“Do you think when Kevin or Lucie comes back in…if…we should try rushing the door?” she whispers. Her lips barely move, trying to conceal her words in case they can lip-read.

Hazel leans closer.

“I don’t know,” I reply in a whisper, so we’re not overheard. “We’ll only be through one door. There are four more locked doors before we’re out. I don’t know if we’ll have the collective strength to get through them all quickly enough before they catch up with us.”

Priya’s shoulders slump as she moves closer. “There have to be windows.”

“Wait, you’re right. There is a window along the wall that faces the woods. I saw it when Theo and I were out there. It was near the back, probably somewhere along the waiting room. They must have built a wall in front of the window.”

“So if we knock that wall down, we can get out the window?” Hazel asks.

Well, she just made that sound easy.

“In theory,” Theo says quietly, crouching down in front of me and Priya. “But it depends on the wall. If it’s just a stud wall, plasterboarded, we could be through it in minutes.”

I helped my dad move a wall that separated our kitchen and dining room a couple years ago; it was super-easy to do. But we had tools, and there were no psychos watching and waiting.

“Maybe. Did you get a look at the window? I didn’t see bars or if it was boarded up, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t. I only remember the location and the green window frame around it, but not if there was any glass,” I say, keeping my voice quiet.

For all we know, it could be bricked up.

But if we’re going to consider something this dangerous, we need to do a little recon first. We need to find out if that wall has just been built out with a bit of wood and plasterboard. That means one of us needs to go to a torture room soon, so we can get into the waiting room.