There isn’t going to be another way out. Not unless they leave the doors open again, and that’s an ambush waiting to happen.

But that ambush is looking like our only chance now.

What else can we do from in here?

The door from the waiting room clicks. I leap to my feet as Lucie stumbles through. Her legs give way, and she crashes to the ground. Hazel is closer and bends down to pick her up.

“Lucie, are you okay?” Theo asks, sweeping her up in his arms like she weighs nothing. Her head lolls back, her eyes closing.

“I’m tired,” she whispers.

That’s where she’s been. For the last two days, she’s been tortured with sleep deprivation, loud noises waking her whenever she almost drifted off.

“Take her straight to bed,” Priya says. “I’ll get her a bottle of water in case she wakes thirsty.”

I follow Theo as he takes Lucie into the bedroom. I feel a little useless. She might have screwed our chances by acting so rashly but she didn’t deserve that, especially not straight after room five.

Lucie is already asleep as Theo lays her down on her top bunk.

“She’ll be okay,” he says, rising to his feet.

I don’t know if she will. She was already emotionally done and ready to die if she couldn’t get out now. That room wouldn’t have helped matters.

Think, Piper.

Maybe there is a skylight in the roof from the time the building was used for something other than this. It’s not like I can request the blueprints, though.

“Theo,” I whisper, tugging on his arm. “Come with me.”

Hazel and Priya pass us as we leave the room. They have a bottle of water and a couple of packaged snacks to leave for Lucie. She won’t have much energy to get up, not until tomorrow I wouldn’t think.

I pull him into the main room and over to the corner of the kitchen area.

“What, Piper?”

“When someone dies in here, they have to take them out, right?”

His dark eyes consider my words for a minute before he tilts his head. “You mean if something happens in this room? Yes! Oh my God, you’re right. They’d have to do something… One of us needs to play dead.”

“That’s what I’m thinking…but what do they do with the bodies? I mean, if they set them on fire…” An ice-cold shiver ripples down my spine.

“No, fire in the woods wouldn’t be a good plan. Besides, someone would see smoke eventually. It would get unwanted attention.”

“So that leaves burial. The river running through town from the lake isn’t deep, so they would never be able to hide bodies there.”

“You volunteering to be buried alive, Piper?”