The Lost

by Natasha Preston

  I don’t dare look at Lucie. She’s on a top bunk across the room, so I could easily see her if I glance over. She’s traumatized by room five and was ready to give up then and there. She’s only here because I wasn’t going to leave her. So how soundly is she going to sleep tonight?

  Is she lying there awake, too scared to close her eyes in case she’s back in that room, having Caleb pour endless amounts of icy water over her face?

  There didn’t seem to be much reprieve, either. He reveled in keeping the torture coming thick and fast. When he removed the towel, his empty eyes stared dead, mouth curled into a smile.

  Evil.

  I want to get off this bunk and go to Lucie, but how can I do that when I can’t even move my head to look at her? She’s mad at me for not letting her run when Theo and I had the chance, and she’s mad that I made her come back in here.

  That’s a whole lot of anger aimed in my direction, and I don’t want to piss her off any more than I have already.

  I tap my fingers on my stomach under the cover.

  Water is everywhere.

  No, don’t go there!

  I can’t start thinking about it. I can’t let it in…because it didn’t happen to this Piper.

  Yeah, how long is that one going to work?

  It actually only needs to work until tomorrow. I can almost taste the freedom.

  We have to get out.

  Above my head the speaker crackles and our nighttime song begins to play.

  I close my eyes and feel a single warm tear trickle down the side of my head.

  25

  I wake to the sound of banging. What the…?

  Sitting, I look around the room, disoriented, as my eyes haven’t quite caught up with my brain yet.

  “What the hell is going on?” Theo asks, leaping out of bed.

  I look around the room, scanning each bed. “Where is Lucie?” I ask, gripping the quilt and shoving it off. I swing my body around and scurry down the ladder.

  Theo and I bolt out of the bedroom at the same time, Hazel and Priya just starting to get out of bed to follow.

  “Lucie!” I shout.

  My heart drops when I see the waiting room door open. Lucie is escaping! How did she manage that? Did they leave it open?

  No, it definitely locked behind us. Didn’t it? Was this a mistake? Too caught up in the high of a double torture that they forgot to lock up? Not that we would get far—the place is like a fortress.

  I stumble toward the hallway, slamming my hand on the edge of the door frame as I lose my footing. “Lucie!”

  Her hair is wild as she thrashes at the wall, hammering a plastic knife into the plasterboard. She has already made about a dozen deep slashes, dust covering the floor.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Theo shouts, grabbing her wrist.

  “Get off!” Lucie yanks her arm out of Theo’s grip, the knife thudding to the ground. “I can’t stay here another second. I can’t…I can’t…” She takes a deep, ragged breath that rattles and sounds like her lungs have been punctured. Her eyes are wide as saucers and flick wildly between me and Theo.

  I watch the two of them in horror. What can we do about this? How can we clean this up enough so it’s not noticeable on their screens? It’s too early. They might come here before they go to the charity event in the afternoon. They might be watching this.

  “What were you thinking?” I snap. “You’ve ruined everything!”

  “You did that!” she shouts, pointing at me and glaring. “I could be free by now. Room five might never have happened if you and Theo had let me run!”

  “Enough!” Priya orders, her voice carrying through the hallway like a foghorn. “We need to figure out what to do now.”

  “We keep going,” Lucie snarls.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I woke up in the middle of a nightmare. I couldn’t breathe. I ran to the door and it opened. I’m not going to pass up a chance like this. If you help me, we’ll be out of here faster.”

  I shake my head. “What’s the time?” I ask, dread lining my stomach.

  “It looks like sunrise,” Hazel replies. “They’ll probably be here soon.”

  “God. We have to go through with this now,” I say. There’s no way the slices in the plasterboard will go unnoticed, and we don’t have anything to vacuum up the dust on the carpet.

  They will notice, and we’ll get punished.

  We have to go.

  The speaker above us crackles, and ice slides down my spine. They’re watching.

  “Lucie, Lucie, Lucie,” Caleb sings. “You’ve been a very naughty girl.”

  Lucie turns slowly, terror filling her eyes. “No,” she whispers.

  He chuckles, and the horrible sound makes a shudder rock my body. “Piper, Theo, Priya, and Hazel, back to bed.”

  Will they kill her now? She was trying to escape, after all.

  Theo backs up, pulling me with him. I let him because there is no other option. My eyes stay with Lucie as she braces herself against the wall. Theo moves me back enough for the door to close.

  Lucie’s heart-wrenching sob is the last thing I hear before the door clicks locked.

  26

  It has been a little over forty-eight hours since Lucie was taken. Three days for Kevin.

  Not knowing what happened is eating away at me. Where are they? What are they going through? Questions I may never get answers to.

  Caleb, Owen, and Matt have been deathly quiet, too. No one has spoken to us since we were ordered back into the room, and nothing was showing on the TV when we turned it on. For the last two nights there hasn’t even been any music, and we’ve had full control of the lighting.

  Something isn’t right.

  We don’t know what’s happened with Lucie, if she’s okay, what they plan on doing with us, or anything. The waiting is excruciating; so much rides on what they choose to do. My heart hasn’t slowed since they took Lucie.

  I just want to know.

  Priya is making soup for lunch, Hazel is hovering around helping her by divvying out rolls, and Theo and I go over a hundred scenarios. None of them are particularly great. The best ones are that they will keep her in those rooms for a while as punishment. It’s what we assume has happened with Kevin.

  The worst scenario is that she’s dead. They have two teens they want to get rid of. Room zero is a strong possibility.

  That being said, we still don’t know if Kevin is alive.

  We don’t know anything!

  Theo grits his teeth, his jaw hard and eyes tight. He’s been angry for the past two days, believing that Lucie has ruined our only chance for escape, and he is quite possibly right.

  There is no way they would keep that window as it is now.

  All yesterday we heard banging, drilling, and other odd noises coming from the hallway. Possibly even welding noises as they make sure no one can ever get out through that window.

  “The building is going to get a security overhaul,” he growls.

  I hold my palms up. “Theo, chill. I know what this means, and I’m angry, too, but we can’t let them see us arguing. Remember what happened last time there was a fight in here?”

  Lucie was sent to room five, and I was sent to room five. Then Lucie got caught trying to escape. We have to be smarter.

  Theo slumps back in his seat and blows out a breath through his teeth. “Okay, I get it. But what are we going to do now?”

  My heart plummets as I admit, “I really don’t know.”

  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 l
eap 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?”

  I frown. No, not really. “Good point.” Who is going to do this? Not only do we have to play dead, but we have to stay calm while they bury us. “Wait, they might transport us, though. I can’t imagine they would bury anyone that close to the building, so they’d need a vehicle.”

  He bites his lip.

  “Come on, Theo. I fully appreciate it’s a flawed plan, but it’s better than waiting for them to open the doors. At least this way, they’re not expecting us to run. They won’t be waiting in different locations in the forest,” I whisper.

  Nodding, he sighs. “All right. It’s worth a chance. We still need a volunteer.”

  Yeah, that’s where the plan hits a small setback. It’s basically suicide. The chance of pulling it off is slim, like, ridiculously slim. But it’s a chance.

  “I’ll do it,” I tell him. “Next time I come out of one of those rooms, I’ll collapse back here and pretend I’ve died.”

  Would they check thoroughly? I can hold my breath, but I can’t do anything about my pulse.

  “Piper, it’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah. I’ll take a crappy plastic knife in my pocket, or something I could use to defend myself in case it goes wrong. Better than nothing, right?”

  He blinks slowly as if he’s thinking when it goes wrong. I don’t want to think too much about it because then I’ll chicken out.

  “I should do it,” he says. “No offense, but I’m stronger and stand a much better chance against them.”

  “This was my idea, Theo, and it’s a pretty bad one.”

  “I know the risks. I’ve been in here too long, I won’t be controlled anymore. I won’t let them continue to win. I want out, and the time is now. I’m doing it.”

  I hope I haven’t just set him up to be killed.

  27

  I’m unbelievably bored with watching the same movies, but there is very little else to do, so I sit with Theo, Priya, Lucie, and Hazel. It has been three days since Theo and I came up with our dangerous plan, and we’ve not yet heard anything from Caleb, Owen, and Matt.

  But we still get food, so they haven’t abandoned us. I’m not sure if that’s good or not.

  Murdering each other or starving to death? It’s a toss-up really.

  Kevin’s absence still weighs heavily in the room. The spot where he usually sat is vacant and has been since he was last here.

  I don’t want to spend all my time stressing or overthinking about what happened to him, but I can’t shake the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  But there is no one else in room zero with him right now, we’re all still in here, so he must be somewhere in this dungeon alive unless they’ve killed him themselves.

  Theo said it’s not the first time someone has been taken into solitary confinement for a longer stretch of time. But the fact that it’s happened before does nothing to ease the worry. I just want Kevin back, so we can carry on as normally as possible in here, waiting and secretly plotting.

  No one voices their ideas for fear of being heard, but they must think about escape on a daily basis, too.

  “Where is your mind?” Theo asks, scooting to the empty cushion beside me.

  “On Kevin and the escape,” I admit softly. “I know you said to not worry, but I can’t help it. Something isn’t right about Kevin’s disappearance, Theo. I can feel it.”

  “I agree that it’s concerning, but this has happened before. Two guys have gone missing in here, I’ve heard Caleb and Matt talking about it when I was in room five. It’s just another way for them to control us, another game to play. And as for the escape, it’ll be okay. Don’t allow them to win, remember, Piper?”

  I nod, though I’m not quite able to shut my mind off the way he seems to be able to. Maybe that’s because he has had more practice. “I remember.”

  The door in the waiting hallway clicks. I leap to my feet, steadying myself by grabbing the top of Theo’s arm as he gets to his feet, too.

  Priya gasps. “Kevin?”

  No one moves closer to the door by the bookcase, but we all stare at it.

  It has to be him, but what condition will he be in? It’s been six days, I think. Was he moved from torture room to torture room? The only way I deal with being in those rooms is knowing that I’ll be back out with the others soon.

  The door opens, and I grip Theo’s arm tighter.

  The guy, tall and a little on the skinny side, drops to his knees. His dark, tortured eyes regard us one by one.

  “Who are you?” Lucie asks.

  He looks traumatized, his chest caving with each ragged breath.

  I take a step forward, but I’m stopped by Theo. His fingers curl around my wrist, and he shakes his head. I know we don’t know this guy, but he’s clearly been harmed.

  “Don’t, Piper. Look at him. Something’s wrong.”

  I tug my wrist out of his grip. “Of course, there is! Can’t you see he needs help!”

  What has happened to him? He looks like he’s been to battle.

  “We have no idea where he’s come from, Piper.”

  I gasp. “Yes, I do,” I whisper, looking into this guy’s wild eyes. He has dark circles and is wincing like the light hurts. His hair is damp, clothes fresh and new. He’s been here.

  Turning to Theo, I tell him, “You said yourself, people have gone missing in here. I don’t think they’ve been missing. I think he’s been held somewhere here, or they’v
e been moved from room to room, constantly tortured.” I turn back to the guy on the floor.

  The guy grips his messy brown hair in his fists and squeezes his eyes closed like he’s fighting something in his mind. Memories, no doubt. I know how that feels.

  No one stops me as I take a few steps closer and crouch down. “What’s your name?” I ask.

  He stills, muscles bunching under his sweats. Letting go of his hair, he stares up at me like I’m an alien. How long has it been since he’s spoken to another person? “Evan,” he replies, his voice rough like he’s been screaming.

  I don’t remember ever seeing his face on a missing poster, but then not everyone is reported as missing or having run away.

  “Hi, Evan. I’m Piper. How long have you been here for?”

  Shrugging, he sits back. “I don’t know. I was taken in February.”

  I suck in a breath. “It’s now August.”

  He’s been here for six months.

  “August,” he repeats.

  “Have you ever been in here?”

  He looks around and nods. “Not for a long time, though. I tried to escape with another guy, and they…”

  They took them out of here and kept them in the torture rooms.

  “I’m so sorry, Evan.”

  “I’ll get him a drink,” Priya says from behind me.

  Evan must have received food and water, but his eyes are sunken, and his clothes a little baggy. He should have picked up a size smaller than usual.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask him.

  He nods. “They only gave me bread, soup, water, and the occasional piece of fruit.”

  Almost six months of only bread, soup, fruit, and water. They are so cruel. My eyes prickle with unshed tears.

  “Come and sit, Evan. We’ll make you something to eat.”

  He slams his palm on the wall and rises to his feet. “Who are all of you?” he asks the others.

  Theo’s jaw tightens.

  “That’s Priya, Lucie, Hazel, and Theo,” I say, pointing to each one so he can put a name to a face. “Theo has been here the longest… Well, besides you. Hazel and I have only been here for about eleven days.”