She assesses the situation.
Either she has accidentally stumbled on something she shouldn’t have, something she was specifically asked not to stumble on—or none of this is an accident. This room, this situation has been meant for her from the very beginning.
Maria begins to realize that she never met the client, she never even met his children, only receiving jpegs of two smiling tots. She received emails from her agency, and flight information, and transfer details, but she never spoke to anyone in person. The only person she spoke to was the woman with the too-tight chignon.
She wonders if the woman is watching her now somehow.
Maria’s gaze whips around, half expecting the woman to be behind her. But the vestibule stretches out ahead, empty, a long, bare passageway with another door at the far end. She scans the corridor. There must be cameras in here, she decides, though it is impossible to tell where they might be located.
The room didn’t trigger when the electrician pressed the green button earlier in the day—it hadn’t played fair. It had been waiting for her.
About a hundred meters down the corridor from Maria, another door opens. She shivers, though it isn’t particularly cold, but the slight drop registers in an internal setting. The room beyond isn’t fully visible, but the light within is bright.
Maria starts walking toward the doorway ahead of her.
Someone knew exactly what was going on here. They had a plan and they were watching.
The next room slowly reveals itself as Maria approaches it. With a flush of relief, like no feeling she has felt in her lifetime, she recognizes the sound of running water coming from somewhere within.
Whatever happens, Maria thinks, at least I won’t die of thirst.
Through the doorway the room is now fully visible. It’s much smaller than the first, though also pure white and immaculate. On one wall a tap is flowing, its water pouring down onto a grate and disappearing out of sight. Every few seconds the tap stops and restarts in automated pulses. Above the tap a flatscreen panel is built into the wall showing what looks like instructions.
Once bitten, twice shy, Maria waves her arm through the doorway without going any farther, her motion activating the computerized voice.
“Welcome, Yossarian, Maria. Proceed to the control panel to begin.”
A shudder of dread passes through Maria.
That is her real name, a name she has not used with this client. It is not the name on her contract; whoever is doing this knows her birth name. They know who she is, her history, where she comes from, her damage and no doubt the series of leaps she took to get away from her old life and to arrive here.
She feels the twinge of her past awakening inside her. Her trauma—as always, buried just as far down as she can stuff it—twitching back to life. Her very own Frankenstein’s monster, a shadow self, made up of off-cuts, bits of memory and faded scars and half-remembered images. The journey she made as a child—the hunger, the thirst, the deep yawn of both inside her, deeper than the cold, or the heat, or the fear, and the dread of the adults around her disappearing, dropping away, the memory of only the three of them surviving. The three of them, alone, made it through with the forest dirt and the shiver of what it took to do so.
Maria inhales sharply. The realization hitting hard—she was not invited here to care for children, that is now a stone-cold fact, she was brought here to do this. This has something to do with the past. Her past.
She looks back the way she has come, down the blocked white corridor, but there is no way out. She reassures herself: sometimes the only way out is through. She knows this fact as implicitly as she knows how to stand and walk and run as fast as she possibly can. She learned it young. Sometimes the only way out is through.
The flow of water is the only sound in the silent rooms and Maria is already thirsty.
She has survived before and she will again.
And with that thought she steps into the next room, the door closing slowly behind her.
CHAPTER 13
NINA
I squint to reread the note as it gently flaps in the breeze across the terrace. You need to leave. Now.
I don’t know why, but it makes me angry. I rush to it and grab it, accidentally dislodging the rock holding it in place and sending the stone tumbling over the side of the wall and down the cliff where I hear it smack into the stone steps leading down to the beach. I look over the edge, down toward the sea, the rock shattered on the steps beneath.
Whoever left the note must have come up to the property that way, from the beach; there is no way they could have gotten past the locked gatehouse and perimeter walls.
I study the note in my hands. Someone obviously wants me to leave, but for my benefit or theirs? Is it a threat or a warning?
I wonder if they knew my father, if perhaps he never told me about this place because it was in some way dangerous. I bat the idea away: he would not have left me a house he knew to be dangerous, at least not without some kind of warning. But then isn’t that exactly what I’m holding, a warning?
Someone knows something about this house that I don’t. Or my father could quite simply have enemies. The idea seems ridiculous—that my kind, soft-spoken father could have ever made an enemy—but I suppose sometimes enemies find you.
