Squinting under the giant mirror I begin to loosen the screws holding it in place.
When they are free, I climb up onto the sink counter and lean over the top of the mirror to unscrew the top fastenings. When all the screws are free, I drop down onto the floor, hands on either side of the mirror as I lift it from its moorings, and for the first time I am the only thing holding it up. The weight is extraordinary. I only manage a few seconds, my muscles and the joints in my hands screaming for release as my grip slips and the edge of the mirror crashes down hard onto the floor beneath, inches from my bare foot, cracking the tile as it connects. I somehow manage to keep ahold of it as the entire mirror begins to swing out of my clutches, but the knock sends a hairline crack racing up the mirror’s edifice and I am terrified the entire thing will burst into a thousand shards in my hands. I steady myself. I test the structural integrity of it and when I am convinced it will not shatter into tiny, lethal splinters, I gently begin to slide it toward the nearest wall.
When I am sure it is safely leaning against the wet room wall and not going to fall on me, I release it and step back.
I turn to the wall where the mirror was mounted and my blood runs cold, horror washing through me as I understand what the note was trying to tell me. The notes have been warnings. Two warnings.
In front of me, at head height, mounted into the wall, behind the mirror, is a camera, its power light glowing red, recording, transmitting. In its opaque black lens, my face is reflected back at me.
“Holy shit,” I breathe, stumbling backward, pulling my towel tighter around me, suddenly aware that everything I have done in this room has been watched. And like a forest fire my thoughts catch light one after the other…because if there has been a camera here in this mirror, then there are probably more. There are probably more cameras in this house, and those cameras will have seen even more.
Horror, shame, and gut-wrenching fear jolt through me.
What is this house? And what does it have to do with my father?
My phone clutched tight in my hand, knuckles white, I raise it and snap a shot of the camera in the wall recording me. That is when I see that the signal bars have completely disappeared from its screen. My stomach feels like it falls through the floor.
“No, no, no,” I hear myself mutter as I try to dial James’s number again, but of course it doesn’t connect. I try again. I try the iPhone emergency button, but it does not work without a signal either.
“Please, please, please,” I hear myself breathe, my voice oddly dissociated from me.
Then my gaze shoots back up to the camera recording everything and I understand with absolute certainty what it is I need to do. I need to get the fuck out of this house now.
CHAPTER 21
MARIA
M aria is barely conscious when the siren begins to sound. The deafening hazard warning tone, reverberating back through the house she has repeatedly very nearly died in over the last six days, rouses her.
She tries to shift her starved, trembling body and using the wall behind hauls herself up to face whatever fresh hell is coming her way.
Maria knows how incredibly lucky she has been to survive this long, how her past, her childhood has helped keep her alive down here. And in a vague way she knows that all of this must somehow be inextricably linked to that past.
Her parents changed their family name after they got to America. Venezuelan refugees descended from Armenian refugees.
But in order to get to America, a four-year-old Maria Yossarian and her parents had made their way on foot across the brutal mountains, mud, rivers, and unmapped lawless rain forest of the Darién Gap, to eventually seek asylum in America. Others had not survived. It had almost broken them too, but it was that or risk worse by staying in a city that had pulled itself apart.
The Darién Gap—a five-thousand-square-kilometer strip of rain forest connecting South and Central America, one of the most dangerous places on the planet—had almost killed them. But somehow they made it out alive where others had not. And they arrived, starved, exhausted, caked in mud, and barely able to speak, in Panama and later on in Texas, where they applied for asylum on the border with hope of a better life.
The trip hadn’t killed her parents but their health had never been the same after it, and when they had gotten sick in their late fifties they had gone suddenly. And left her alone but for a quiet, traumatized uncle.
She alone survived. It seems almost ingrained in her now, that ability. She knew how to survive.
The siren blasts on through the rooms and panic, like an old friend, pumps life back into Maria’s jittery muscles. An urgency she feared she might no longer possess roars to life inside her.
Something is happening. She shifts her weight in preparation for whatever is coming. The warning siren grows incrementally closer, less muffled. She swipes away the blood trickling dangerously close to her eyes, knowing she will need all her senses operational for what is going to hit her next.
It isn’t that the house is getting harder; she knows she is getting weaker, slower, less sharp. She looks down at her hand, post-wipe, a brilliant red smear, her most recent, most severe injury clearly not yet healing. Sepsis is one of her biggest concerns, and has been for days. She saw her reflection a day ago: a large lacerated, green-black hematoma on her left temple. Her injuries are substantial, she knows, but she is still able to function. And as far as Maria is concerned that’s all that matters right now.
She managed to bandage her arm with the torn hem of her top and cauterize a cut on her thigh in the other room, but her lips are dry and cracked, her energy low—she has had water but hasn’t eaten now since day two.
Across the stifling heat of the room, the door panel light flickers, then fades out completely. Maria blinks hard, unable to believe her eyes, unable to trust the reality of what she is seeing as the door slowly, undoubtedly, begins to roll back to reveal the previous room. Beyond it, the previous, and then the previous, all their doors opening, on and on.
She has only a moment to take in what’s happening before all the lights go out and she is plunged into darkness.
Her breath and the blaring siren the only sounds in the pitch black, Maria tries to remain calm. She tells herself to focus, to breathe. She has gotten used to doing that. Her eyes will adjust to the darkness, she tells herself, if she just gives them a moment.
Eyes wide open Maria waits, blindly staring in the direction of the door, hoping for some sliver of light to become apparent. She blinks again and again until the darkness slowly begins to graduate, though part of her mind is conscious that this is all just wishful thinking. Or a trick. But as her eyes adjust, the vaguest outlines of the open doorways become evident.
