And with her last available jolt of energy, Maria springs from her resting place and begins to move.
In the darkness she shifts around the walls of the room until her fingers find the door’s opening and she stumbles through.
The next room is harder, larger, the floor still slick with water. She slips and skids across it, her hands desperately trying to grip, palms clammy, on to the smooth walls.
But time not being on her side, she begins to rush and a moment later sprawls across the wet floor, landing headfirst into the half-open door to the next room. The pain is intense as she holds in her yells, its initial waves and throbs flowing over her and passing, then scrambling up, she continues.
Maria slips through another doorway and another and to her absolute, unbearable joy, she begins to see a lift in the darkness several doorways ahead. Risking everything, the alarm system blaring bass-y and slow around her, she takes a final risk, pushing off the wall behind her and propelling herself full-tilt toward the light.
—
WITH A PRIMAL SCREAM, MARIA barrels out of the rooms and back out into the hallway, her clothes ragged, her eyes wild, her face blood-smeared and bruised.
—
BACK IN THE MAIN HOUSE, she propels herself toward the stairwell, half collapsing onto its steel banister. Her eyes, crazed, snap back on to the half-open door she just flew through.
She hangs on the banister momentarily, her breathing coming in high, tight, inhuman rasps as she clings to the stairwell, knuckles white with tension, watching to see if anyone else, anything else, will emerge after her and pull her back.
A clang, from deep within the basement, snaps her out of her reverie and propels her once more up the stairs into the natural light.
Twilight sky is breaking through the vast windows of the living room. The natural light almost blinds her after only artificial light and darkness for days.
Maria skids and skitters across the marble living room, desperate to get to the terrace doors, but she slips, her hand saving her but leaving a smear of pure red on the once immaculate white bouclé sofa as she passes.
Then, as she nears the doors, she pulls up sharply. Someone is there. She isn’t going to make it.
Two men approach the house. She sees them, one from the terrace, the other from the garden, backed by a bright pop of frangipani trees.
Thinking fast, Maria turns on her heels to bowl back toward the main wet room—the only room in the house that she is certain has a manually locking door.
As Maria flies into the marble bathroom, the sound of another alarm joins the siren from downstairs as all the lights in the property flick back into action.
Maria slams the bathroom door, slides the lock, and drags anything and everything she can move in the room in front of the door before backing away from it until she bumps hard up against the wet room screen.
She spins and jumps, catching sight of her own bloody, haggard face in the floor-to-ceiling mirror beyond it. She holds her own gaze, breath coming hard and fast.
Maria knows she needs to get out of here, dead or alive. Going back downstairs is not an option.
She knows the men will take her back down if she lets them and she will die there. Better to fight up here and risk death than to go back down and continue the game.
After six days in the basement, Maria’s mind is functioning on an entirely different level than the men’s outside this room. She has an advantage, however small.
She has been fighting for her life for 118 hours.
She listens for the men beyond the door. Under the blare of alarms, she hears their footsteps. There are only two of them. There are only two, but two is more than one; Maria knows this.
The only other sound in the bathroom is the gentle white noise of the air-conditioning system above her.
Maria looks up. The sound is coming from a supply-and-return vent in the ceiling. She takes note of the little screws holding it in place, remembering movies where plucky heroes escape baddies through ceiling panels. She studies the one above her, with its small rectangular shape. An idea forms and she swallows hard.
A gentle knock on the bathroom door, and her attention is ripped away from the ceiling.
“Ms. Yossarian?” the man’s calm voice asks with a degree of politeness in his warm American accent that Maria finds truly terrifying. “Would you mind opening the door?”
Maria muffles her breath and stares at the bathroom door, frozen.
Another rap comes, and Maria jumps. Then without a second thought she grabs the small hand mirror from the edge of the sink unit and smashes it onto the floor. She quickly grabs a shard, climbs up onto the toilet cistern, reaches up, and begins to quickly loosen the screws on the vent grate above. The screws tinkle one after the other down onto the bathroom floor.
