The grounds are covered with more cameras than ever before, and she is under no illusions that they will come if they have to. The guard at the gatehouse will come, and more.
She looks down at the medical alert band on her thin wrist and knows they’re watching. But the thing itself, the house, the experience, is now a closed system. She runs it on-site, the old man maintains its hardware.
She knows he’s unaware of what exactly they’re doing down there, that perhaps a part of him knows something is not quite right but that he needs or rather wants something else more than he cares about the truth. And she helps him with that. She helps keep up the lie.
The new system is working. They tightened everything up since the escape three months ago. It’s impossible to exit the locked-down house now without clearance. Nina and whoever comes after will not get as far as Maria had.
Lucinda turns up the volume on her sound system so she can hear Nina’s words through the glass; Nina is talking to her, or to the client, in a way, Lucinda supposes. Lucinda has no idea who the clients are, who any of them have been. They auctioned off each package to a few clients only, who then had access to the interactive viewing experience via encrypted servers.
Nina’s package was subject to the usual bidding war, though her final fee had interestingly been slightly lower than Maria’s; age and backstory, as always, affected that outcome.
“I know you’re in there,” she hears Nina say. “You made the food.”
So she’s talking to Lucinda after all. Lucinda preferred not to hear up until now but the way Nina is looking at her through the glass makes it impossible for her not to be at least a little curious.
Nina continues, “I don’t know how you knew my father but he wouldn’t have wanted this, I know that much. If he told you to do this then you have to tell me because I don’t believe he was like this, that he would do this to me. Did he do it to other people? Did he?”
Lucinda thinks of Nina’s wonderful father, then of her own parents, vague, disinterested shadows from her past; they visited less and less until she did not really have people anymore.
Nina’s father was a truly loving and lovely man, though. He had cared for Nina so very much, and not once had Lucinda felt envy at that idea; only relief that such people existed. And yet, even so, she had done all this. She had continued to do her job. She had brought Nina here to the house.
Lucinda’s guilt coils around her insides tightly.
Nina seems to look directly at her through the silent glass, and a wellspring of sadness bubbles up inside her. Lucinda’s tears match Nina’s.
After a moment between them, one that only Lucinda is aware of, Nina sucks up her emotion and clears her throat.
“Okay, you want me to experience these rooms, okay. And what then? What if I get through every single one of them? What then? You just let me go?”
Lucinda considers the answer to that but she does not like the direction it takes her in. The protocol for house completion is not good. But no one has ever made it past the fifth room.
Lucinda simultaneously hopes Nina does and does not, kicking hope as far down the road as she dares.
Lucinda watches Nina get into the coffin, her attention drawn away suddenly by the sight of an intercom light flashing beside her.
The guard at the gatehouse. The man they took down there to recover must have woken up.
CHAPTER 37
JOE
J oe is coming around and he feels awful. He’s propped up in some kind of office chair and when he finally focuses, he sees that he’s in the gatehouse that was locked when he arrived earlier and vaulted the gate. He checks his watch, frowns, then checks it again. He’s lost over four hours.
A sound behind him makes him quickly swivel in his seat, to take in the black-uniformed security guard filling him a plastic cup full of water from the chilled watercooler.
Joe flinches as the man, substantially bigger than him and armed, approaches. The man gives him a tight smile and hands him the plastic cup.
Joe takes it carefully and nods thanks before greedily gulping it down. His head is hot and buzzing. Joe’s eyes fall on the defense baton attached to the man’s utility belt and makes a fair assumption that this is the cause of his throbbing skull.
Joe tries to talk but his voice catches. He clears it and tries again. “Any particular reason you thought it was necessary to knock me out?” he asks the guard.
The guard gives him a hard look and gestures for Joe to hand him the cup for a refill. Joe obliges.
“I’ve called down my boss,” the guard tells him. “She’ll be here soon. You can talk to her.”
Joe frowns, then makes to rise. “The woman from before? I don’t think I’ll be hanging around for that. I think maybe I’ll just give the cops a call and see what the hell they make of the random woman I met up at the house. She’s not the owner. I know that much,” Joe says, up now and heading to the door.
The security guard blocks his way, handing him his refilled water. “I’d sit down if I were you.”
