These Deadly Games(52)
Well, fuck.
I slammed the laptop shut. Dammit, what now? Mom’s laptop was probably safe to use, but it was in her bedroom with her.
I could at least organize my thoughts and whittle down a list of suspects. I pulled a notebook from my desk drawer, flipped to a blank page, and scrawled Lance Burdly’s name. Though at this point, I doubted he was real. I’d seen this true crime documentary once where a serial killer left extra evidence at the crime scenes to throw off detectives. That’s probably what Lance was—a false clue. An0nym0us1 wanted me to waste time researching someone who didn’t exist.
Clearly, it worked. And it had distracted me so effectively I’d let Matty eat those brownies without thinking anything of it.
Letting out a low growl, I turned to a blank page to start over.
In my mind, Jeremy Fischer was suspect number one. “Pesky little dipshits,” he’d called us in Happy Grillmore—and that was before we’d finished sabotaging his date, wrecked his leaderboard standings, and humiliated him on his own livestreams—not to mention Dylan’s point that we might’ve siphoned enough subscribers to eat into his earnings. And now we’d be his biggest competition at the tourney. His appearance at the park was also suspicious as hell. He could’ve easily lied about getting an invite from “me” to discuss forming an alliance. More likely, he was there to watch his Prank Caller game in action. He could’ve taken the threatening pictures of Caelyn beforehand and zipped over—he lived in Lakecrest, which bordered Newboro by the park. As far as I knew, streaming was his only job, and he set his own schedule. He had oodles of time on his hands.
But there was also Lucia Ramirez. Sweet as pie on the outside, troll on the inside. After Zoey threatened to expose her trollish ways to the world, I’d catch her staring in class, in the cafeteria, when we passed in the halls. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was fear I’d sink her reputation. Maybe it was hatred. Either way, it made my skin crawl—not just because of what she did but because it reminded me of what I did. Of how I’d treated her, even after what happened to Brady. Even at her party, I’d snapped at her when she tried complimenting my sweater. Your brownie points are rancid.
Brownie points.
The brownies.
No. No way.
Was she really a plausible suspect? She did follow me into the bathroom right after I got An0nym0us1’s first message. Did she coincidentally have to pee? Or was she keeping an eye on me as I played the first game? She could have taken that first video in the morning, right after kidnapping Caelyn, been late to school, then sent me the recording from the front row of history class.
I twirled my pen, antsy. It seemed like such a stretch. But Lucia might’ve been desperate to keep us from derailing all her hard work, all her plans for Harvard, for the future. Any admissions board who googled her would see Zoey’s exposé and yeet her right off the application pile.
But something else niggled at my mind …
Biting my lip, I glanced out the window. Was it my imagination, or were Zoey’s shades drawn even higher than before? Goose bumps prickled my arms.
The way she’d acted on FaceTime at the hospital reminded me of when we used to play Among Us on our phones. The game was simple: Crewmates raced to complete tasks around a spaceship while an Impostor, pretending to be a Crewmate, committed murder and sabotage. After each murder, we’d guess the Impostor’s identity and throw someone off the ship. If we were right, we won. If the Impostor blended in too well and we were wrong, there’d be another round of tasks, murder, and finger-pointing.
Whenever Zoey was an Impostor, she’d be the first to hurl accusations, trying to throw everyone off her scent. But whenever she was a Crewmate, she’d quietly watch everyone argue, trying to suss out the Impostor. She was so predictable, I hated when she was an Impostor—her rounds were too easy to win.
Back in the hospital, she acted like an Impostor. Overly vocal. Quick to suggest theories.
And unlike our friends, I knew she was willing to steal a spot at the tourney. But was she really willing to kill our friends for it? I knew she resented Randall’s and Matty’s MortalDusk skills, and their popularity on our streams. But what about Akira? Was Zoey so jealous of our closeness that she’d resort to murder to tear us apart? Not to mention kidnapping my sister and torturing me—did she hate me that much for catching her cheating? How would she have managed it?
Well, she was MIA all day, supposedly home sick. She could’ve followed me and Caelyn to the middle school. Snatched Caelyn before she could get on the bus. Hidden her in that creepy storage room in her soundproof basement—the one that always freaked out Akira. Taken those disturbing videos and pictures all day.
But once her parents got home from work—damn, that’d be so risky. Also, An0nym0us1 had shown up in MortalDusk right before Matty died and zapped Zoey’s avatar. Was that enough to rule her out? Or was it a clever in-game alibi? Zoey was a hacker. She’d hacked the school’s network to tweak our schedules, busted Lucia, and circumvented MortalDusk’s cheating detectors. Surely she could figure out how to run two instances of MortalDusk on her laptop.
Adding Zoey’s name to my list broke my soul in two. But it was plausible, however unlikely, and I couldn’t rule it out. Matty dying today was absurd, yet it had happened. Randall’s dad being ambushed by a SWAT team was inconceivable, yet it had happened. This entire scenario was completely unbelievable, yet—