These Deadly Games(8)

This is not a joke. This is not Tessa. If you don’t play my game, your sister dies.



I banged the back of my head against the door. If this was Tessa, she could be lying. But wouldn’t she have turned in her phone by now? Still, there was no way this was real. I dropped Caelyn off at school this morning. She got on the bus to Frost Valley. She was with her class now, enjoying the crisp mountain air.

I never saw her get on the bus.

Oh, God. I cringed and covered my eyes. Last I saw her, she was running into the school for her inhaler. I should have waited. I should have made sure she left the school and got on the bus with everyone else. What if she really was kidnapped? What if some sociopath really wanted to torture us?

I typed, my fingers trembling, Caelyn’s supposed to be on a field trip. Her teachers will know she’s missing. So will my mom. You won’t get away with this.

Her teachers think she’s home with the flu.



Dammit. Who the hell could this be? I stared at the username, An0nym0us1. No clues whatsoever. Whoever it was must have called in sick for Caelyn, pretending to be Mom. If this were real, I couldn’t call the emergency contact at Frost Valley to confirm that’s what happened. This anonymous person might know, and I’d be breaking their rules. And all the while, Mom would think Caelyn was safe on her field trip.

That meant nobody would suspect a thing, at least not until tomorrow afternoon when Caelyn was due home. Someone had to have spotted her outside the school. A teacher, or a classmate. Someone had to have seen she wasn’t really home sick. Someone had to suspect something.

Before I could type anything else, a new message flashed across my screen.

If you think I didn’t think of everything, your sister won’t survive.



My God. I blinked away tears and shook my head. I had to stay calm and figure this out. But I still couldn’t believe this was real. Let me talk to her.

I’m the one who gives the instructions. Are you ready to play?



I tapped everywhere on the screen, trying to navigate back to the video of Caelyn. But all I could do was close the app and reopen it, and it would only show the most recent message. Each message vanished as soon as a new one arrived. Were they deleted? Maybe it just wasn’t obvious how to find older messages.

Maybe I could google it.

I closed the app to see what it was called and found the silver serpent icon on my third home screen; the most recent app installed. I hadn’t installed it. How’d it get here? Did someone hack my phone or something? There was no text label below it, only three periods. No app name to look up.

An alert from the app popped up atop my screen. She dies in 5.

I opened the app.

4.



Oh, God.

3.



Oh no. I had no choice. I had to do this. Frantically, I typed my reply.

I’m ready.





CHAPTER 3


Once last year, when Mom and Dad were having yet another screaming match, Caelyn and I waited it out in my room, huge headphones glomming our skulls as we played Mario Kart with the volume turned all the way up. Caelyn was winning because I was letting her, and as she whipped around a bend to finish the second lap, there was a shriek down the hall so loud it pierced through the music and fanfare blasting in my ears. I slipped my headphones off one ear as footsteps pounded toward my room, my father’s drunken drawl growing louder and louder.

“Danny, no!” Mom yelled. Caelyn’s eyes were trained on the screen as she dropped a trail of bananas behind her kart, like she didn’t hear any of it. But when our parents crashed against my bedroom door, she heard. Her eyes widened and welled with tears. I tugged her close, burying her face in my chest as Mom protected us from the monster booze turned Dad into. This is it, I thought. This is the night he’ll finally turn his fists on us. My heart pounded in terror, and helplessness sucked the air from my lungs. If Mom couldn’t stop him, I certainly couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough. There was nothing I could do to protect my baby sister from such inexplicable rage.

That’s how I felt now, my pulse thrashing in my ears as I awaited An0nym0us1’s instructions. The image of Caelyn bound and gagged burned in my memory. If this was real … if she was tied up, alone with some psychopath in some isolated place … she must be terrified. And there was no way to know where she was. No way to save her, to assure her that everything would be okay. There was absolutely nothing I could do—except play her kidnapper’s game.

Finally, a message appeared.

Let’s play The Number Thief. Next week’s key is locked under a desk upstairs in a room that adds up to 5 in its prime. Deliver the key to a locker double plus 9. You have 20 minutes. Ready? GO!



What? I reread the message twice more, but it felt like my brain’s synapses were exploding without relaying any signals.

I had to find a key? Why different keys for different weeks? And why would it be locked up? Wouldn’t you need a key to unlock the thing itself? Unless they meant … an answer key?

Holy hell. Someone kidnapped my sister and was holding her hostage so they could cheat on a test?

I tapped the text field, fully intending to send a response in the vein of, Are you absolutely out of your fucking mind? But I hesitated. Obviously, this person was out of their fucking mind. So insulting or provoking them probably wasn’t the best idea. But this had to be some sort of joke, or a prank, or something.