Page 85 of Stay Scared

“No one leaves before dawn.”

Chapter 13

The countdown keeps moving. 04:12:11 becomes 04:12:10 across every monitor surrounding Mark.

His chair remains in the center aisle of the abandoned theater, trapped between the barrier sealing the stage and the gate blocking the lobby. Rook stands behind him with both hands resting on the chair.

“No one leaves before dawn.”

Cade leans over the main console.

“You’re not making it to dawn.”

The beaked mask tilts.

“You sound convincing when you forget who controls the cameras telling the story.”

The theater feed disappears. A video-editing timeline fills the monitors. Hours of footage have already been separated into tracks. Cade’s memory house fills the first. Owen’s surveillance archive sits beneath it. The red room follows, mixed with photographs taken through my apartment windows. The files are already titled.

FORMER LOVER.

THE WATCHER.

THE ARCHITECT.

A fourth row carries my name beneath FINAL VICTIM.

I stare at the arrangement. Rook has not spent tonight collecting evidence. He has been editing a story.

Owen moves closer to the monitors, shoulders rigid as he studies the directory attached to the project.

“The project file is inside the cloned network. I can’t delete it from this terminal.”

Rook opens Cade’s sequence. The hallway photograph appears first. Cade has me against the wall with the frame trapped between us, but the clip ends before my third tap. His hand around my wrist follows. Then the carnival maze. Every time he moved into my space remains. Every time he backed away is gone.

“You cut the signal.”

“I cut what weakened the story.”

Beside me, Cade watches himself become the man Rook wants on-screen. His blood-stained hand grips the back of an operator chair hard enough to flex the plastic. The footage does not need to be fake. It only needs to be incomplete.

Owen’s sequence begins next. His photographs blend with Rook’s images from inside my apartment until they appear to come from the same camera. Notes about my routines sit beside pictures Owen never took. Then the Blind Maze plays. Owen pulls me through the collapsing wall. The footage cuts before I choose his hand.

“You matched your photographs to my archive.”

“I preserved the useful parts.”

“You made your images look like mine.”

“You made that easy.”

Owen reaches toward the terminal, but Ash catches his forearm before his fingers reach the controls.

“He wants you interacting with a network he controls.”

Owen looks down at Ash’s grip, then back at the screen. Ash releases him. Owen remains beside the terminal with his fingers curling once near his thigh.

Rook advances to Ash’s sequence. The red room appears beneath crimson light. Ash’s distorted voice tells me there are no safe words inside Crimson Night. The clip ends there. The private stop is gone. The three taps are gone. The open door is gone.