Survive This Book · Book 1

Escape the Governor's House

1

You wake up buckled into an antique bed, and the man who put you there has been waiting three hundred years to watch you run.

You come back in flickers.

A van floor ribbed with steel, cold through your scrubs. The VA parking lot in Fresno tilting away under a sodium light. Engine drone, pressure in your ears, and a man’s voice above you, soft with wonder: “Hundreds of years, and here she is.”

Then nothing. Then silk.

You are on your back in a four-poster bed, wrists and ankles buckled into padded cuffs lined with fleece so they won’t mark the skin. Someone has dressed you in a cedar-scented nightgown decades older than you are.

Forty feet up, the ceiling is painted. A robed crowd bows inward, rank on rank, toward a hollow where a figure should be. The hollow is horned, and ringed in gold leaf.

“Good evening, Luna.”

The voice comes out of the walls, warm and unhurried, made for a podium.

“You look rested. Better than at that desk in Fresno. Two cups of coffee on the windowsill every morning. One for you, one for Dani Reyes.” A fond pause. “Cami says hello. Well. She would, if she knew.”

Cold settles in your chest. You know this feeling from Kandahar. The road ahead has been seeded.

Click. Your right wrist comes free. Click. The left.

“The doors unlock in sixty seconds. Everyone runs.”

Far beneath the floor, iron drags across stone. It stops, as if it heard him too.

Your ankles release. You sit up. Your eyes go around the room like they once went around a culvert.

North wall: a tall door banded in black iron, the obvious exit. East wall: a moth-eaten tapestry, and behind it the edge of a smaller door. By the bed, an iron candelabra stands loose in its floor socket. On a table, laid out on wine-dark velvet like a jeweler’s piece, a brass key. Its bow is the horned hollow.

“I’ll keep you company for forty seconds,” the voice says. “After that you’re on your own.”

To pull the iron candelabra from its socket, turn to 60 .

To take the brass key from the velvet, turn to 139 .

To stand at the foot of the bed and look up, turn to 104 .

To run for the tall iron-banded door, the obvious exit, before the sixty seconds are up, turn to 287 .