Page 153 of X's and O's

His blood covered the table, leaking from veins and arteries and spreading across my feet in a rapidly spreading pool.

“Vi! Vi!”

I shook my head, Toby’s terrified screams finally cutting through the panicked-fueled chaos inside me.

“Vi! He’s dead! He’s dead! He has no fucking head!”

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t process.

All I could think wasHe’s dead, he’s dead, he has no fucking head, was as sick a rhyme as the one still playing on repeat via the speakers in the ceiling.

A blade had dropped from somewhere up there, killing a man in an instant.

And maybe for the first time since we’d been locked in this room, I took the message to heart.

“The doors are locked, the windows high. No way out, so don’t you try.”

We’d ignored the warning, and now a man was dead at my feet.

That could have been Toby.Wouldhave been Toby if Dickson hadn’t been so desperate for freedom.

The realization hit me hard. Bile rose in my throat, and I spun away, stumbling off the table and away from the dead body so I could be sick.

I was still retching when the message changed again.

The final two lines of the poem now on repeat, the same creepy, AI voice that chilled me to the bone.

“Two must die for one to go. Who will strike the final blow?”

But this time, there was more.

“Tick tock, the countdown starts. Fail to act, and still your hearts.

No more chances, no more time. Hesitate, and all three die."

I clutched my stomach, emptying it until I couldn’t anymore, all with the horrific realization all of this was real. That the threats playing on the speaker weren’t just someone messing around.

But a killer was out there, watching us, taking sick delight in whatever game he was playing.

Toby or I had to die.

That’s what the poem said.

If neither of us acted, we’d both end up dead.

And I believed it. After watching what had happened to Dickson, I believed it with every cell of my body.

If I wanted to live, I had to murder my best friend.

It was the most horrifying thought I’d ever had. But in the next instant it disappeared, evaporated by the knowledge I would rather sit in this room and slowly pass awayfrom hunger and dehydration than hurt Toby. I’d rather endure torture, be poisoned, or drowned. Anything was preferable to killing my best friend.

I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and raised my head wearily to tell him exactly that.

“Ten,” the speaker warned. “Nine…”

“Tobes, I—"

But Toby stared at me, his hands covered in Dickson’s blood.