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  “Umm…”

  His face dropped, disappointed at Dee’s lack of approval. “It’s a work in progress.”

  Was he for real? “There’s a dead guy in a pool of his own blood two feet away and you’re worried about your hashtag?”

  Blondy McBrit sighed. “Sorry. I forgot. This is all new for you. Personally, I abhor violence, but after a while you get callous.”

  A while? “How long have you been here?”

  “Seven months, one week, three days,” he said without hesitating.

  Dee’s eyes grew wide. She’d never heard of anyone surviving that long on Alcatraz 2.0.

  “Don’t be impressed,” he said, reading her reaction. “My case is in appeal, so I’m off-limits for the moment. That miscarriage of justice you Americans call a trial was over so quickly they didn’t get a chance to find out to whom I’m related.”

  Dee arched an eyebrow. “The Queen?”

  Blondy McBrit snorted. “Look at you! ‘The Queen?’” he mocked in falsetto. “Certainly not. But my mother’s cousin’s first husband is the second assistant to the foreign minister. He’s filed an appeal on my behalf due to diplomatic immunity.”

  “Oh.” It was a plausible story, but he could also be full of shit and this was just another trap on Alcatraz 2.0.

  I’m not taking any chances.

  “Actually,” Blondy McBrit continued, “I’m surprised he’s helping me at all, based on my conviction.”

  Dee took a step away, eyeing Slycer’s body. If this guy lunged at her, maybe she could flip it over, pull the knife out of Slycer’s gut, and use it to defend herself. “What did you do?”

  His face was unreadable. “I was convicted of murdering my parents.”

  See? Don’t trust anyone on this island. It was a good mantra. Dee was in a maximum-security prison, so in addition to The Postman’s government-sanctioned killers, all her fellow inmates had committed heinous crimes. She was literally surrounded by murderers.

  “I loved my parents.” His blue eyes narrowed; his affable manner vanished. “As much as you loved your…sister, was it?”

  “Stepsister,” Dee snapped. Then she paused. “How did you know that?”

  Blondy McBrit stepped between Dee and Slycer’s body and reached into his pocket. Dee stiffened, her eyes darting toward the far corridor. Was he going to pull out a weapon? She couldn’t reach Slycer’s knife now, but maybe if she chucked the mirror at Blondy’s face, she’d have time to run for her life?

  But instead of the murderous glint of a recently sharpened blade, Dee saw a folded piece of paper in his hand.

  “‘Dee Guerrera,’” he said, reading from the page. “‘Convicted of premeditated murder in the first degree. Victim: Monica Patterson, seventeen. Stepsister.’”

  The image of Monica’s strangled face, purple and swollen, flashed before Dee’s eyes. She’d been the one to find the body, the one to call 911 as she desperately tried to administer first aid, even though she knew by the stiffness of her limbs that Monica was beyond help. “I didn’t kill her.”

  She had no idea why she felt the need to proclaim her innocence to this stranger, but the words just came flying out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “Of course you didn’t. We’re all innocent on Alcatraz two-point-oh.”

  Sarcasm dripped from every word. He didn’t believe her for a hot second.

  But instead of saying he thought she was full of shit, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his black corduroy jacket. “Shall we go?”

  Dee glanced from the Brit to Slycer’s body. Was this a trap? “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  He tilted his head to the side, just as Slycer had when Dee had refused to run into the maze. “Whyever not?”

  His earnestness threw Dee off. “I…” I think you might be a psychotic killer? I don’t trust you no matter how cute your accent is? “I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Oh!” He smiled, his eyes warm and crinkly. “Sorry. I’m Nyles.” He paused, as if that was enough explanation.

  It wasn’t. “And you’re here right now because…?”

  “Because my Alcatraz-mandated job is to introduce new inmates to life on the island. I get a note like this one,” he said, dangling the refolded paper in the air, “shoved under my door in the morning, telling me where to meet the newbies. Though it’s usually just at the gate to the guard station. This is the first time I was instructed to go to a Painiac’s kill room. Must have been an administrative mistake or something. I mean, why would you need an orientation if you weren’t going to survive your first hour on the island? Anyway, I almost didn’t show. Can you believe it?” He chuckled as if he’d made a hilarious joke.

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice flat. “Funny.”

  “I would have missed the death of Prince Slycer,” Nyles continued, either not picking up on her sarcasm or ignoring it. “That would have been a tragedy, Dee. By the by, is that short for Dorothy? Deirdre?”

  What were they, best friends? “No.”

  “Ah, I see.” Nyles gazed at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Come along, then.”

  Dee still didn’t trust him. If she followed, would she round a corner and run directly into a Cinderella-themed booby trap of sentient rodents, pumpkin time bombs, and projectile glass shards?

  Then again, her other options were to find her own way out of the murderous maze, or stay with Slycer’s body until someone else got to her. Neither was particularly tempting. “Where are we going?”

  Nyles’s smile widened, flashing his oversize teeth. “Fancy an ice cream?”

  SAN FRANCISCO’S SUNSHINE WAS underwhelming.

  Though the sky was vivid blue, dotted with puffy wisps of clouds that stretched like chubby fingers from the west, the sun gave off zero warmth, and Dee’s skin prickled beneath the thin fabric of her Cinderella gown. It was the total opposite of November in Los Angeles, where it was probably seventy-five and sunny, and Dee’s crappy costume would have been adequate protection from the elements.

  Did I seriously just compare the benefits of a penal colony versus my hometown in terms of a princess costume? As if this day could get weirder.

  Except it had. Though Dee had watched the endless live stream from her holding cell, she hadn’t fully appreciated the creepiness of Alcatraz 2.0 until she stepped outside the warehouse.

  The prison had been established on a man-made island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, connected to a natural outcropping of rock that had served as the midway point for the old Bay Bridge. Once known as Treasure Island, it had been built for a world’s fair almost a century earlier, then transformed first into a military installation and then into a series of Hollywood soundstages, before finally being redeveloped for housing. But once the tunnel was built to connect San Francisco to the East Bay, and the Bay Bridge was demolished, the island had been abandoned.

  Until The Postman purchased it.

  The heavy creep factor came from the island’s infrastructure, which had been retained when it was transformed into a prison. Duplexes, storefronts, library, warehouses—all the remnants of its former glory had been shined up and repurposed. Now convicted murderers like Dee worked pedestrian jobs, lived in traditional homes, and did everyday crap like cooking meals, navigating neighbors, and, oh, trying to stay alive as long as possible before they were ambushed, kidnapped, and brutally executed while the entire world watched.

  It was fucking surreal.

  Nyles had fallen quiet. He’d seemed edgy since they’d stepped outside the decrepit warehouse, moving quickly down the wide, deserted street as his eyes continually darted from side to side. This part of the island was packed with enormous structures of corrugated metal and waterlogged wood, mostly ruined. Some were missing roofs; others had entire chunks of siding stripped away. Even the air smelled musty and rotten.

  And though the neighborhood looked vaguely familiar, as Dee hurried to keep up with Nyles’s long strides, she noticed that
there were no cameras around. Based on what she’d seen of The Postman app, she had half expected there to be cameras everywhere: attached to fences, mounted on streetlamps, lining the tops of buildings. Instead, the only ornaments in this dilapidated industrial wasteland were the dozens of black crows perched atop the warehouse roofs, stoic and unmoving.

  Nyles sped onward, past an abandoned gas station with a hand-painted sign on one boarded-up window reading DON’T FEED THE BIRDS.

  So there were rules on Alcatraz 2.0 after all? Good to know.

  “I’ll introduce you to your job first,” Nyles said, breaking the silence as they rounded a corner onto Main Street. A row of brightly painted shops stretched down both sides. “So you can meet your coworkers.”

  Dee cringed. “Coworkers?” Translation: The convicted killers I’ll have to hang out with every day.

  “Everyone has a job on Alcatraz,” Nyles said. He cast a sly glance at her. “Even a princess.”

  “Ha-ha,” Dee replied without an ounce of humor in her voice.

  “It won’t be anything complicated, I can assure you,” he said cheerfully, as if he were giving her the rundown on her new after-school job at the mall. “Normal hours, ten to five and all that.”

  Nothing about this place was normal. “And if I don’t show up?”

  “That’s your choice.” Nyles shrugged. “But no work means no money on your island debit card. Which means you can’t buy food.”

  “Good reason to show up.”

  Nyles smiled. “Isn’t it?” He shot another clandestine look at her, eyes sweeping down from her sparkly headband to her dress, and just for a second, the happy-go-lucky façade slipped away, revealing a significantly more somber expression. Then he turned, and it was gone.

  “Anyway,” he continued, his tone light and airy, “we’ll have to get to the Barracks before dark. We do not want to be out after the sun goes down. That’s usually when the Painiacs…” He paused, musing over the word, then shook his head. “That’s usually when the killers strike. Unless it’s a foggy day. Or rainy. Or an eclipse, I suppose.” He stopped and faced her. “Basically, only be outside with the sun.”

  “Noted.”

  Nyles pointed to a quaint structure across the street that looked like a converted cottage. “So we’ve got the stationery store there, library next door. Farther down there’s the bodega—that’s where you’ll buy groceries and whatnot—the hair salon, and the gym.”

  “So I can look good and get in shape for my murder?”

  Nyles smiled, his blue eyes bright with amusement. “Quite.” He shifted his gaze to a spot above Dee’s head. “Here we are, then.”

  They stood in front of an old-timey ice-cream parlor complete with pink-striped awning and hand-painted lettering on the window.

  “‘I Scream’?” Dee said, reading the name of the shop. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “You’ll find an abundance of dark humor on the island.” Nyles pushed open the glass door. Above, a silver bell tinkled an announcement of their arrival.

  Dee followed him inside and felt as if she’d stepped back in time. The black-and-white-checkered floor was dotted with ornate wrought-iron tables, painted white, with matching chairs. The walls, like the awning outside, were bubble-gum pink, and crammed with sepia-toned photographs of ice-cream parlors from ages past. Pink stools lined the front of a counter that held jars of neon candy, lollipops, and jelly beans, plus a refrigerated display of ice-cream flavors. It was neat and cheerful and totally fucked up. Because, just like in Slycer’s maze, Dee quickly noted the cameras affixed to the ceiling in each corner of the shop: rounded black mounds, surveying the entire room. A chill ran down her spine. Four red lights, one in each camera dome, were all pointed directly at her.

  “I’m back!” Nyles called out to no one in particular.

  A door on the far wall, camouflaged by pink toile wallpaper, swung open, and an attractive, heavily made-up girl appeared in the doorway. Dee recognized her immediately: Griselda Sinclair.

  Griselda had a huge fan base, and every time the feed switched to her apartment or to a shot of her working out in the gym, the fan comments that ran up the side of the screen would explode. She even had her own hashtags—#ConjugalVisitsForGriselda and #GriseldaIWantYouInMyPants—because the fans were super classy like that.

  But Griselda seemed happy to play the role of Alcatraz 2.0 hottie. She wore a plaid miniskirt paired with combat boots that laced to the knee, plus an off-the-shoulder midriff shirt that exposed a black lace bra strap on her right shoulder, and her long dishwater-blond hair had been flat-ironed stick straight. She paused in the doorway while she smoothed down her hair and tucked it behind both ears. Then she pulled on the right sleeve of her shirt, shifting it so far off her shoulder that it practically exposed side boob, ran her tongue over her teeth to check for stray lipstick, and stepped into the shop.

  It was like watching an actress backstage before she made her entrance, and as Dee saw the red dots of the cameras swivel in Griselda’s direction, she realized that was exactly what she had witnessed.

  “You’re the only person on this island stupid enough to be wandering around the warehouse district this close to nightfall,” Griselda said.

  “It’s touching to know you care, Gris.” Nyles tossed a white plastic card onto the counter, then reached into a large glass jar and snagged a piece of red licorice.

  She picked up the card and swiped it through some kind of electronic reader, then slid it back to Nyles. “I see you’ve brought the newbie.”

  “Ah yes.” Nyles bowed low with a flourish of his licorice. “Griselda Sinclair, may I present your new coworker, Dee Guerrera.”

  “H-hey,” Dee stuttered, trying to sound casual. She didn’t want any of these people to see her fear.

  But Griselda made no attempt at friendliness. She folded her arms across her chest and examined Dee from head to toe. “So we’re stuck with Cinderella Survivor, huh?”

  “Who?” Dee asked.

  Nyles’s eyes grew wide with excitement. “Is that what they’re calling her?”

  Griselda nodded toward the front of the shop. “See for yourself.”

  Mounted on the wall above the door was a large, flat monitor. One half of the screen showed several small boxes, rotating slowly through a variety of camera feeds. The other half showed strangely familiar night-vision footage of a girl in a long dress holding a mirror, and in the upper right-hand corner of the screen she saw a symbol that she immediately recognized: PEI in red block letters, the bottom of the P extending into the spine of the E and tail of the I. The logo for Postman Enterprises, Inc.

  It took Dee several seconds to realize that she was watching a replay of her first moments in Slycer’s maze.

  Beside the video, the comments feed scrolled at a breakneck pace, but even at that speed, Dee caught the same hashtag used over and over again: #CinderellaSurvivor.

  “Our little princess has twenty million spikes,” Griselda said flatly.

  Nyles whistled low as if impressed, but Dee was pretty sure it wasn’t a good thing. “What does that mean?”

  Griselda smiled sweetly, exposing a perfect dimple in her right cheek. “It means, Princess, that you won’t last a week.”

  THE POSTMAN GLARED AT the monitor, teeth clenched so hard they ached, while the one they were calling Cinderella Survivor slowly lowered herself into a wrought-iron chair at I Scream.

  She killed Slycer.

  At first The Postman didn’t believe it—much like the fans, who peppered the comments feed with incredulity and intricate conspiracy theories. It seemed too bizarre. A teenager with a mirror just took out The Postman’s number-one killer? Impossible.

  But it wasn’t. The Postman had seen Slycer’s corpse, felt the pulseless body already stiff and cold before the guards arrived to haul it away. The blood had stopped pouring from the wound by then; the pool was sticky and thick. And while all of that could have been attributed to the special eff
ects frequently employed by The Postman’s killers to fake out their victims, this time the blood and the corpse and the death were real.

  “And now I have her all to myself,” The Postman said out loud, though there was no one to hear. “Voice command!” The voice-recognition control panel beeped twice to acknowledge activation. “Engage autodetect on camera banks thirty-two through thirty-seven.” Cinderella Survivor would be leaving for the Barracks soon, and The Postman wanted to make sure that every single moment of her time on Alcatraz 2.0 was covered.

  “You won’t be out of my sight for a moment.”

  She was the only priority.

  So many months of planning, all destroyed in an instant. No one’s time on Alcatraz 2.0 was particularly pleasant, but the moment Slycer’s body hit the floor, Dee’s fate was sealed. She’d be broken, tortured, begging for the end.

  And she’d watch anyone she cared about die.

  NYLES LAUGHED NERVOUSLY. “GRIS, don’t scare the new girl.”

  “You want to give her false hope?” Griselda said, arching an eyebrow. “Make her feel like she can win?” Her eyes shifted to Dee. “News flash—you can’t.”

  Dee expected Griselda’s bravado to mask an underlying fear, but her eyes were hard, her lips firmly set, and all Dee detected was a no-nonsense This is how it is, Princess attitude that matched the businesslike primping Griselda had done before entering the camera shot. Between Nyles’s cheerfulness and Griselda’s casual indifference, Dee was relatively sure they were both nuts.

  Nyles pulled out a chair, and the metal legs scraped against the tile floor with a nails-on-a-chalkboard screech. “She did manage to kill the Slycer.”

  Griselda stiffened, clearly irritated. “Beginner’s luck.”

  You try it.

  A new voice chimed in from behind the counter. “If that’s beginner’s luck, I want some.”

  Dee turned, instantly on guard even though the female voice sounded friendly, and neither Nyles nor Griselda appeared alarmed by her presence. A short Asian woman with freckled cheeks carried two large boxes from the back room, both marked POSTMAN ENTERPRISES, INC. She wore an abundance of light blue eyeshadow and matching blue lipstick, and as she passed beneath an overhead light, Dee noticed that her black shoulder-length hair was streaked with blue as well.