“Can you move it?” Mara asked.

“From the booth. But the booth is past the wall.”

The audience members began to argue. Someone said the whole thing was an elaborate performance. Someone else wanted their money back. Mara stepped onto the small stage beside the orange chair.

“This isn’t part of a game,” she said. “Please stop trying the doors at random. The building staff know which exits are real. We need to stay together.”

The authority in her voice surprised her. Years of managing restless classrooms had taught her how to speak when nobody else was ready.

Celia led them to a marked emergency exit behind a painted grocery counter. Its handle worked, though the alarm gave an ugly shriek when she pushed it. Fresh night air entered. The visitors hurried out. Mara waited until the last one had cleared the threshold, then followed Priya into the parking lot.

Holt was already there beside a patrol car. Simon had disappeared from the rear loading bay. The white van was missing.

Celia pressed both hands to her face. “He’s going to the house.”

Chapter Nine: A House Is Not a Stage

Holt ordered Mara not to return home. It was a reasonable command and, for several seconds, Mara obeyed it without argument. Then Celia said something that transformed her fear into a precise question.

“The finale uses a live feed,” Celia explained. “Simon installed a projector at the last location. It makes a person’s own house look occupied by a character from the story. The audience sees the picture and thinks they’re watching reality change.”

“Where is the projector?” Mara asked.

“I don’t know. He never showed me the final setup.”

“The black case,” Mara said. “He brought it to my yard.”

Holt called for officers to secure the house. Mara was instructed to remain with Priya. She did. But she opened her camera app, the same one that had alerted her to the brick, and watched the empty patio. The board was still over the window. The garden bench stood beneath the service door. The back gate was shut.

Then the live image brightened. A pale figure appeared in the doorway of the garden shed, a boy in a green raincoat. The figure turned its head toward the camera.

Priya gasped. “That’s Owen.”

“No,” Mara said. “That’s light.”

The figure lacked a shadow on the ground. It moved with the smoothness of a prerecorded sequence, and its bright green coat didn’t change color beneath the yard lamp. A projector somewhere was casting the image onto a thin screen or mist. Mara had seen something similar in the Arcadia advertisement.

A caption appeared in the camera feed, not as part of the app but on a card placed within view: OPEN THE WRONG DOOR.