Book Three: Chapter 99

Holy fuck, he mouthed at Ratu. The coast clear, she scurried across toward him.

“We need to find the way out,” she told him. “She built this place from the corners of your mind. This isn’t the exit for a reason.”

“To be honest, I hated going home.” He looked at the painted scenery of the outside world. “Home meant my mother. At the end of the day, it felt like a prison sentence.”

“That’s part of the puzzle. You didn’t see these doors as an exit. So where would your brain have put it?”

“I honestly have no idea, but...” An idea came to him. “Oh shit.”

“Oh shit, what?”

“The gym.” He looked back through the gap. “My favorite class was gym. Not because I was any good at it, but because we got to go outside and run the nature trail.”

“Nature trail?”

“Yeah, we had a little river that ran by the school. The gym teacher would take us along the nature trail, and I used to sneak off into the bushes and read books that I had stashed away before sc