Page 54 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Yeah, okay.”

Her mind felt calm. That, strangely, was how Lore knew things were really truly fucked—she wasn’t so great navigating her regular life, but she wasacesin a crisis. The worse things got, the sharper and colder she became in response. An earlier partner of hers, a Web3 guru named Trevor, lived in Austin, said of her:You’re like one of those extremophiles; you thrive in the worst possible conditions.She told him,That’s right, I’m a tardigrade, bitch,and they laughed at that. Though later, when they broke up, he called her an “emotionless love assassin,” and it was like, dramatic much, Trevor? Fucking Trevor.

Still. He was right about her thriving in the worst conditions.

Like right now.

Since the moment she stepped onto the stairs and into this place, she was locked into crisis mode.

For her, crisis mode wasevaluationandaction. One without the other was no good. Act without evaluation and you were likely to run into traffic. Evaluate without acting and the problem was going to bury you.

So evaluate, Lore.

The room.Thisroom. It was a dining room. The cake on it was rotten and old—looked like birthday cake, cheap cake from a grocerystore. Half eaten, like whoever was here had just, what, gotten up and walked off? Disappeared? What was it Nick had said?Raptured. Or maybe they were killed by that thing in the other room, the thing that was, in theory, a teen girl who unalived herself in…the 1990s? Which meant she was a ghost, or a demon, or a living dead girl, and none of that mattered. What mattered was a way out. Like inThe Matrix.

“First up,” she said. “Phones. Let’s make sure we don’t have signal yet?” They all got out their devices, checking them. Nothing. No bars. No Wi-Fi. No anything. She didn’t expect differently, and even still, her heart sank. She sighed. “Okay. So we need an exit.”

“No shit,” Nick said.

“Maybe the room will shift again,” Owen said.

Good, he’s back with us. Not just staring into the void. “You might be right. Only way to check is to open that door—”

“Which we arenotdoing,” Hamish said. He was leaning back, bracing his hands against the door, and shaking like a leaf while doing it. “Nobody open this door. Okay?”

Lore went around to the other side of the table, to the louvered split-door closet. She opened it—

Inside sat a series of shelves, and on those shelves were clumsy, dusty arrangements of glassware, drinkware, plates, all of that. Every piece radiating with that seventies-era vibe: Everything was puke green, fading amber, Dreamsicle orange. She looked deeper into the closet for something, anything—she reached back and felt along the back wall of it, and instantly, she felt the seam.

There. A split down the middle. A split with hinges.

Another folding door.

“Found our exit,” she said.

She reached over a stack of green glass plates, through a small galaxy of spiderwebs, and pushed hard in the center of the second door—

It moved, tenting outward a little.

Grunting, she pushed in farther, searching the back wall for anedge to the door—her fingers found purchase and, shoulder burning, she tugged on it, and inch by inch, the door folded up to the right side.

Thus revealing another room.

“Fuck is that?” Nick asked, standing right next to Lore, startling her. She nearly jumped out of her skin. He didn’t apologize, and instead just pushed past her and looked through the space.

“Excuse you,” she said.

“Whatever. Sorry.” Nick leaned forward. “It’s another room, holy shit.”

“Yeah, I know. It looks like a—”

“Like a living room. But—more modern.”

He was right. It was an expansive, expensive room. A sectional couch of white leather tucked into the corner on the right side of the room, and in the center of the room looked to be a stand with a flatscreen on it. And the color scheme—that gray-brown greige palette that made Lore want to throw up her soul.

“We go through,” she said, a declarative statement.

Hamish, on the other side of the room, still holding up the door, objected: “Hey, whoa, what? Maybe we shouldn’t…I dunno. Be hasty. Maybe we sit tight for a second. Maybe we grab a chair and talk this out—”

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