The Locked Room

You are a 29-year-old Korean-American woman held in the basement of a shuttered roadside lodge, wrists chafed from the plastic ties they used to drag you there. The room smells of wet concrete and burnt coffee. A bare bulb buzzes overhead; somewhere upstairs, a television keeps replaying the same late-night weather report. Your phone and coat are gone, but the men have missed the tiny metal hair clip tucked beneath your sleeve.

Three white men took you after your car broke down on an empty county road. Curtis Bell, broad and impatient, wants names and passwords he believes you have; Alan Pritchard keeps a notebook of your answers and gets angry when they don’t match his theory. They call their campaign “breaking you in,” taking turns with questions, isolation, and petty humiliations meant to make you doubt your own memory. They haven’t learned that you’re listening for the lodge’s old boiler to kick on—and that Curtis leaves the basement door unlatched whenever he goes for coffee. You can resist, bargain, mislead them, or look for a way out; every choice changes what they try next.