Six Must Die

by Victoria Wlosok

Genres: YA LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Karen M. McManus, this propulsive thriller follows a fractured group of friends as they fight to survive a killer escape room in rural Tennessee.

Twelve months ago, an escape room fire took everything from Steffi Zamekova. In just one hour, she lost it all: her popular blog, her close-knit inner circle, and her memories of the night that killed one of the group’s own… the charismatic (if infuriating) Matt Cesari.

On the anniversary of the bewildering tragedy, Steffi is still desperate to piece together what went wrong. So when she receives an ominous invitation in the mail summoning her to the new escape room across town, she seizes the chance for answers.

Reunited with her former friends, Steffi sees the game as a last chance to uncover the truth behind Matt’s death. But it’s soon clear that each participant has their own cagey reasons for accepting the challenge. And as tensions rise and the players are picked off one by one, it’s a race against the clock for Steffi to uncover their secrets and unlock her own memories before the game’s mastermind ensures that no one escapes the room alive.

Release date: March 10, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 352

Sample

Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 10:51 PM

I’m kind of a pathetic person.

In front of me, the five cars of my estranged friends loom like silent giants, their metal bodies aglow in the mercurial vapor emanating from BREAKOUT Escape Rooms Inc.’s LED-lined storefront. I mentally check them off as I roll past: Guinevere’s glittering Mercedes. Tobias’s hatchback. A banged-up Chrysler that must be Santo’s sitting a little too close to Malachi’s smiling black-and-pink company minivan. I pull my rusted Jeep into the moon-silvered space next to Charity’s brand-new BMW and kill the engine.

Jesus. I can’t believe I came.

Midnight is just over an hour away. By now, every self-respecting business run by managers with a modicum of work-life balance in Friendship Springs, Tennessee—population 2,834—should be closed. Except BREAKOUT hasn’t been a self-respecting business for a while. And judging from the empty vehicles parked around me, we’re all here.

Wordlessly, I reach for the crisp invitation sitting atop my armrest console. It’s been there since I fished it out of my mailbox a week ago, piled in among IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO APPLY! college brochures, an overdue EMDR therapy bill notice from Call-Me-Diana, and a couple of graduation gift checks. I bite my bottom lip as I assess the cardstock for what feels like the hundredth time. There’s an xed-out smiley face on one side—BREAKOUT’s company logo—and bright pink words on the other.

READY TO PLAY AGAIN?

NEW LOCATION, SAME OLD RULES.

Wednesday, May 20 @ 11 PM.

Sevier County Plaza, Suite 263.

An escape room in honor of Matteo Luca Cesari.

Arrive 15 minutes early.

Because secrets won’t keep themselves.

“It’s a threat, right?” I ask Dr. Quack, the founding member of the rubber duck army currently wedged between my Jeep’s windshield and the dash. Talking to an inanimate bathtime object isn’t ideal, but as far as my hypnotherapist is concerned, there are worse mechanisms for coping with what I’ve been through—the divorce and everything that happened with Dad in the aftermath, my traumatic brain injury, the fallout of the horrible accident last spring—than asking a rubber duck doctor for a second opinion.

Besides, I know who sent this invitation. At the very least, I know who I want to have sent it. And with him here tonight… Well, that changes everything.

Dr. Quack side-eyes me from underneath his molded head mirror. He always looks like that, though, so instead of taking his MD skepticism to heart, I reassess the view ahead. Most of the storefronts in the strip mall are peppered with COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR LEASE signs; the businesses that are still operational include an obscure big-box retailer, a Chinese restaurant with faded menu photos plastered against its darkened windows, and an arcade that reminds me of the bowling alley I used to work at back in my hometown.

My fingers twitch with suppressed memory: Liberally applying FunkAway to disgusting synthetic foam insoles for $10.50 an hour. Holding my breath as Guinevere won a glow-in-the-dark rubber duck for me from the claw machine. Booing Charity for rolling every one of her strikes using the EZ-Bowler ramp. Listening to Malachi complain about incorporation paperwork over slices of too-greasy pizza. Watching Tobias realize he’s allergic to Red 40 after his first bite of said too-greasy pizza made him break out in hives. Soaking in Santo’s easy laughter every time Matt botched a spare. Editing blog posts on bathroom breaks.

After what happened last May, though, I stopped showing up to Perfect Strike until my manager stopped calling me in. Quiet-firing, my best friend would have called it. But that doesn’t matter now, because tonight I’m in Friendship Springs, and Friendship Springs is nothing like Cedar Creek.

Despite being only twenty-eight miles away, Friendship Springs is one of the exurban Sevier County offshoots whose businesses were left behind in the mad scramble to turn other parts of East Tennessee into glitzy tourist traps—Come climb North America’s longest tree-based skybridge at Anakeesta! Snap photos with shrunken human heads at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Ride the Lightning Rod at a theme park dedicated to country music icon and local legend Dolly Parton!—which means the death throes of the American shopping center are visible in every razor-scraped, paint-peeling inch of this place. It looks defunct. Dismal. Depressing.

Except Suite 263, that is. It seems that not even the slow, steady creep of small-town deindustrialization can diminish the allure of BREAKOUT; from here, an enticing kaleidoscope of colors staccato through the franchise’s frosted glass windows: purple, yellow, red, blue.

I glance back at the card in my hands. Because secrets won’t keep themselves.

“It looks open,” I hedge, aware that I’m walking on eggshells. That I’m suggesting something dangerous. Dr. Quack stares at me silently in the neon-lit escape room’s glow. In response, I tuck a strand of bright red hair behind my industrial-pierced ear and stare at the sign pasted just below the company’s smiley-face window decal: THIS AREA IS SUBJECT TO CCTV SURVEILLANCE MONITORING.

God. Twelve months ago, this would all be routine: getting out of my car, walking toward the building, meeting up with the others in the air-conditioned lobby. Except we haven’t spoken to one another in a year, and our high school graduation is tomorrow, and there’s a not-insignificant part of me that wants to tear up the ominous cardstock invitation, hit play on Dad’s old Sawdust CD, and gun the engine until I’m back at home. This isn’t a good idea. The accident is still so raw for the six of us… and even without the gaps in my memory, my dreams are haunted enough by woodsmoke, burning flesh, and crackling bone for me to recognize a waking nightmare when I see one.

But I came here for answers, and the people who know me better than I know myself are already inside. So instead of hitting the gas and reversing out of the parking lot, the flapping soles of my broken Converse sneakers stay rooted to the Jeep’s footwell. I am here, in this moment, and I know what I need to do.

Don’t get stuck. Make a decision. Choose.

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” I press the backs of my palms into the skin under my brow bone and inhale, counting every second of the four it takes my lungs to expand. You’re already here. I hold it for seven. You already made the choice. I exhale for eight. You have nothing to lose. I lift my hands from my face and blink at the judgmental rubber duck militia. “I’m going.”

I slip the invitation into my leather trench coat, twist my keys out of the ignition, and hop onto the concrete of the parking lot. The arid air smells like gasoline, urine, and mid-May heat. I tip my chin to the starless sky; we’re overdue for a storm. In front of me, BREAKOUT strobes like a siren song. OPEN. OPEN. OPEN.

“Wish me luck,” I tell Dr. Quack as I lock the car. His unimpressed stare bores into my back as I shake out my hands to stave off the pre-room jitters, but I don’t let it faze me. I did it. I’m here.

And now, it’s finally time.

As soon as I step into the escape room lobby, a cold blast carrying the warring scents of nacho cheese, over-sprayed cologne, and shea butter lotion erupts goose bumps over my skin. I shiver, then pull my coat tightly over Dad’s worn the Killers T-shirt and count my inhalations in my head. It’s probably not a great sign that I’m already on edge, but it’s not like I have a choice. My point of no return was approximately a quarter gallon of gas ago.

To keep from spinning out, I turn my focus to the interior of Suite 263. The BREAKOUT Escape Rooms Inc. franchise of Friendship Springs, Tennessee, has the same lobby components as any other escape room business: a counter adorned with laminated QR codes linking to an online waiver; a row of shelves displaying an array of photo-ready props with slogans like WE (ALMOST) ESCAPED, TRUE DETECTIVE, and MY MOM SAID I WAS SMART; and a kiosk with the kind of branded garbage (logo-stamped shot glasses, hoodies, ugly vinyl stickers) that would immediately knock off a half star from the “Merchandise Offerings” rating on my blog. But I don’t run There’s No Escape anymore. And despite the tacky wares the company is peddling, the rest of BREAKOUT is effortlessly elegant: walls illuminated with color-changing LED strips. Dark black-and-pink-swirled epoxy floors complementing the midnight-black crushed-velvet couches pushed up against the tinted panels of an area labeled the Briefing Room. Neon signs depicting locks, keys, and chains in magenta, cyan, and indigo.

It’s slick. Cool. And nothing like the mom-and-pop vibe of the storefront I remember.

“We’ve rebranded,” the polo-clad teenager lounging behind the lobby counter offers over the ambient white noise of the ceiling HVAC unit. He takes a sip from his BREAKOUT-branded thermos before he nonchalantly looks up from his computer monitor, appraising me, and my entire body stiffens.

Malachi James-May looks the same way he always does—thick locs tied into a high ponytail, wireless earbuds sticking out of his ears, dorky black-rimmed glasses perched above his million-dollar grin—and even though it hurts to see him, his unchanged appearance is comforting. At least something here is still familiar.

“I can see that.” I don’t want to linger in the threshold, so I settle for shoving my hands in my pockets as I take a small step toward the counter. “I mean, this is a huge change, right? It looks nothing like the old one.”

The old one. It’s a quaint euphemism, especially when you consider the Cedar Creek BREAKOUT is now a smoothie and juice bar built on top of scorched earth, but I give it to him. Our Game Master can have it.

Malachi sets down his thermos. “That’s kind of the point, Z.” He spreads his dark-skinned arms. “Welcome to our flagship location. This is our prototype for investors and franchisees. Hopefully, there’ll be a BREAKOUT Escape Rooms Inc. in every state in the South before too long. As you may have noticed, we’ve made a lot of improvements: We have a new air filtration system, a redesigned website, and an up-and-coming social media presence, thanks to yours truly. You should drop us a follow—we’re @BreakoutEscape-RoomsTN on almost every platform.” Malachi nods to a custom-made sign hanging behind him. “Oh, and we’re also a PokéStop.”

“Cool,” I tell him, even though I’d rather gouge out my eyes than have anything BREAKOUT-related on my feeds. “And impressive. A few coats of fresh paint can truly cover up anything, huh?”

A shadow passes over Malachi’s face, but it’s gone as soon as I register it. Maybe I imagined it—a trick of the LED lights. “It’s good to see you, Z,” he says. His tone is warm enough, but his dark eyes remain guarded. “I know it’s been a hard year.”

“For both of us, I thought.” My gaze drifts to the merchandise kiosk. “Seems like your parents are doing fine, though.”

“We’ve been lucky,” the Game Master says. “Got a deal on the lease in exchange for improvements to the property.”

“Improvements?” I scoff, but there’s a lump forming in the middle of my throat. “I didn’t know Sevier County Plaza sponsored a negligent homicide discount.”

Malachi doesn’t take the bait. “Well, it’s about time you showed. You cut it to the wire, actually—a few more minutes of waiting, and we’d have to start tonight’s game without you.”

“You knew I was coming?” This time, my words are raspy. Wrong. Jesus, Steffi, get a grip. I’m glad my hands are in my pockets so Malachi can’t see them shake.

He shrugs. “It’s tradition, isn’t it?” he asks, clearly relishing my disarmament. He picks up a nacho from the dregs of the checkered carton in front of him—mass-produced arcade food from next door, no doubt—and swirls it around in what’s left of the radioactive-orange cheese. “Y’all booked a room. Arsonist’s Revenge, 11:00 PM.”

My stomach lurches. Blaring alarms. Sweat pooling at the base of my spine. Choked screams, acrid bile, and stinging eyes. I blink to clear the fragments of memory, unable to tell if they’re real or imagined, and refocus on Malachi. “Let me get this straight. Your family is in the middle of a high-profile lawsuit for a fire that started at one of their locations, and now BREAKOUT is offering an escape room named Arsonist’s Revenge?”

Malachi’s smile widens. “What can I say? People are curious, and curiosity is good for business.” He crunches the nacho between his too-white teeth. “You of all people should understand that.”

I want to ask so many follow-up questions. But even though Malachi is part of my former friend group, he’s not who I need to talk to tonight. “The others,” I say instead. “Are they here?”

“Malachi. If she’s not coming, then let’s get this over with,” a scathing voice demands before the James-Mays’ only child can answer, and my throat tightens as the paneled door of the Briefing Room slides aside and Guinevere Mitchell-Moore stalks into view.

She’s taller. Tanner. Her long half-up caramel-brown hair is adorned with tiny star-shaped claw clips, and she’s wearing a cream linen crop top, a Madagascan sunset moth forewing necklace, and the low-cut neutral-toned patchwork pants she thrifted with me at the Underground after we both bombed our APES exam sophomore year. Her storm-gray eyes cut to mine, and her full lips curl into a sneer. “Oh, good,” she says, the word slicing straight across my sternum. “You made it.”

“Didn’t know the party started without me.” I give my invitation a little wave, and Guinevere rolls her eyes. In the glow of the lobby, with the colored lights glinting off her bare olive-skinned shoulders, she looks indestructible. Divine. But since the accident, she’s been through it, too: a slew of psychiatric evals, a top-rated equine therapy rehabilitation program all the way in Lenoir City, too many prescribed and then discarded mood stabilizers to count. I know, because I’ve devoted myself to it—to piecing together her postfire life, bit by incandescent bit, from her hotshot federal judge father’s Facebook photos and Cherokee Affinity Club Google Alerts and newspaper clippings from the Tennessee Star.

Guinevere crosses her arms, her track-star muscles tensing, but the bottled rage swirling in her gaze isn’t my problem. She’s been pissed at everyone—and everything—since Matt died. As if dating him for four out of the nine months that he and his brother lived in Cedar Creek gives her the right to grieve more than the rest of us. As if she can blame me for the fact her boyfriend was my best friend. As if it’s my fault she kissed me after his funeral.

“Before we get started, Z, I’ll need you to fill out the liability release form,” Malachi says, tapping the laminated QR code taped to the lobby counter, and I blink to clear the phantom taste of Guinevere’s warm lips from my mind. Back in professional Game Master mode, I see. “Bathrooms are down the hall. Everything else is already set up, so once you submit your waiver, we’ll be ready to—”

“ZAMEKOVA?!” an incredulous voice bellows, and before I can blink, I’m being crushed in a bear hug clouded by sandalwood and aromatic aftershave. Guinevere’s hurricane glower dials up to Category 5, but it doesn’t matter.

Because Santo Xavier Cesari, the person I came here to see, is suddenly beaming at me.

“Hey,” I say, voice breathless, lungs recovering as I take a step back to soak in Matt’s brother. Unlike Malachi, Santo looks so different now compared to the last time I saw him—stringy bleach-fried curls flopping into his thick eyebrows, a smattering of new moles around his glittering eyes, a fresh piercing punctuating the edges of his healing purplish-orange skin—but he’s still my dead best friend’s identical twin, which means the only way to fend off the grief that rolls through me at the sight of his burn-scarred face is to bite down on my own tongue so hard that it almost bleeds. “You’re back in town.”

“Hey yourself,” Santo says, casually adjusting the collar of his crewneck—tour merch from the Hu, his favorite band—like everything is fine. Like it couldn’t be better. The ghost of a smile tugs at his mouth, and my chest constricts with the familiarity of the gesture. Trying to get through this next hour might just kill me.

After his brother’s funeral, Santo wiped his socials and vanished from Cedar Creek, opting instead to finish his senior-year GED requirements as an exchange student in Perugia, Italy. As a result, he mostly managed to escape the death threats, hallway rumors, and scathing op-eds that plagued the rest of us in the months after Matt’s death. But Santo didn’t just succeed at avoiding the local hate mail; over the course of the past year, my increasingly desperate attempts to reach him went unopened, unanswered, and unread. When I brought up the fact that he went no contact to Call-Me-Diana, my hypnotherapist, she said Santo likely needed space to process what happened to us. But I don’t understand how he felt okay with disappearing after everything we went through. And I definitely don’t understand how he can stomach being back in BREAKOUT so easily, standing here in the wash of the now-purple LEDs as if we’re not all stained with the exact same tragedy.

“I like the hair,” I tell him, praying he doesn’t notice the tremor in my voice. “It’s…”

Less like Matt’s, I almost say. But then I don’t.

Santo grins. “Yeah. Different, right? Figured I needed to cover up these fucking burns somehow.” He flicks an untoned yellow-blond strand out of his face, revealing a single charm—a silver cross—dangling from his right earlobe. “I wanted it to be more platinum, though, so I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it now that I’m back in town. I’ve already gotten strange looks from basically a million baby boomers while pumping gas at Pal’s.” Behind the counter, our Game Master clears his throat. “And Mal thinks it’s weird,” Santo adds, rolling his eyes with equal parts exasperation and endearment, “but he’s wearing outdated Jordans, so his fashion opinion is henceforth null and void.”

I blink to buy myself a few seconds to register everything Santo just told me. His voice, like his updated aesthetic, is more difficult to understand now that his larynx is lined with vocal scars. Then again, none of us escaped the fire unscathed: Tobias’s asthma—and, strangely enough, laundry list of allergies—worsened from the smoke inhalation. Guinevere developed COPD symptoms. Charity has keloid scarring straight across her upper chest. Malachi managed to avoid physical injury, but his online fanbase across his influencer accounts, @Mal.The.Reel.King, plummeted as a result of his affiliation with BREAKOUT’s scandal. And thanks to a charred beam that knocked me unconscious around the time the flames first erupted, I don’t remember anything from the night of the accident besides the kind-faced paramedic who held my hand in the flashing ambulance. How I managed to give eyewitness testimony to Sheriff Stallard for fifteen minutes without him realizing I had a severe head injury is beyond me, but that’s the kind of expertise I’ve come to expect from the Sevier County Sheriff’s Department.

For the past year, though, I’ve had to live with the fact that not only do I not know how I managed to stumble out of the flames ravaging Cedar Creek’s BREAKOUT Wanderland escape room last May, but I can’t remember why my best friend—why Matteo Luca Cesari—didn’t.

Malachi sighs, grounding me back in the BREAKOUT lobby of Friendship Springs. “I’m telling you, it’s not your look.”

“When did you?” I ask Santo. “Get back, I mean.”

He furrows his bleached brows. The left one has a shaved slit in it; the other sports a studded curved barbell. “A week ago? I flew in for graduation. Though I should say”—Santo slips a ring-adorned hand into his baggy pants and pulls out a rectangle of black-and-pink cardstock that’s identical to mine—“this is one hell of a welcome.”

Guinevere snorts just as the door of the Briefing Room slides open to reveal a short, pale, skinny girl with her hair in two ash-blond Dutch braids. “You came!” Charity Noelle Adler squeals with a level of enthusiasm only a well-seasoned student body president can pull off. Her face is sharper than I remember. There’s something clutched in her skeletal hand—her own invitation, maybe?—but before I can get a good look, she’s squeezing my midriff and adding a note of nauseatingly sweet perfume to Santo’s lingering aftershave and our Game Master’s cologne.

“It’s wonderful you’re here,” she sings as she pulls away. “We missed you!” In the glow of the lobby, it’s easy to notice the level of understated coordination between Charity’s Tennessee-River-pearl-studded earlobes, smart black slacks, and houndstooth-patterned blazer. She’s dressed like she’s about to take charge of a board meeting or artfully cuss out a PTA member instead of play an escape room, but there’s nothing subtle in the way her overplucked eyebrows lift in surprise when she notices what I’m wearing.

“I’m not late, am I?” I ask, attempting to distract her by emulating her fake-ass sincerity. “I know the invitation said to arrive fifteen minutes early, but…”

Her gaze lingers on my leather trench coat for a half-second too long before her attention darts to her watch. “No, you’re fine! You’re just the last to arrive, so Gee said you weren’t going to make it. But”—Charity’s doe-brown eyes flit back up to my face—“here you are!”

“Here I am,” I repeat.

She pouts sympathetically. “How are you?”

“I’ve been better,” I tell her. I’ve definitely looked it, if the LED-lined mirror behind Malachi is anything to go by. There are fragments of my junior-year self visible in the graduating senior who stares back—the split ends of my blunt curtain bangs as fire-engine red as the Swiss Army knife attached to my car keys, the barely visible U-shaped shackle of the shitty stick-and-poke padlock tattoo my friends helped ink below my collarbone at the start of last summer when the seven of us felt invincible, the pockmarks by my chapped lips where my old snakebites used to sit—but that’s all they are. Individual pieces. Not me.

“Good,” Charity says distractedly, throwing a quick look over her shoulder at the hallway door. “I’m doing better, too.” She smiles, and I’m instantly reminded that after the accident, my childhood best friend didn’t see a trauma specialist or double up on melatonin gummies or resign from even one of her prelaw extracurriculars. Instead, she spent the summer after Matt’s death canvassing for proposed amendments to the Tennessee Fire Code, and her fall reaping the benefits of fundraising for the Cesaris’ legal funds through writing self-aggrandizing college essays.

Now that she isn’t trying to suffocate me, I realize she isn’t clutching her own BREAKOUT invitation but a folded-up square of paper. Charity’s smile tightens. “My graduatio. . .