Hide and Seek: The Mad Girl Sees All Novel – Chapter 1 She’s from the Asylum [Welcome to Round 44 of Global Hide-and-Seek. Today’s instance: Rose Manor.] [Participants for this round are in position. Players, take note — once the game begins, you’ll have thirty minutes to hide.] [After thirty minutes, the Wraiths will enter the field and begin the hunt. Hunting window: three hours.] [If caught, you die.] [Your home nation will lose one region to a Wraith invasion.] [Survivors will receive rewards.] [Countdown begins now.] Lyra Vance froze. She glanced down at herself — still in the same hospital gown, white with blue stripes, slippers on her feet. Then she looked up at the crowd around her — every skin tone imaginable, jabbering in languages she couldn’t understand, faces twisted with panic and despair. When the strange voice finished, a door appeared out of nowhere on the open ground, and everyone surged through it. What was going on? Lyra felt completely lost. ***** Draconia.
Strategic Game Command Center. On the enormous screen, livestream feeds of every participant popped up at once. In the column marked ‘Draconia,’ a girl in a hospital gown stood at the instance entrance, glancing around, her hair a mess, a dazed look on her face. The chat exploded. WhenWillTheyDie: [We’re done we’re done we’re done.] DontHitMe: [Who did we draw this time?! Lyra — a little girl?] DetailFreak: [Is she wearing… a hospital gown?] NeverAteVeggies: [Draconia’s down to twelve regions. Lose another and where the hell do we squeeze in?] NutrientGooSucks: [Can we please get a swap? Game gods, I’m begging you.] PickMeGame: [Forty-three rounds in, we’ve already lost twenty-two regions. Looks like number twenty-three drops today.] momo: [I am so sick of you people. Whoever gets drawn is fighting for the country. You can’t cheer for her, fine — don’t go breaking her down. And girls have pulled it off before.] AureliaIsGuilty: [Exactly. If these players hadn’t won us living space, we’d still be holed up underground.
No gratitude, get out.] AnotherDayAlive: [Still, she’s in a hospital gown. The debuffs are maxed out.] LuckyKoi: [Heavens above, please send every drop of my luck to this player.] ApplyingToEmigrate: [Hilarious. Aurelia drew a special-forces operative, already scouting the terrain. Ours is still spacing out. Thank God my emigration application went through. I’m out of here.] GoDraconia: [Traitor. Get lost.] Inside the command center, no one spoke. Everyone snapped into work mode. Chief of Staff Lana Sterling kept her eyes locked on the screen, the rattle of keyboards the only sound in her ears. The keyboards stopped. “Reporting. Participant’s name is Lyra Vance, female, twenty-two, from Everbright. Records show—” The officer broke off. “What is it?” Lana frowned. “Records show Lyra Vance was admitted to a psychiatric facility at age seven. She’s never been discharged,” a staffer reported. Lana’s frown deepened. “Seven? You’re telling me she’s been institutionalized for fifteen years? Never once left?” “Correct, ma’am. After the nuclear war, her entire family died. No guardian ever came to sign her out,” the staffer replied. Lana ordered, “Pull every medical file she has.” An aide replied, “Yes, ma’am.” Lana watched the chat skew uglier and turned to another aide. “Steer the public mood upward. And monitor the networks, anyone running her down, ban the account.” An aide replied, “Yes, ma’am.” ***** Back on the livestream, the chat was getting nasty.
RunForIt: [Folks, time to write your wills.] BornToCuss: [Write your own damn will, dickhead!] ApplyingToEmigrate: [Draconia’s luck is finished. If you’ve got the means, find a way out.] BornToCuss: [Finished your ass. Find your mother.] ApplyingToEmigrate: [Aurelia’s accepting refugees. Catch: vassal status.] GoDraconia: [Shut your mouth up there. Traitor.] BornToCuss: [Accept your ass.] ApplyingToEmigrate: [I’m not wrong though. Look at Aurelia — they drew a special-forces operative. Look at us? A mental patient? (Message failed to send.)] LuckyKoi: [She moved. She moved.] On the screen, Lyra finally took a step. She wasn’t running, she walked slowly toward the door, trailing her hand along the wall as she went. She drifted into Rose Manor that way. Once inside, she found shards of broken mirror scattered across the ground. She picked up a piece. The girl in the reflection had a thin face that made her eyes look enormous, with dark shadows beneath them. That washed-out, blue-tinged pallor that came from years without sunlight. She replayed that mechanical announcement in her head, twice over. Hide-and-seek. Wraiths. Three hours. Death. She drew in a deep breath.
The air carried the scent of roses. Roses, trees, fountains, statues, the manor itself. This was real. Not the white walls, white lights, white ceilings of the ward. Not the scheduled pills or the orderlies’ blank-faced check-ins. Not the restraints that had pinned her to the bed. No bite of disinfectant in the air. The corner of Lyra’s mouth twitched up. Then twitched again. Then she couldn’t hold it back, she dropped into a crouch, wrapped her arms around her knees, curled herself into a ball, and her shoulders began to shake. The chat assumed she was crying. momo: [Yeah… honestly, who wouldn’t be terrified?] GoDraconia: [Don’t cry, sweetheart. Find somewhere to hide. You might just make it through.] NutrientGooSucks: [Poor girl. Only twenty-two.] BornToCuss: [Anyone fighting for this country deserves respect! One more person talks shit and I’ll show you what generations of trash-talk can really do.] The next second, the girl curled on the ground tilted her head up. She was laughing. Tears streamed down her cheeks from laughing so hard. She tipped backward and lay flat on the broken glass, the back of her hospital gown smudging with dust and grit. She didn’t care.
Her wild laughter rang out, loud enough to fill the empty manor. The sound echoed across the open grounds, and other players’ hearts jumped, they thought the Wraiths had arrived early. The chat went dead silent. Lyra lay on the ground, arms spread wide, staring up at blue sky and white clouds. “I’m out,” she murmured. Then she shot upright, the laughter not quite wiped from her face, her eyes still red. “Ha. Wraiths or no Wraiths — who cares. I’m finally out.” Lyra pushed herself up, dusted off her backside, and shuffled deeper into the manor in her slippers. Twenty-three minutes left on the countdown. A few steps in, she stopped abruptly, tilted her head as if watching something — except there was nothing there. Only a wall. She stared at the wall, thoughtful. “So you’re already here.” Inside the command center, Lana stared at the screen, studying the young woman’s reaction. The countdown kept ticking. [22:19] The Wraiths weren’t supposed to enter for another twenty-two minutes. So who exactly was she talking to?