Finding oneself at the mercy of a crazed gunman isn't all fun and games.

Nope, thought Nora Bradford. Not at all. Not even when said gunman was an actor toting a fake gun and you'd volunteered your time to play the role of hostage for noble reasons.

According to her sister Britt, Lawson Training Incorporated staged emergency situations just like the one they were in the midst of as the culminating exercise of every course they offered. Today's trainees were civil workers from the town of Centralia. Directly beyond the wall of the room where Nora and Britt had been stashed, the civil workers were attempting to respond strategically to a faux enemy trying to take over this faux office building.

Given the current state of the world, Nora certainly believed in the value of emergency preparedness and response training. In fact, Nora had agreed to come along with Britt today because Britt had framed this outing as something proactive the two of them could do to further the cause of world peace. Nora wanted world peace! It was just that, with every passing minute, she was growing more and more certain of her unsuitability for the role of hostage. Her decades-long love of reading had instilled in her a very vivid imagination.

To her ears, the agitated shouting of the gunman sounded all too terrifyingly real.

Tension had been mounting steadily within her, tightening her shoulder muscles and causing her stomach to constrict with unease, ever since the "attack" had begun. She should have opted to further the cause of world peace by volunteering in her church's soup kitchen. The soup kitchen was more her speed.

Angry yelling carried through the wall, followed by a few shrieks of fear.

Nora swallowed. Shrieks of fear? She could only hope that the volunteers who'd been cast as office workers were taking artistic license.

Britt, of course, seemed oblivious to the ominous commotion. She was four years younger than Nora, the baby of their family, and the bravest of them all.

Britt curled her fingertips around the bottom edge of the room's lone window and tugged. "I think we should try to escape." She smiled at Nora the same way she'd smiled at Nora whenever she'd suggested mischievous childhood adventures. Her eyebrows ticked upward delightedly.

"No," Nora answered firmly. "The gentleman who assigned us to this room told us all we'd have to do is wait." She infused her words with a calm she didn't feel. "Once we're discovered, we're supposed to react to the situation we encounter however we'd react in real life."

"I am reacting to this situation the way I'd react in real life. Which is to view it as a challenge. You know, like those Escape the Room games that are gaining in popularity."

"This is not an Escape the Room game. We're here to help provide an object lesson for the trainees. This isn't about us."

Britt gave the sash a few more hard tugs before stepping back and setting her hands on her hips. Slowly she turned, scrutinizing their environment. It held nothing but a desk and the chair Nora occupied.

Britt's attention stopped on an air vent mounted into the wall near the ceiling.

Nora narrowed one eye to a slit. "There's no way we'll be able to escape through an air vent. People crawl through them in movies, but they're not roomy enough for that in real life. Are they? More to the point, we were instructed to wait. We're not trying to get an A+ as fake hostages."

"Speak for yourself." Britt made shooing motions as she approached.

"Scoot."

"Britt —"

"Scoot!"

Nora exited the chair.

Britt dragged it beneath the vent, stood on it, and peered into the duct.

Just as Nora lowered onto the carpet to sit, a heavy crash reverberated from the other side of the wall, sounding like a huge piece of furniture falling.

Was there any chance that this training exercise had been hijacked by a real attacker?

No. Even so, Nora felt the way she did when sitting inside an airplane as it hurtled down the runway for takeoff. Intellectually, she knew she was safe. Emotionally, she knew planes sometimes crashed.

She longed for the soup kitchen.

"Is the vent conveniently large enough to crawl through?" Nora asked.

"No."

"Well, we could always break apart the desk and use splintered pieces of wood to chisel a tunnel through the wall."

Britt hopped from the chair and gave a businesslike nod. "Okay. I'm game."

"I was kidding!"

"It might work."

"It'll never work. Also, we can't damage Lawson Training's property." Nora frowned and straightened the brown bandana she'd tied around her head to decorate her Rosie the Riveter up-do. "Stop eying the desk in that hungry way, Britt."

Her sister returned to the window, her features holding a faint resemblance to those of a young Sophia Loren. This morning, Britt had woven her long walnut-brown hair into a messy side braid that totally worked for her. She wore skinny jeans under a loose silver top. If laid flat, Britt's top would look like a rectangle with sleeves. On the twenty-five-year-old Britt, however, it looked easy and sexy and trendy. Britt didn't care that much about clothes, but the feeling wasn't mutual. Clothes never failed to complement her.

On this first day of May, the Pacific Northwest forecast called for a peak temperature of sixty-two. Nora had dressed in her trusty cable-knit sweater. It was three years old and it, too, looked like a rectangle when you laid it flat. Unfortunately, it continued to resemble a rectangle while on Nora's body.

God, who must have diagnosed her to be very longsuffering indeed, had seen fit to give her two beautiful sisters. One older. One younger. Nora's genes had labeled her as the dotty spinster of the trio long before her ill-fated love life ever had.

She checked her watch. Five till noon. "We've been in here for almost forty-five minutes. How much longer do you think it's going to be? I'm craving my iPhone."

"You need a technology detox." More window wrestling.

If Nora had her phone, she could distract herself by checking her messages and social media platforms for communication from Duncan. Shutting her into this room without her phone was akin to shoving Linus into the world without his blanket.

Another booming thud rumbled the air. Two men shouted muffled threats.

Nora closed her eyes and scrolled down a mental list of all the things she'd planned to do on this Saturday. She'd planned to read book six in the Silverstone Chronicles. Design pinnable images for Merryweather's Summer Antique Fair. Make a batch of apple cinnamon soap from a recipe her great-great-grandmother had handwritten in 1888. If there'd been additional time, she'd hoped to do what she always did with leftover time on the weekends: rewatch episodes of Northamptonshire.

It had taken Britt and her thirty minutes to drive here, to the town of Shore Pine. Once they stopped at Mr. Hartnett's on the way home so that Nora could deliver the latest in a long string of bribery gifts, then continued on to their hometown of Merryweather, there'd definitely not be time left in the day to indulge in Northamptonshire.

A scent like that of burning chemicals mixed with sugar wafted to Nora. She glanced to the side in time to see smoke slide into the room from beneath the door. Smoke! "Um." She gestured to it.

"Huh," Britt said. "Cool effect."

Nora carefully drew in breath,...