The minibus wound its way through the Highland mist like a determined caterpillar navigating a cloud. Priya Mehta pressed her forehead against the cold window, watching the last mobile phone tower disappear behind a craggy hill. Her fingers twitched involuntarily toward her jacket pocket, muscle memory seeking the rectangular comfort that wasn't there.
"No second thoughts now," murmured the man beside her—Dimitri something, Russian accent, expensive watch. He'd introduced himself at the pickup point in Inverness with the kind of firm handshake that suggested business dealings rather than spiritual seeking.
"None at all," Priya lied smoothly. The art of professional deception hadn't left her, even after walking away from her CEO position six months ago. "You?"
"I am here for the silence," Dimitri said, though his gray eyes suggested he was running from noise rather than seeking peace.
The Serenity House materialized from the mist like something from a Gothic novel—all stone walls and narrow windows, though someone had tried to soften its severity with strings of prayer flags and a carved wooden sign declaring it a "Sacred Space for Digital Healing." Dr. Fiona MacLeod stood at the entrance, her silver hair braided with suspicious precision for someone who claimed to have renounced vanity.
"Welcome, welcome!" Dr. MacLeod's Scottish burr wrapped around them like a tartan blanket. "You're the last to arrive. The others are already settling in. Now then, the moment we've all been preparing for—your devices, please."
Priya had already powered down her phone in Inverness, but watching it disappear into Dr. MacLeod's lockbox still felt like surrendering a vital organ. Around her, the other late arrivals performed similar acts of technological sacrifice. A young woman with an American accent and impossibly white teeth took multiple photos of the lockbox itself before reluctantly adding her phone.
"Blake Johannsson," she introduced herself, extending a manicured hand. "You might know me from—"
"We don't discuss our outside lives here," Dr. MacLeod interrupted firmly. "This week, you're simply Blake. No followers, no likes, no external validation required."
Blake's smile flickered like a connection dropping. "Of course. Simply Blake."
The great hall had been transformed into what Priya privately termed "aggressive wellness"—meditation cushions arranged with military precision, crystals gleaming on every surface, and enough dream catchers to snare the unconscious thoughts of a small village. Five other guests were already assembled, sipping herbal tea from handmade ceramic cups that seemed designed to be as inconvenient as possible to hold.
"Everyone, please welcome our final arrivals," Dr. MacLeod announced. "This is the complete group for our week of digital restoration. Eight seekers, one journey."
Priya catalogued them automatically, a habit from years of sizing up board rooms. A nervous-looking couple in matching athleisure wear—British, mid-forties, probably here to save their marriage. A stringy man with a guitar case who radiated the kind of aggressive spirituality that demanded an audience. A compact woman with shrewd eyes reading a worn paperback—Spanish or Portuguese accent when she murmured thanks for the tea. And a young Japanese man who sat apart, sketching in a notebook with quick, precise strokes.
"Tomorrow, we begin our proper schedule," Dr. MacLeod continued. "Five-thirty morning meditation, breakfast in silence, mindfulness workshop, lunch, nature immersion, afternoon yoga, dinner, and evening reflection. Tonight, however, we feast and share our intentions."
The feast was vegetarian, organic, and somehow managed to be both elaborate and unsatisfying. Blake photographed each course with her hands, framing shots with her fingers and looking increasingly distressed when she couldn't capture them.
"I'm here to find my authentic self," Blake announced when the intention-sharing began, though her voice suggested she was reciting lines. "To disconnect from the digital and reconnect with the spiritual."
"Beautiful," Dr. MacLeod murmured, though Priya caught her glancing at the locked drawer where the phones were kept.
The Spanish woman—Carmen, she'd introduced herself as—spoke next. "I need clarity. Time to think without distraction. To finish my book."
"What kind of book?" asked the male half of the couple—Roger, accountant's hands, definitely an accountant.
"A novel," Carmen said, but her eyes shifted left. Liar, Priya thought, filing it away.
The evening progressed with similar declarations. Dimitri sought stress relief from "the pressures of modern trading." The couple, Roger and Patricia, wanted to "rediscover each other." The guitar player, who insisted everyone call him River, claimed to be "downloading cosmic frequencies." The young artist, Kenzo, simply said he needed to see colors again without screens.
When Priya's turn came, she told a measured truth. "I built something that consumed me. I need to remember who I was before the algorithms and metrics."
"The prison of quantification," River interjected, strumming an uninvited chord. "We're all serving time in the digital panopticon, man."
"Quite," Priya said dryly, earning a small smile from Carmen.
That night, in her spartan single room, Priya lay awake parsing the day's data. Eight strangers, each running from something, gathered in a house that groaned with Highland wind. Her mind, deprived of its usual digital stimulation, began creating patterns from nothing—the way Blake had touched her throat when lying about authenticity, how Dimitri's expensive watch didn't match his worn shoes, the calculation behind Dr. MacLeod's serenity.
The morning meditation came too soon and yet felt overdue. Priya's body, accustomed to London time and email-checking from bed, protested the 5:30 summons. She dressed in the dark, fumbling with analog buttons, and made her way to the meditation pavilion—a converted outbuilding that smelled of sage and denial.
Six cushions were occupied. River was attempting a lotus position that his joints clearly opposed. The couple sat close enough to touch but carefully not touching. Carmen looked alert despite the hour. Dimitri breathed with mechanical precision. Kenzo had his eyes closed but his fingers twitched as if holding a phantom stylus.
"Blake's probably still doing her face routine," Patricia whispered. "I saw her unpacking enough skincare for a month."
"Silence, please," Dr. MacLeod intoned from her elevated cushion. "We wait in stillness."
Five minutes passed. Ten. At fifteen, Dr. MacLeod's serenity cracked. "River, would you check on Blake? Her room is above yours."
River unfolded himself with theatrical difficulty and departed. His scream, when it came, was surprisingly melodious.
Blake Johannsson lay in the pavilion's supply alcove, her impossibly white teeth now the only part of her that seemed alive. Her yoga mat was spread beneath her in corpse pose—savasana, Priya remembered from her one corporate wellness workshop—but this was no meditation. The purple marks around her throat suggested a more permanent form of stillness.
"Nobody move," Priya heard herself say, the crisis management voice emerging unbidden. "Dr. MacLeod, where are the phones?"
"Locked away, I—we need to—the police—"
"How?" Carmen stood, her novel-writing pretense evaporating. "Check the windows."
They looked. The world outside had transformed overnight into a white wall. Snow pressed against the glass like static on a dead channel.
"The roads will be impassable," Dr. MacLeod said faintly. "The phone lines are old, they go down in weather like this. We're—"
"Isolated," Dimitri finished. "With a killer."
The word hung in the air like incense, heavy and choking. River started to laugh, high and nervous. "This is insane. This is actually insane. We're trapped here like—like—"
"Like characters in an Agatha Christie novel," Kenzo said quietly, his first words since arrival.
"Don't," Patricia's voice pitched toward hysteria. "Don't say that. In those stories, more people die before—"
"Before someone solves it," Priya interrupted. She looked at Blake's still form, then at the seven faces around her, each pale with the particular shade of fear that comes from realizing you might be prey or predator, but certainly not safe.
"We need to move her," Dr. MacLeod said, attempting to reclaim authority. "Cover her with—with something. The supply room has sheets."
"No," Priya said. "We don't touch anything. This is a crime scene."
"And what are you, CSI?" Roger's accountant composure was fracturing. "We can't just leave her there."
"We can and will." Priya moved to block the alcove entrance. "Someone killed her. Someone in this room, most likely. Moving the body destroys evidence."
"Evidence for whom?" Dimitri asked. "You heard the doctor—we're alone here until the snow clears. That could be days."
"Then we solve it ourselves," Carmen said, and Priya caught something sharp in her tone, like a blade being tested.
"This is madness," Dr. MacLeod protested. "We should—we need to—"
"What we need," Priya said, "is information. When did everyone last see Blake? What did you hear in the night? Who had reason to—"
"To kill an influencer?" River laughed bitterly. "Pick any of us who've had to endure her photographing her breakfast for twenty minutes."
"River!" Patricia gasped.
"What? We're all thinking it. She was insufferable. But I didn't kill her, if that's what you're wondering. I was in my room all night, practicing silent guitar."
"Silent guitar?" Kenzo raised an eyebrow.
"Fingering practice without strumming. It's very meditative."
"Can anyone verify that?" Priya asked.
"In my single room? How very forward of you to ask."
The morning dissolved into accusations and alibis. Everyone had been alone, of course. The retreat's emphasis on solitary reflection meant no one could confirm anyone else's whereabouts after evening reflection ended at nine. Blake had been alive then—she'd monopolized the sharing circle with a story about her journey to ten thousand followers that managed to be both boastful and boring.
"We should search her room," Carmen suggested. "There might be something to indicate why someone would—"
"You seem very eager to investigate," Dimitri observed. "For a novelist."
Carmen's jaw tightened. "And you seem very calm for someone trapped with a murderer. For a trader."
"Enough," Dr. MacLeod intervened. "If we're going to... investigate... we do it properly. Priya, you seem to have experience with crisis management. Will you lead this?"
Priya wanted to refuse. She'd come here to escape responsibility, not adopt it. But Blake's still form demanded something more than panic and finger-pointing.
"Fine. But we do this methodically. First, everyone goes to their room and writes down everything they remember about last night. Every detail, no matter how small. Then we search Blake's room together—no one goes anywhere alone."
"You think the killer might strike again?" Patricia clutched Roger's arm.
"I think we should be careful," Priya said diplomatically, though privately she was already calculating probabilities. Passion killing or premeditated? Opportunity or planning? The throat suggested personal, but the location implied calculation.
Blake's room was a monument to the effort required to seem effortless. Products lined every surface—serums, masks, tools for contouring and highlighting, supplements with names like "Glow Galaxy" and "Inner Influencer." Her suitcase contained more outfit changes than days in the retreat.
"Look at this," Kenzo held up a ring light. "She smuggled this in. Battery-powered."
"So much for digital detox," River muttered.
"There's more," Carmen had found a hidden pocket in Blake's luggage. She pulled out a second phone, slim and expensive. "She had a backup."
Dr. MacLeod's face darkened. "That's strictly against the rules. The contract specifically states—"
"I don't think she cared much for contracts," Dimitri said, powering on the device. The screen lit up, demanding a passcode.
"We need to get into this," Priya said. "There might be—"
A sound from outside interrupted her—a crash, like furniture falling. They froze, then moved as one toward the door. The hallway was empty, but from somewhere below came another crash, then footsteps running.
"The phones," Dr. MacLeod gasped. "Someone's trying to get to the phones."
They ran down the stairs in a chaotic cluster, arriving at Dr. MacLeod's office to find the door ajar and the lockbox smashed open on the floor. Phones scattered across the carpet like dead beetles.
"Mine's gone," Patricia said, scrambling through the devices. "Roger, yours too."
"Everyone, check," Priya ordered, though she already suspected what they'd find. Every phone was there except two—the couple's matching devices.
"Why ours?" Roger demanded. "Why take ours?"
"Maybe the killer thinks you know something," River suggested helpfully. "Maybe you saw something you shouldn't have."
Patricia went very pale. "But we didn't. We didn't see anything. We were together all night, weren't we, Roger? Together?"
Roger's silence lasted a beat too long. "Of course, darling. Together."
Priya filed that away and picked up her own phone. Dead, despite being charged when she'd surrendered it. She tried Carmen's, Dimitri's—all dead.
"The cold," Kenzo said. "Batteries drain in extreme cold. If they've been in this unheated room all night..."
"Or someone drained them deliberately," Carmen countered. "Made sure we couldn't call out even if we got to them."
"But why leave them here at all then?" Dr. MacLeod asked. "Why not destroy them completely?"
"To torture us," River said dramatically. "The illusion of connection just out of reach."
"Or because the killer needed time," Priya said slowly. "Time before we could contact the outside world. Time to... what? Escape? But where would they go in this weather?"
She looked around the room, really looked. Seven faces, each carrying their own secrets like invisible luggage. One of them had put their hands around Blake's throat and squeezed until the influencer's last post became truly final. But why? What could Blake have done to inspire such violence?
The answer, Priya suspected, lay in the phone still hidden in Blake's room. The backup device that suggested Blake hadn't really come here for digital detox at all.
"We need to get into that phone," she announced. "Blake's backup. Who here is good with technology?"
"I thought we came here to escape technology," River said.
"We came here for various reasons," Carmen replied sharply. "And right now, technology might be the only thing that saves us."
"I can try," Kenzo offered. "I work with digital art, I know some tricks."
They returned to Blake's room, the group unwilling to separate despite the growing tension. Kenzo worked on the phone while the others searched more thoroughly. It was Patricia who found the notebook, hidden inside a pillowcase.
"Look at this," she breathed, opening pages covered in Blake's looping handwriting. "She was... she was documenting us."
The notebook was a study in casual cruelty. Blake had been observing them all, noting weaknesses and secrets with the eye of someone used to commodifying human frailty.
"'Carmen pretends to be a novelist but keeps checking legal documents when she thinks no one's looking,'" Patricia read. "'Definitely a journalist. Probably here for an exposé.'"
Carmen's expression confirmed the assessment.
"'River—real name Gerald Higgins—convicted of fraud in 2018. Rebranded as spiritual guru. Recognizable from news footage despite the hair.'"
River—Gerald—went white, then red. "That's—that was dismissed. The charges were dropped."
"'After you paid restitution,'" Carmen said quietly. "I remember that case."
Patricia continued reading, her voice growing smaller. "'Roger and Patricia having separate rooms despite being married. Roger sneaking around at night. Affair? Or something worse?'"
"Give me that," Roger lunged for the notebook, but Dimitri intercepted him.
"Let her finish," the Russian said calmly. "We all need to hear this."
"'Dimitri Volkov,'" Patricia read, "'claims to be cryptocurrency trader but has calluses suggesting manual labor. Accent slips sometimes—not consistently Russian. Hiding identity?'"
Dimitri's expression didn't change, but his hand moved involuntarily to his pocket.
"'Dr. MacLeod's certifications don't check out. Found her real name—Fiona Morrison, failed wellness center in Cornwall, bankruptcy 2019. This place is probably her last chance.'"
Dr. MacLeod sank into a chair. "She couldn't have known that. How could she—"
"'Kenzo Yamamoto,'" Patricia continued, "'supposedly artist but recognized him from tech conference. He's a developer for—'" She stopped. "The writing changes here. It's messier."
Priya took the notebook, studying the last entry. "'Priya Mehta. Former CEO of DataMind Solutions. Company folded after—'" The sentence ended mid-word, as if Blake had been interrupted.
"After what?" Kenzo asked.
"After a data breach that exposed user information to predatory advertisers," Priya said evenly. "Three suicides were linked to targeted harassment enabled by our algorithm. I testified before Parliament. It was quite public."
"My God," Patricia whispered. "She was investigating all of us."
"Blackmail," Carmen said flatly. "She was gathering blackmail material."
"But why?" Dr. MacLeod asked. "She had millions of followers, brand deals—"
"All fake," Kenzo said, looking up from Blake's phone. "I'm in. And her follower count—ninety percent bots. Her engagement rates are fabricated. She was hemorrhaging money maintaining the illusion."
"So she came here to what, extort us?" Roger demanded.
"Or one of us," Priya corrected. "One of us had something she wanted badly enough to risk coming here."
"Or one of us had something to lose badly enough to kill for," Carmen added.
They looked at each other, the veneer of wellness-seeking stripped away. River the fraud, Carmen the spy, Dimitri the impostor, Dr. MacLeod the failure, Roger and Patricia with their crumbling marriage, Kenzo with his hidden identity, and Priya with her burden of digital deaths.
"We need to establish a timeline," Priya said, falling back on process when human emotion became too complex. "When did each of you last interact with Blake?"
The stories came reluctantly. River admitted to arguing with Blake after dinner when she'd made a snide comment about his guitar playing. Carmen had seen Blake in the hallway around ten, heading toward the meditation pavilion. Dimitri claimed to have been reading in his room—"Dostoevsky, if you must know. Crime and Punishment, ironically enough."
It was Roger who broke. "I saw her. Late. Maybe midnight."
Patricia stared at him. "You said you were with me."
"I—I went for water. I saw her in the pavilion, doing some kind of ritual with candles. She was alone."
"Alive?" Priya pressed.
"Very much so. She was... chanting something. I didn't stop."
"And you didn't think to mention this before?" Patricia's voice rose. "Roger, what else aren't you telling me?"
"Nothing! I just—I didn't want you to know I'd left the room. You've been so paranoid lately—"
"Paranoid? You've been getting messages at all hours, hiding your phone—"
"Because I was planning your birthday surprise!" Roger exploded. "A second honeymoon. I've been coordinating with your sister."
The silence that followed was excruciating. Patricia began to cry, ugly sobs that seemed to encompass more than just this moment.
"Someone else must have seen something," Priya said desperately. "Heard something. Blake was strangled—that's not silent. There would have been a struggle."
"Unless she knew her killer," Carmen said. "Trusted them enough to let them close."
"Or was already incapacitated," Kenzo suggested. "Look at this." He'd been scrolling through Blake's phone. "She had an app for her supplements. She was taking enough melatonin to tranquilize a horse."
"Self-medicating for insomnia," Dr. MacLeod said. "Very common in people addicted to screen time."
"Or someone increased her dose," Dimitri suggested. "Dissolved extra in her evening tea."
"We all drank from the same pot," River protested.
"But we served ourselves," Priya remembered. "Anyone could have doctored her specific cup."
The paranoia was setting in properly now. Every gesture became suspicious, every word potentially incriminating. The snow continued to fall outside, sealing them in with Blake's cooling corpse and the knowledge that one of them was a killer.
"I need air," Patricia announced, standing abruptly.
"No one goes anywhere alone," Priya reminded her.
"Then Roger can come with me. If he can bear to leave my side for once."
The couple departed in bitter silence. River mumbled something about checking the kitchen supplies and dragged Kenzo with him. Carmen and Dimitri paired off to search the meditation pavilion more thoroughly, leaving Priya with Dr. MacLeod.
"This is a disaster," the older woman said quietly. "Even if we all survive, the retreat is finished. Who would come here after this?"
"You could rebrand," Priya suggested absently, her mind still processing data. "True crime tours are very popular."
Dr. MacLeod laughed bitterly. "Digital Detox Death House. Yes, that'll pack them in."
Something nagged at Priya. The timeline felt wrong. If Blake was gathering blackmail material, why reveal it so early? She'd only been here two days. Unless...
"Dr. MacLeod, did Blake arrive early? Before the rest of us?"
The woman frowned. "No, she was... wait. She did email asking if she could come a day early. For content creation, she said. I refused—the previous group was still leaving."
"But what if she came anyway?" Priya stood, pacing now. "What if she'd been here already, gathering information before we even arrived?"
"That's impossible. I would have known."
"Would you? This place is huge. Outbuildings, storage areas. She could have been watching, listening."
"But how would she have known about us? Our booking details were confidential."
Priya stopped pacing. "Unless someone gave them to her. Someone who wanted her here, investigating the rest of us."
The implications hung between them. Dr. MacLeod paled. "You think one of the guests invited her? Paid her to come?"
"Or she invited herself and found an ally. Someone who would benefit from the chaos she could cause."
A scream from outside sent them running. In the courtyard, Patricia stood pointing at the ground where red drops spotted the snow like violent punctuation.
"Blood," she gasped. "There's a trail—"
The trail led to the old stable, converted into equipment storage. Inside, River sat on the floor, blood streaming from his nose while Kenzo tried to stem the flow with his shirt.
"He attacked me," River gasped. "Out of nowhere—"
"He was destroying evidence," Kenzo protested. "Burning papers in the stove—"
"They were mine!" River shouted, then winced at the pain in his nose. "My lyrics, my personal writings. Nothing to do with Blake."
"Then why burn them?" Priya demanded.
River's shoulders sagged. "Because she'd written on them. Notes in the margins. Cruel things about my music, my past. I couldn't bear to see them anymore."
Carmen and Dimitri arrived, drawn by the commotion. "What's happening now?" Carmen asked wearily.
"River's destroying evidence and Kenzo's dispensing justice," Patricia summarized, her earlier hysteria replaced by bitter exhaustion.
"I wasn't—" Kenzo began, but Dimitri interrupted.
"Enough. We're turning on each other exactly as the killer intended. We need to think logically."
"Fine," Priya said. "Let's think logically. Who benefits from Blake's death? River, she was humiliating you. Carmen, she was about to expose your investigation. Dr. MacLeod, she could have destroyed your business. Roger and Patricia, she knew something about your marriage. Dimitri, she questioned your identity. Kenzo, she had information about your real career. We all had motive."
"You forgot yourself," Carmen pointed out. "She knew about DataMind. About the suicides."
"Yes," Priya admitted. "She did."
"So we're all suspects," Roger said flatly. "Brilliant deduction."
"No," Priya said slowly, pieces clicking together. "We're not all suspects. Because one of us invited her here."
The group fell silent. Finally, Kenzo spoke. "How do you figure that?"
"The backup phone. She brought it deliberately, which means she expected to need it. She was meeting someone, coordinating with them. The notebook entries—she had information that would take weeks of research, but she'd only been here days. Someone fed her that information."
"Who?" Dr. MacLeod demanded.
Priya looked around the circle. "Show me your hands."
"What?" River asked.
"Your hands. Everyone."
Reluctantly, they all extended their hands. Priya examined each pair, noting calluses, scratches, defensive wounds.
"Carmen," she said finally. "You have bruising on your knuckles."
Carmen looked at her hand in surprise. "From gripping my pen too tightly. You can check my notebook—"
"And Dimitri, those aren't trader's hands. Those are fighter's hands. Boxer?"
The Russian nodded slowly. "In my youth. It's how I paid for university."
"River's nose is broken, but his hands are clean. Kenzo has paint under his nails, not blood or skin. Roger and Patricia..." She paused. "Patricia, you have scratches on your wrist."
Patricia pulled her sleeve down. "From the rosebush outside. I was picking flowers for our room."
"In Scotland? In November?"
"There were some late bloomers—"
"Stop," Dr. MacLeod interrupted. "This is torture. Just tell us what you know."
Priya turned to face her. "I know that you invited Blake here. You needed her to expose your guests' secrets so you could blackmail them yourself. The retreat is failing, you're desperate for money. Blake was your weapon."
Dr. MacLeod's expression didn't change. "That's absurd."
"Is it? You're the only one who knew all our room assignments in advance. You could have given Blake the information she needed. You had access to our booking forms, our personal details. And you're the only one with a key to the meditation pavilion. You could have let her in for those late-night 'rituals' Roger saw."
"This is speculation—"
"Blake's phone," Kenzo interrupted, looking at the device. "There are messages here. From someone called 'FM.' Fiona Morrison?"
Dr. MacLeod—Fiona—stood very still. Then she laughed, bitter and sharp. "Yes, I invited her. But not for blackmail. For publicity. She was going to do a series about digital detox, bring her followers here. I was desperate, it's true, but not desperate enough to kill."
"Then who?" Patricia demanded.
Priya closed her eyes, reviewing the data one more time. Then she opened them and looked directly at Kenzo.
"You," she said simply.
Kenzo didn't deny it. He set down Blake's phone carefully and met her gaze. "How did you know?"
"The notebook. Blake recognized you from a tech conference. You're not just a developer—you created the algorithm that made her bot detection possible. The update that would have exposed her fake followers. She was here to confront you, to force you to give her a workaround."
"She was going to destroy people," Kenzo said calmly. "Not just expose them—destroy them. She had information that would have driven Roger and Patricia apart, that would have sent River back to prison, that would have ruined Dr. MacLeod completely. She showed me the notebook, gloating. Said if I didn't help her, she'd release everything."
"So you killed her?" Carmen's journalistic instincts had kicked in fully now.
"I went to talk to her. In the pavilion. She was high on melatonin, barely coherent. She started laughing, saying how pathetic we all were, how we deserved to have our lives stripped bare like she was about to be. She said the digital age was about survival of the cruelest, and she was the apex predator."
He paused, and in that pause, Priya could see it all. The quiet artist pushed too far, the influencer too intoxicated to see the danger, the hands that created beauty now creating death.
"She was wrong," Kenzo continued. "The digital age isn't about cruelty. It's about connection, creation, community. People like her poison it, turn it into a weapon. So yes, I stopped her. I'm not sorry."
The confession hung in the air like incense at a funeral. No one moved. Outside, the snow had finally stopped falling, and in the distance, they could hear the sound of helicopters approaching.
"The police," Dr. MacLeod said faintly. "Someone must have seen the snow clearing and called them about the roads."
"What do we do?" Roger asked.
Priya looked at the group—these flawed, broken people who'd come seeking peace and found violence instead. She thought about DataMind, about algorithms that drove people to despair, about influencers who sold lies and journalists who exposed truths and marriages that crumbled under the weight of constant connection.
"We tell the truth," she said finally. "Part of it, anyway."
"What do you mean?" Carmen asked.
"Blake came here under false pretenses, bringing illegal devices, gathering blackmail material. She was found dead this morning. In the chaos and isolation, we couldn't determine what happened. That's all true."
"You're suggesting we let him get away with it?" Patricia's voice was shocked but not entirely disapproving.
"I'm suggesting," Priya said carefully, "that we've all paid enough prices to the digital age. Blake would have destroyed lives for likes. Kenzo stopped her. Perhaps justice isn't always about punishment."
The helicopters were getting closer. Soon, the police would arrive, the bodies would be photographed, the scene processed. The phones would be charged, and the outside world would flood back in with its notifications and demands and endless need for content.
But for just a moment longer, they stood in silence—eight people who'd come seeking digital detox and found human complexity instead. River wasn't River, Carmen wasn't a novelist, Dr. MacLeod wasn't even Dr. MacLeod. They were all constructs, carefully curated personas designed for public consumption.
Only in murder had they become real.
"I'll confess," Kenzo said quietly. "It's not right to ask you all to lie."
"You're not asking," Dimitri said. "We're choosing."
One by one, they nodded. Even Roger and Patricia, united finally in something greater than their failing marriage.
The first police officer entered as they were sitting down to breakfast, Blake's body still in the meditation pavilion but somehow less present than before. The questions would come, the investigation would proceed, but Priya suspected it would be ruled as misadventure—a troubled influencer, too many pills, a tragic accident in an isolated location.
Blake had sought to expose their digital sins, but in the end, it was her own digital empire that crumbled. Her final post, scheduled before her death, went live as the police took their statements: a sunset photo with the caption "Disconnecting to reconnect. Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. #DigitalDetox #Blessed #Authentic."
The comments flooded in—hearts and crying emojis and "RIP Queen" messages from people who'd never met her, performative grief for a performative life. But in the Serenity House, surrounded by police and pretending to be shocked, eight people had found something real in the midst of manufactured wellness.
They'd found that sometimes, the most authentic thing you could do was lie.
As Priya gave her statement, careful and measured and containing just enough truth to be believed, she thought about her company's algorithm, designed to predict and influence human behavior. But no algorithm could have predicted this—the quiet artist who became a killer, the blackmailer who became a victim, the strangers who became conspirators.
The digital age had promised connection, but it delivered isolation. It promised truth, but it delivered performance. It promised wellness, but it delivered anxiety.
And sometimes, Priya thought as she watched Kenzo calmly signing his statement, it promised influencers but delivered corpses.
The investigation would continue for weeks, but the verdict was never really in doubt. Accidental death, the coroner ruled. Blake Johannsson, seeking enlightenment, had found oblivion instead. Her followers moved on to the next tragedy, the next spectacle. The Serenity House closed permanently, Dr. MacLeod disappearing into the same obscurity she'd tried so hard to escape.
The others returned to their lives, changed in ways that wouldn't show up on social media. River went back to being Gerald, but with less desperation to be someone else. Carmen wrote her exposé, but it was about the wellness industry's victims, not its villains. Roger and Patricia divorced, but amicably, finally honest about wanting different things. Dimitri remained mysterious, but sent Priya a Christmas card with no return address.
And Kenzo continued creating art, though now his pieces had a darkness to them, shadows that suggested hands around a throat, silence that spoke of stopped breath.
Priya returned to London and didn't replace her phone for a month. When she finally did, she found she'd lost the compulsion to check it constantly. The digital detox had worked, just not in the way anyone had intended.
Murder, it turned out, was quite effective at putting social media in perspective.
She never spoke of what really happened at the Serenity House. But sometimes, late at night when the city hummed with wireless signals and data streams, she thought about Blake Johannsson, who'd built an empire on empty hearts and died surrounded by full ones—full of rage, fear, desperation, and ultimately, complicity.
The digital age had made them all performers, but for one week in the Scottish Highlands, they'd dropped their masks and revealed the people underneath—flawed, frightened, and capable of anything.
Even murder.
Even mercy.