Joel cocked his head. “Okay.”
“Now, I squat down like I’m doing a clean lift. Because that’s basically what this is, is a clean lift. I’ll show you one later, in the weight room. And I lift from the knees—”
“THIS IS A LOCKDOWN. ALL STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO CLASSROOMS IMMEDIATELY.”
“Is it a drill?” Joel asked.
“Keep moving.” Hwa’s gaze slid slowly over a series of icons in the far right of her vision. One of them was an exclamation point. It was blinking. She focused on it and blinked three times. An alert swarmed up in her vision: THIS IS A LOCKDOWN. ALL STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO CLASSROOMS IMMEDIATELY.
Which one was the goddamn security icon? Why weren’t these things more intuitive? She blinked out of the alerts menu and roved her gaze over the others. There it was. A badge. Security. She blinked three times.
“FIFTY SECONDS.”
There, in her left eye, was a juddering video feed of a man in a long coat. He was carrying a shotgun. He was on the edge of the atrium at the end of the lobby. Any minute now, he could change direction and cross the atrium, where he would see them. They were boxed in.
“THIRTY SECONDS.”
“Is it a drill?”
Hwa focused on Joel. “No,” she said. “It’s not.”
“TEN SECONDS.”
Joel bolted back to the mail room. He pounded on the door. He tried the knob. It was locked. The blinds were down. Hwa began stacking bins. If they couldn’t find shelter, she would have to make one. Maybe if she stacked the bins outside the mail room, they would just look like another delivery that hadn’t been processed yet. Or maybe fetal pig bodies were especially good at absorbing hollow-points.
“Sorry, piggies,” she murmured. “Joel!”
“They won’t let us in!”
“Not so loud!” Hwa gestured for him to hunker down beside her in the shadow of the bins. He came over and crouched. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said, and belatedly realized that phrasing something that way meant she actually had to have a plan.
“What?”
Hwa watched the shooter in her left eye. He was moving in the other direction. Good. “We have to be really quiet,” she whispered.
“Okay.”
Hwa tried to remember what the school security briefing had said about lockdowns. She’d gone through lockdown drills before dropping out, but being on the other side of all that procedure was different. In the security tab, she found a subheading marked EVACUATIONS AND DRILLS, and blinked at it. It unfolded across her right eye, and as she read, her heart sank.
“All the doors are locked, now. The whole school is sealed. Main doors, fire exits, everything. It’s all remote; the cops are the only ones who can open it back up.”
“Daniel could open it back up,” Joel said. He focused elsewhere and whispered. “Daniel? Are you there? Daniel?”
Static.
“All the communications are being jammed,” Hwa said. “That’s part of it. In case there’s a bomb. Or in case there’s a hack in the system or the augments. Or a toxin. It’s a total quarantine, until the cops come in. Nothing goes in or out. No people, no information, not even the air. Nothing.”
There was a terrible silence. The silence of scared kids hiding behind locked doors. The silence of fans that have stopped spinning. Dead air, closed mouths, and empty halls. Hwa had never known the school to be so quiet. It sounded like everyone was already dead.
“We’re alone,” Joel said, finally.
“Yeah.”
“So what do we do?”
Hwa looked again at the shooter. He was far on the other side of the atrium. “We move. Now. Quietly.” Hwa pointed to the left of the atrium. “We need to get to the elevator on that side. I’ll force the doors open. We can use the elevator shaft to get into the ducts. Then we use the ducts to climb into the lighting booth above the auditorium.”
Joel looked at her as though she had just relayed all that information in Korean. Given the situation, maybe she had. “You’re crazy.”
“The lighting booth is the safest place in school, Joel. It’s why everybody goes there to make out. There’s only one way in or out, and it’s a ladder that pulls up behind you.”
He didn’t look any more confident.
“Joel. Come on. Your dad hired me for a reason, right?”
He nodded.
“This is that reason.”
His lips firmed and he nodded again. “Okay.”
Hwa poked her head out first. The shooter was peering down another hallway. This was the perfect time to move. She gestured behind herself. “Go. Now.”
Joel skittered around from behind her and started running. She chased from behind, keeping herself in line behind him. Their new shoes squeaked across the floor; it was recently waxed and Joel wiped out and yelped. In her left eye, the shooter’s head came up and she saw him raise his gun—
—heard the dry pops of fire—