“Master control room,” she said aloud. “Master control room.”
She pictured the bank of buttons. Big and bright and perfectly fitted to her fingers. Imagined punching them. That satisfying click. The way each button lit up as she locked a series of doors behind her, locked herself away—
Behind her, the shotgun sounded. She turned. The shooter was running at her. Her icy fingers fumbled on the nail gun. She lifted it. It shook in her grasp. She pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Oh, Christ, the safety, shit—
“Hwa, get down!”
Síofra. In her bones. Finally. She fell to the floor. So did the shooter. The sprinklers stopped. The siren died. Her ears rang. Her hands kept shaking. Something peeled away from the shooter’s scalp. A skein of skin, with hair attached. Beneath it was a skullcap. Light danced across the shooter’s skin. It slowed down, ceased, and he went limp.
“He’s inoperative, now, Hwa. He can’t hurt you. I’m coming. Stay there.”
She tried to say something. But then there were people in Lynch uniforms, and they had bright yellow towels of absorbent foam, and they were picking her up under her arms and dragging her to the nearest wall and taking the backpack off and unbuckling the toolbelt. They were saying how sorry they were. How glad they were that she was okay.
Síofra skidded out into the hall. He nearly wiped out on the wet surface. But he just kept running until he got to her end of the hall. The others scattered and lined up against the opposite wall, chins up, shoulders back. Waiting for orders.
“Hwa?” He waved a hand in front of her face. “Are you in shock?”
“Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.”
He laughed. He started dabbing her face with a towel. “Look at you. You must be freezing. We didn’t know the sprinklers would go off. We’ll change the crash protocol before the next drill.”
Hwa tried hard to make her lips shape the word. “Drill?”
“Yes.”
She had lost too much blood to feel proper anger. She realized that now, distantly, and without anxiety. “For … the school?”
“No. For you. To see how you would protect Joel.” His lips thinned. He looked away. “I asked Mr. Lynch not to go through with it. But he wanted to test you, and I … I knew you would pass.” He smiled like his mouth hurt. “That’s why we didn’t use real rounds.”
She really was pretty far gone, now. She couldn’t even come up with something clever to say. Why was she so hot? Why was she sweating so hard? She’d barely run at all. She lifted her wounded arm. “Blanks do this?”
Síofra peeled back the tie and looked down. Blood covered his fingers instantly. Apparently she should have taped down the wound after foaming it shut. Hwa felt sticky all down her right side. She’d thought it was the sprinklers. But it was hot. It was blood. The hallway tipped over on its side.
Her boss was screaming.
“I NEED A MEDIC!”
Her vision went pure white. Then deep black. Then they were lifting her on something. A stretcher. Síofra was shaking the skullcap by the collar of his long black coat. Shaking him and slamming him against the lockers and yelling in his face about how you fucking idiot she’s bleeding out just look just look JUST FUCKING LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO HER—
“H … Hey.” Hwa held out her hand. It fell. She had to concentrate to bring it back up. Imagined all her muscles working like the girders on a causeway. Imagined all the tendons in her hand working her fingers into a fist. Close. Open. Close. Open. Síofra dropped the skullcap and reached out. He held her hand in both of his. They felt almost obscenely warm. She was so terribly cold.
“What is it?”
“You can…”
“Yes?” He bent down closer.
“You can take this job and shove it.”
6
Palinopsia
The room smelled like mould. Like fungus. Like feet. Hwa suspected that she might actually be dead, and this environment—the damp dimness, the tangy air, the twitching walls alive with blue veins of bacteria—was nothing more than a vivid hallucination of her own corpse’s slow decay.
“It’s like a cheese cave, they says.”
Even through the hospital mask, Hwa could detect her old instructor’s disgust. Kripke’s thick rust-coloured eyebrows knit together in a permanent scowl. He was a huge man, too big for the chair by the bed. Hwa was so glad to see him she could feel herself starting to cry. Kripke looked like he already had. His eyes were bleary and red.
“The docs had to lower your immune resistance when you came in, so your body would take the spackle. But now you have to repopulate your personal flora, or some shit. Looks like a fancy excuse not to clean the rooms, you ask me.” He waved at her chart. Encased in hospital gloves, his fingers looked like sausages. “And why am I listed as the emergency contact? What about your mother?”
Hwa shrugged.
“I had to tell her, you know. Me nerves, that woman.”