The shirt I’d been wearing was ruined, smeared with blood and bits of glass. I stripped it off and shook it out before I tore it into makeshift bandages for my hands. The knots I’d made would hold, but not for long. Maybe we could steal Lena’s car keys again and go to the hospital. We, I kept thinking, we. I knew she’d forgive me. She had to. Without each other, we could, quite literally, die.
I put on a clean shirt and flung open the door only to trip over Mrs. Dunham. She’d slouched down against the wall outside my room, legs kicked out before her. It was clear from her face that she was crying.
“Jamie,” she said hoarsely. I knelt down beside her. “What have you done to yourself? Look at your hands! And your face—are you hurt? I heard the worst noises coming from your room.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I told her. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
That phrase was beginning to sound meaningless.
She leaned over to look inside my room and pulled back in shock. “Oh, Jamie. What have you done?”
“I’ve got to go,” I said, “but I’ll explain later, I promise, I’ve got to find Holmes.”
She grabbed at my hand to keep me from leaving, and I bit back a yell of pain.
“I guess that means you haven’t heard,” she said, and her eyes misted over with tears. “Oh, Jamie, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. But there’s been an accident. A horrible, horrible accident.”
MRS. DUNHAM SAID IT’D ONLY HAPPENED TEN MINUTES before—had it only been ten minutes since I found that camera? It could have been seconds, or years, for all I could tell—and that campus was being evacuated, building by building. Michener Hall was empty except for the two of us. She’d thought I’d destroyed my room on hearing the news. Because she, unlike everyone else, knew where Holmes’s main haunt was.
They were blaming it on a gas explosion, she’d said.
I’d pelted across campus at a dead run. It was beginning to snow, a powder-dusting that clung to my bare arms and the bandages on my hands. I’d forgotten my coat, my phone. My heart beat harder as I got to the quad.
From clear across campus, I could see that the sciences building was a smoking ruin.
My phone. Where was my phone? What if Holmes was trying to call me? What if she was trapped in the building somewhere? That was the worst possibility I’d allowed myself to imagine, that Julian and George’s flightless bones had collapsed on top of her, but that she was fine underneath—a little sooty from the smoke, perhaps, but fine . . . but then, I wasn’t giving her enough credit. Holmes was a magician. She had to be standing outside, whole and hale and intact, smoking a cigarette as she watched it all burn. Most important, she’d be alive. Still furious with me, I’d give the universe that—she could never want to speak to me again for all I cared—so long as she was alive.
All of that went straight from my mind when I saw it. It wasn’t possible. The northwest corner of Sciences was blown clear through: the corner where Holmes’s supply closet was. Battered pieces of granite had thudded mightily to the ground. Through the smoke, I could see the building’s interior walls, tattered and stacked like the pages of an old book lit with a match. Here and there, bits of broken wall were still smoldering.
Somewhere in the distance sirens sounded. Uniformed police officers were cordoning off the area, pushing the few bystanders back into a huddled mass of winter coats. Over a bullhorn, a voice ordered any remaining students to report to the union for further instructions. An officer had set up a standing light that sharply illuminated the building’s entrance. There would be a thorough search, he was saying. The firemen would pull out any survivors.
Survivors.
I pushed past him, and the other officer waving a pair of plastic flares, and then past a yellow-suited fireman—there were fire engines behind me, now, flashing their lights—who snagged me by the arm. The look I turned on him must’ve been that of a feral dog because he loosened his grip for the half second it took me to shake him off. I took off in a sprint toward the front door, and was instantly tackled to the ground.
They wrestled me back toward the emergency vehicles where they assigned an officer to be my babysitter and made me sit under his watchful eye on the edge of the fire engine. They didn’t want to arrest me, they said, but they would if I tried to take off again. So I sat dully while the red lights washed everything with fire. At some point, the officer, in a moment of compassion, pressed a cup of something hot into my bandaged hands. He tried to convince me to put on his jacket, but I wanted his pity even less than I wanted his attention. Possibly I insulted his mother. I couldn’t remember. He kept away from me after that.
I wondered what Holmes’s funeral would be like. I felt sick for a while, and then I stopped really feeling anything at all.