She was freezing. She remembered, then, a bath when she was little, maybe eight or nine, and hearing her parents begin to argue. She’d stayed there, motionless, until the water was freezing: she didn’t know why, in retrospect, she hadn’t just drained the tub. But it hadn’t occurred to her. If she didn’t move, she’d thought, she wouldn’t exist, and if she didn’t exist, she could stop hearing them.
“You’re okay, Gemma.” Pete kept his arm around her, even when he bent to cough. His eyes were tearing up. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.” He was using the same sounds as Calliope, and none of them made sense, and she couldn’t stop laughing, laughing and shivering. “She needs a doctor,” he said—shouted it, actually, his throat raw from smoke, as if he expected someone to hear.
Calliope was at the bathroom door. She touched the handle lightly with a finger, to feel if it was hot. “There are no doctors,” she said.
Only then did Gemma realize that there were no more shots, no more sounds of gunfire. Just the noise of fire getting fat on drywall and ceiling panels and support beams, gobbling up filthy rugs and mattresses, swelling itself with sound. They never told you that about fire, how loud it was, as if everything it touched started to scream.
Outside the bathroom, Gemma was relieved to find no fire. She could hear it close, though: the pop and boom of things changing form suddenly, exploded from solid to gas, a noise that sounded just like terror. But the smoke was even worse, so bad she could hardly see, and a single breath made her choke.
“Get down,” Pete said. He had to repeat it before she understood. In a crouch, he took off his shirt and wound it tight against her fist, since the toilet paper had begun to come apart. They went, crawling, Calliope in the lead. Gemma wanted to leave Calliope—she wanted Calliope to vanish, to disappear into the smoke like a mirage—but she was also terrified of losing her. She would never be able to find the exit. She couldn’t think at all, didn’t know which way the stairs were, thought that everything had burned already, the doors and windows and the way out, that they might be crawling their way to an exit that no longer existed.
In the stories, there is always a fire.
The floor was slicked with blood, and there were bodies everywhere. Gemma wondered whether one of them was Wayne’s. She had the urge to shout for everyone to wake up, to run, to get out, although she knew they were all dead, replicas and soldiers, humans born by chance and by design, all of them sleeping together under a veil of smoke. She was glad that the darkness softened dead bodies into shapes: already, they were losing reality.
But she had to crawl around a dead replica who’d lost half her head to a bullet. She still had a gun in her hand, and Gemma noticed her fingers, long and pale and lovely, and imagined that they still stirred, like underwater plant life moved by a current of water.
The stairwell was impassible. Even the door marked Authorized Personnel was warm, and Gemma could hear the fire beyond it humming, shredding the physical world into vibration. Calliope tested the door handle, then quickly pulled her fingers away and sucked them into her mouth.
Trapped. They’d waited too long to get out.
They headed back across the scrum of debris, of broken bodies and cotton drift. Everything was dark with ash, everything looked like the grit of burning, and even as they made it to the windows, the fire finally punched its way up to the second floor, collapsing a portion of the wall near the stairwell and tonguing its way over the blood-sticky floor.
A sudden sweep of fresh air made Gemma want to cry. Several windows were missing where people had crashed through them. Gemma, Pete, and Calliope leaned out into the night air, still fizzing with rain, and in the distance Gemma saw dark figures escaping into the trees, pouring through the open gate, shaking the fence to dismantle it: replicas, hundreds of them, making a run for it. Two vans were on fire and half a dozen bodies—soldiers and replicas, it looked like—were scattered across the parking lot, like dolls abandoned by a careless child. Most of the usual Jeeps and trucks were missing. Probably the soldiers had gone, carrying their wounded, or maybe seeking reinforcements, and whisked Saperstein and the other staff to safety.
“We’re going to have to jump,” Pete shouted. “It’s the only way.”
Gemma nodded to show she understood. The drop was twenty feet, and almost directly beneath them two replicas lay, half-naked and entangled, their eyes unblinking, exposed to the wind and rain. She didn’t know whether they’d landed wrong or been shot, but it didn’t matter. She would have jumped if the distance was twice as great, would have catapulted into the air without looking back—anything to get out, to get away, as far from the chokehold of the smoke and the fire feeding off bits of skin and scalp and hair as possible.
She jumped.
She was screaming through the air, and her lungs were bursting with the joy of oxygen, and then she landed hard in a barren patch of dirt, next to a scrub of bushes. Her right ankle rolled and she knew right away she’d twisted it, but the pain was nothing compared to the red-funnel fire that burst in her vision when she drove her injured hand down into the ground for balance. It was like the missing finger had instead folded up inside her and shot all the way to her throat; she nearly gagged.
Pete landed with a grunt and scrabbled quickly away from the bodies. Now that Gemma was closer she saw they’d been shot, probably from the air: there was a pattern of blood spatter on the exterior wall. It was Calliope, funnily, who hesitated, teetering on the windowsill, looking now not like the monster Gemma had seen in the bathroom but like a sister Gemma might have dreamed. Smoke undulated and roiled behind her.
“Jump,” Gemma found herself shouting, though minutes earlier she’d been hoping Calliope might simply disappear. “Jump!” Her throat was raw from smoke, and when she tried to draw air again, she began to cough.
Calliope jumped, and for a second Gemma saw her framed in the air like a bird, arms flung wide and mouth open, suspended in the glitter of the fine rain.
Then she landed, gracelessly, but on her feet. Gemma felt the impact herself, whether from the vibration of the ground or because of the doubling effect, she didn’t know. When she stood up and tested her weight, her ankle held, barely.
“What happened?” Pete had already moved to take hold of her injured hand again, but she drew away. It was too painful, too awful, and numbly she half believed she could make everything that had happened untrue again.
“I landed wrong,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Keep pressure on your hand,” was all he said. He’d always looked thin but now, in the slick light of the remaining streetlamps, covered in blood that wasn’t his, he looked truly sick.
They moved across the parking lot, leaving the ruins of the airport behind. Gemma kept expecting to hear a ricochet of shooting, to be stopped, to have her legs eviscerated by bullets. But other than the sound of the fire and a few distant shouts, it was quiet. Why was it so quiet? The fire must be visible for miles. Shouldn’t there be sirens already? Ambulances? Shouldn’t someone have noticed and responded? It was as if . . .