Shot. Shot. Shot.
He’s bleeding. Can’t run. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. The blood—
Hands gripped my shoulders. I lashed out, like a horse with a broken leg.
The person holding me stumbles backward. All I can see is blood. I hear her, calling my name.
I felt like I was watching myself from outside my body. I felt as if something else had control.
“Tess. Tess.”
Through the blood, her features come into focus—
“Emilia.” I said the name and came back to myself. There was no blood. There was no body. But the gunshots were real. It took hearing another one before I was sure, and by that time, Emilia had locked a hand around my forearm.
“We have to go,” she said. “We have to hide.”
I let her pull me toward the library door, and then my survival instincts clicked back on. I pushed the door inward. Emilia followed. I considered barricading the door but decided that might just draw attention. If we barricaded ourselves in, the shooter would know we were here.
I pulled Emilia through the stacks. Toward the back of the library, the lights in the stacks were motion activated on an aisle-by-aisle basis. I hunkered down between two shelves, pressing my body as flat to them as I could. Beside me, Emilia did the same. It took a minute for the lights to go off.
Those sixty seconds were the longest in my life.
I could hear Emilia breathing beside me, could feel her breath on my neck.
“What’s going on?” I asked her, my voice so quiet I could barely hear the words myself.
“We were supposed to be in class,” Emilia said, her voice nearly as low as mine, neither of them anywhere near as deafening as the sound of my own heartbeat. “I forgot something in my locker. I went back, and I saw one of the new security guards pull his gun.”
Hardwicke had doubled the number of security personnel on campus. Heavily armed. The memory washed back over me. I’d thought—we’d all thought—that the guards were armed for our protection.
“How many?” I said, my voice hushed, my throat tightening around the words. “Just the one guard?”
Emilia shook her head, the motion stilted. We couldn’t afford to set off the motion sensors. We couldn’t afford the light. We couldn’t afford to draw attention to the library.
What do they want?
I didn’t waste my breath to risk asking that question out loud. Emilia had no way of knowing the answer—not if she’d seen what she’d seen and then run.
Run. Run-run-run—
Every instinct I had told me to get out of here. I was trapped. And if they looked for us—if they wanted to find us, there was nowhere to hide. And if they weren’t looking for us, if this was an attack and they decided to concentrate on the classrooms, then our classmates, the ones who’d made it back to class after the assembly—
Without even realizing I was doing it, I shifted. I was going to get up. I was going to do something. But Emilia’s fingernails dug into my arm.
Don’t. Like my last question, her plea was silent. Don’t be stupid.
Don’t leave her there alone.
“Henry’s out there,” I told Emilia, my voice nearly refusing to form the words. “And Vivvie—”
I had no idea where Vivvie was. She’d bolted, minutes before the first shot.
There was a moment of silence out in the hallway, and then a rapid-fire burst of shots, louder than the others. Closer.
Emilia squeezed her eyes shut. I eased the phone out of my pocket. Call. Call for help. Dial—
No service. I heard footsteps outside the door, heard someone shouting out orders. Why wasn’t my phone working?
Had they knocked out the service? They.
For the first time, I let myself process the fact that there was a word for the kind of people who infiltrated the security force of an elite private school and then began shooting.
Terrorists.
“Somebody roofied me.” Beside me, Emilia’s eyes were open now. She was pale and staring straight ahead. “At that party, someone roofied me.”
This was the first time she’d ever said the words. I knew that, just like I knew that she didn’t want to die without saying them.
We’re not going to die. We’re not.
“I don’t know if John Thomas was the one who slipped it into my drink,” she said hoarsely, her lips barely moving, the words barely audible. “I never knew for sure what happened that night, or who was involved. I didn’t want to know.”
Another set of footsteps. Heavy. Running.
A tremor ran down my spine. I forced myself to stop shaking but couldn’t stop the horrible questions wending their way through my mind.
How many gunmen were there?
How many people are already dead?
Emilia closed her eyes again, then slipped her hand into the messenger bag she wore over her shoulder.
My breath caught in my throat. What are you doing, Emilia?