Impossible City is burning, he thinks incoherently, and opens his eyes.
He’s sprawled on the classroom floor, surrounded by the stunned, staring faces of his classmates. The back of his head hurts. He slammed it against the tile at least once when he fell, and maybe more than once, because his hips and shoulders hurt too, like he’s been thrashing, or seizing. The front of his jeans is wet. Normally, that realization would be followed by shame, or anger, or some combination of the two. Here, now, he can’t muster more than a calm confusion. It feels like someone just ran a few thousand volts through his brain, scrambling everything.
Miss Lewis is kneeling over him, hair hanging to frame her face the way it always did in his dreams, eyes wide and terrified. “Roger, are you all right?” she asks. “Can you hear me?”
“I love you, Miss Lewis,” he says dreamily, and she isn’t Miss Lewis anymore: she’s Ms. Brown, and this isn’t second grade, and he’s just had a seizure. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It feels like his brain is struggling to reboot, to start making sense of a fall he doesn’t remember and an impact he didn’t feel. There’s a moment of absolute terror—what if this was a stroke? What if he’s had a stroke, and something essential has been lost, and will never come back? What if he’s less now than he was at the beginning of the day? The fear passes quickly. He’s fine. He knows he’s fine, and he knows, with as much certainty as a heart can hold, that he won’t be fine if he doesn’t start moving. This is not a situation that allows for slowing down.
Ms. Brown doesn’t have the reassurance of being in his body, of feeling what he feels. She looks petrified. “Roger, do you know where you are?”
“Classroom.” His tongue is slow and clumsy. He tries to sit up, and is delighted to find that he can. Everything is reacting normally. If not for the wet patch on his jeans and the sore places where he slammed into the floor, he’d say he was in tip-top condition, no problems here, all systems go. He’s fine.
“Roger, you need to lie still.” Ms. Brown flutters her hands helplessly, motioning for him to lie back down. The rest of the students are watching in mute fear. The seizure must have been pretty impressive: normally he would have expected at least a few of them to be suppressing snickers over the fact that he wet his pants. “Please. I’ve called the office, they’re going to get you an ambulance—”
Math is not his strong suit, but he does the math anyway, adding up travel times, test times, the amount of time hospital admissions will take, the possibility of sedation . . . all the things that stand between him and a phone call if he does as he’s told. The figure he comes up with is brutal in its simplicity, and it says “too long.” He can’t listen to his teacher. If he does, Dodger is going to die.
The Impossible City is burning, he thinks again, and while he doesn’t know what the words mean, he knows what they’re trying to say. If Dodger dies, so does he.
“You’re supposed to walk off a seizure if you can,” he says glibly, and it may be the most convincing lie he’s ever told. He climbs to his feet, proud of the fact that his knees barely shake, and bolts for the door before Ms. Brown can order him to stop. The last thing he sees as it swings shut is her face, white as whey, crowned with eyes gone huge and childlike in her fear. He feels bad about that, he really does, but as Dodger is so fond of saying, there isn’t time.
There’s a “no leaving campus without permission” rule in effect for all grade levels, but this is an emergency, and he’s already going to be in trouble when Ms. Brown gets over her shock and tries to follow him, because he’s not heading for the office. He’s running, full-tilt, toward the street. The rain has stopped, for the moment, but it wouldn’t matter if it were pouring. He’s got to get to a phone. The seconds are ticking by, too fast to trace or catch, and the entire world seems to be oversaturated, too bright, too sharp, until the air irritates his skin.