Marisa looked at her list of demands, and at the time, at the background image on her cell phone of the reefs in Fiji, at the messages of hope and fear and hate coming through.
Somewhere behind her, the cops grunted as they ran with their ramming rod into the window. There was a loud bang, which Marisa could feel in her bones (one in particular), but nothing else happened.
* * *
Jordi hit the glass again. His shoulder burned, but the sound of glass shattering masked the pain. What a wonderful sound. Joy filled him for a moment, relief so great it was like putting down a heavy bag after hours of lugging it around. Then he realized he wasn’t bouncing back like he had all those other times. He tried to stop himself, as he’d imagined he’d be able to do. But his momentum carried him forward.
Rain soaked through his clothes, his hair. The city’s sounds magnified at once, the colors—dimmed though they were by the day’s gray cast—felt immediate and beautiful, almost impossibly so. It felt like he was moving in slow motion.
His perspective shifted as gravity tugged him forward. The ground. The hundreds of people below, who turned their attention to him, letting out yelps.
I did it, he thought. There is a way in, a way out. The lock-in is over. Just then he felt a tug on his legs, and he looked at the rain falling and the ground below and he thought, What have I done?
9
1:40PM
Wind flowed through the building, though the only person paying much attention to it was Marisa. The only wind she’d felt in the past week was the slightest breeze that managed to come in through the gap beneath the doors behind her. The little chill on her ankles had woken her up a few times, but this was something else. This was the beginning of the end. Probably well past that.
She didn’t have to know what had happened upstairs to realize the experiment, her scrambling attempt to save the reefs, was over. Oh, maybe another demand or two could be met in the next hour, the next thirty minutes, however long it took for the building to empty out, for whatever had been broken upstairs to turn into an exit. She might as well reach for the key and get it over with. But something kept her from doing that just yet.
Lokoloko Island.
Instead, she looked out at the foyer, empty for the first time since she’d closed the locks. Only Nurse Hae remained, out of sight. And here came that same blond sophomore from lock-in night, emerging from the bathroom again. His fly was up this time, but he checked it, anyway, before hurrying up the stairs to catch up with everyone else.
* * *
The roof garden was in mayhem.
Most people had seen the glass break and Jordi disappear below their line of sight. There were screams and cries and people scrambling for their phones to capture what they could on video, or to let the world know what was happening, to call for ambulances.
The wind whipped around the shouts and clamored into a frenzy of sound, so that even those who could see Omar dangling halfway over the roof couldn’t communicate it to the person standing next to them without someone’s wailing muffling the words. Thankfully, those at the very front, rushing to pull Omar back in, could hear his shouts over the rain.
“Don’t move me!” Those with their hands on his legs, gripping his waistband, froze as if they thought one wrong move might lead to an explosion. Still, they held on, feeling the incredible weight of two bodies succumbing to gravity.
“He’s slipping,” Omar shouted at them, not saying anything about the glass in his hip, how their first yank to save him before he’d started yelling had caused a hot flash of pain that weakened his hold on Jordi’s legs. Another movement and he’d lose his grip.
The rain alone might do it soon, not to mention Jordi’s dead weight swinging like a pendulum, shifting the pain in his side. Jordi’s head had hit the side of the building when Omar had stopped his downward momentum and he was now dangling unconscious. If Jordi woke up and started freaking out, he’d pull them both down.
The students holding on to Omar all looked to Mr. Gigs, who was trying to help but had arrived late and at an awkward angle, so was now just holding on