it may have appeared, their muscles were exhausted. They craned their necks, wanting just to see the sun climb over the horizon through the glass before allowing themselves to sleep.
Traffic began its assault on their senses, climbing over the school walls and up the side of the building, through the glass enclosure on the roof garden by way of the tiny window slits. A man with a high-pitched voice called out the number of a city bus route to passersby. A garbage truck parked nearby and the men who worked it rattled through the glass bottles in the dumpsters, sorting them aside.
For now, though, Nadia’s music drowned out the cacophony. The orange rays poked out over the horizon, bringing to light the vast city expanse, the ocean in the distance.
Downstairs, Marisa insisted to her Protectors they should go watch with everyone else. They had spent what was left of the night talking, joking around. It hadn’t been improv, but Kenji was happy. It hadn’t been a sport, but Amira was happy. It wasn’t a place in the world, but Celeste was happy. It hadn’t been the party he’d planned for, but Peejay was happy. Her demands hadn’t been met yet, but Marisa was unflappable. She was patient.
The sun rose. Thursday night unmistakably gave way to Friday morning. Parents who hadn’t come in the middle of the night for their children came now. Lock-in night was officially over.
The doors remained locked.
PART II
ONE WEEK LATER
1
7:13AM
Marisa woke up to back cramps again. It was only thanks to Amira’s exercises and stretches that Marisa could still stand, that her legs had not withered away. At least, that’s what it felt like. She gritted her teeth and reached for her toes, keeping her knees slightly bent like Amira had taught her, pushing the stretch to the seizing muscles in her back instead.
The foyer was awash in dawn’s weak gray light. Rainy season had rolled in the day after lock-in night, about a month earlier than usual. “Proves my point,” Marisa had said with a shrug, though she then had to go into a five-minute explanation of how inclement weather was all part of the same problem as the reefs.
Even now she could hear the drizzle pattering on the skylight overhead. Those sleeping around her on blankets shoveled in through the tiny window slits seemed like injured victims after a disaster, overflow patients hooked up to IVs in parking lots. Of course, they were all healthy. Marisa felt lucky for this, lucky that anyone who needed medication had enough of it, the insulin and pills kept at the nurse’s office, routinely refilled and passed through the slits. If anyone had been sick or hurt, Marisa would have to produce the key. And she would. Of course she would.
Thankfully no one had needed it, or thought to fake an illness. A slight flu had gone around a couple of days into the lock-in, but it had passed quickly without spreading too widely. There’d been a bout of food poisoning, too, but that hadn’t been serious, either, and affected only a couple of kids who’d ordered delivery paella, which included some bad shrimp. The delivery guy had had to pass the rice on a tiny plate, piling it only an inch high at a time so it could fit through. It had taken him fifteen minutes, and the promise of a solid tip to keep him from fleeing, though Marisa suspected the delivery guys loved to come to the school and take selfies with the students through the windows.
That wasn’t the only source of food, of course. There was a kitchen in the building, and during her planning, knowing full well the school could not meet her demands in an evening, Marisa had slowly brought in days and days of supplies of canned food and dried goods, as well as menstrual products and other hygienic necessities, so she could not be called shortsighted, or cruel. She’d hidden it all in her locker, in her cronies’ lockers, in any forgotten closets and drawers she’d discovered while inventorying the tools in the building. The day of the lock-in, she brought another duffel bag full of eggs, milk, flour, sliced bread from the deli. All of that disappeared in a matter of days, but it’d been something. And she knew food was well within reach of all these kids with smartphones and chauffeurs, anyway. A text message could feed anyone in the building. They had the technology and the funds. Their