My jaw clenches to keep my teeth from chattering. Elise is shouting something to me, and I don’t hear her. Some of the girls start to line up, shifting into alphabetical order out of habit. I’m tugged in front of Alice, who leans forward and cries into the back of my uniform.
My whole world narrows to the solid metal door in front of me; it’s like I can feel something shift, some charge running through it. I straighten up, the muscles in my lower back aching, cracking the bones and joints that have been bunched up for too long.
Open sesame, I think.
The door pops open.
Just.
Like.
That.
I don’t know why it surprises me. We had one fire drill two years ago, and this is exactly what happened. Well—okay, no it’s not. There weren’t any sprinklers or smoke, but the alarm went off, and we assembled in the center of the room. A PSF appeared there and marched us to the end of the hall. I think we all thought they’d take us outside.
They didn’t.
But this time, there isn’t a PSF standing at attention, clutching a rifle. When the electronic lock releases, the familiar hiss and click is drowned out by the flood of voices carrying down the hall. All of the doors have opened, and the sound of the alarm is now amplified by a hundred. It pours down through the ceiling from the floors above us. It seeps up from the floors below. If I didn’t know better, if it wasn’t totally contrary to every single thing they’ve done up to this point, I’d say they were trying to smoke us out. Like exterminators do with pests.
None of us move. I wonder if there’s something racing in the pit of everyone’s stomach, like there is in mine—if they feel like their hearts are simply going to tear themselves into pieces. The sprinklers sputter and belch out buckets of water, which rises up to our bare ankles, and still none of us move.
And then two kids race by the doorway. The Green girls, their ponytails streaming out behind them, are weaving in and out of smoke that looks as thick and solid as cream.
Even as all signs point to our world burning down around us, only two kids—two out of the two hundred on our floor—are following their instincts. The rest of us are all standing here stupidly, waiting for an announcement to tell us what to do. We would rather risk being burned alive than tempt the Camp Controllers into action. We know what will happen.
But the monster also knows what it should be doing, what we should be doing. I feel the snarl curl my lips, the lick of anger curdling my blood. I like that word: curdling.
I take the back of Elise’s shirt in one hand and Alice’s arm in the other, and I drag them forward.
“Let’s go!” I shout, when it’s clear no one else will. I glance back over my shoulder at the pale faces, dripping with sprinkler water and tears. “I’m not waiting here to suffocate!”
“No!” Alice is crying, trying to yank herself free—and I almost let her go. I can feel my fingers slipping against her slick warm skin, and the monster bares its teeth and thinks, survival is a choice you have to be strong enough to make. But I can be strong enough for the whole room if I have to be.
“There’s no one coming!” I say, coughing around the words. “Don’t stay here and wait until there’s no air left to breathe! Go! Move!”
In some ways, life is easier when you surrender control to someone else. It doesn’t surprise me that half of them don’t move until I bark at them, until I turn it into orders. The PSFs made our shells too tough to let any of us feel a soft touch. We only respond to hard, sharp, vicious.
The temperature under my skin reaches a thousand degrees as I step out into the hall. Elise and Alice follow, and I wait half a heartbeat to see if the rest of the girls will, too. They do; it’s a slow spill of blue uniforms. We cough our way down the white tiled path to the staircase at the very end. Faces pop into the cloud of smoke around us, kids peering out of the doorways. I don’t need to try to wave the cloud of steely gray away to know that every room looks exactly like ours. The Camp Controllers never tried