Chapter 5: Sarah

  Sarah Thompson was, for the first time in nine months, not thinking about her daughter.

  This was remarkable. Since Emma had been born, Sarah's brain had operated on a two-track system: whatever she was currently doing, and Emma. Grading papers: Emma. Driving to work: Emma. Showering, eating, sleeping, breathing: Emma, Emma, Emma, Emma. It wasn't a choice. It was closer to gravity. The baby existed and Sarah's mind orbited her.

  But the spa had done something. The hot stone massage had quieted the first track. The eucalyptus steam room had dimmed the second. And now, lying face-down on a padded table while a woman named Kristin worked warm oil into the knots between her shoulder blades, Sarah Thompson was thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

  It was wonderful. It was the most wonderful nothing she'd experienced in nine months. She understood, lying there, why people paid money for this. For the silence in your own head.

  Her phone was in a locker. Dave had Emma. Everything was fine.

  She'd almost not come. She'd almost canceled for the third time, because Maya had a cold last week and Sarah wanted to make sure the Butterfly Room was covered, and because the formula delivery was scheduled for today and she wasn't sure Dave knew which brand they'd switched to (he did, she'd told him twice, but some part of her brain didn't trust information she hadn't personally verified). She'd stood at the front door with her car keys and her purse and her running shoes. She wore running shoes everywhere, a habit from her first year teaching, when she'd learned that you needed to be able to move fast at all times, and she'd almost turned around.

  Dave had taken the keys out of her hand. Literally removed them from her fingers, gently, and pointed at the door.

  "Go," he'd said. "We're fine."

  He'd been holding Emma in the crook of his arm, casual, easy. Emma had been chewing on his beard and making her satisfied humming noise.

  They were fine. They were always fine. Dave was the most capable person Sarah had ever met, and the fact that he didn't seem to know this drove her crazy.

  She was just starting to drift in that warm, boneless state between awake and asleep where the world goes soft and your muscles forget they exist, when the table shook.

  "Did you feel that?" Kristin asked.

  "Mm," Sarah said, which meant yes and also please don't stop.

  The table shook again. Harder. The oil bottles on the shelf rattled. One fell and hit the floor with a sharp crack.

  Kristin's hands paused. "We don't get earthquakes here."

  A sound, deep and close. The lights flickered. Went out. Came back. Went out again and stayed out.

  Sarah sat up.

  She was off the table before she'd made a conscious decision to move.

  She grabbed the robe from the hook on the door, terry cloth, too big, the spa's logo embroidered on the pocket, and pulled it on. Bare feet. Bare everything under the robe. It didn't matter.

  In the dark, from the hallway, someone screamed.

  The kind that doesn't stop. The kind that goes on and on because whatever caused it is still happening and the person screaming can't do anything about it except make the sound.

  "Stay here," she told Kristin. "Lock the door."

  "What's—"

  "Lock the door."

  Sarah opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

  The emergency lights were on. Dim red, the kind that showed you where the exits were and nothing else. The hallway was a red-tinted tunnel, and at the far end, where the lobby should have been, something was wrong with the wall. It was bulging inward. Bowing, drywall was stretching, deforming in a way that drywall was not supposed to deform. Cracks webbed outward from the bulge, and through them, orange light poured in.

  The screaming had stopped. That was worse.

  A woman in a towel ran past Sarah. Wet hair. Bare feet slapping the tile. Her eyes were wide and empty.

  Sarah caught her arm. "What happened? What's out there?"

  The woman looked at her. Looked through her. Pulled free and kept running.

  Sarah let her go. You couldn't help someone in that state. You could only get out of their way and hope they found a wall to stop against.

  She moved toward the lobby. She didn't run. Running was what you did when you were panicking, and Sarah was not panicking. Sarah was a preschool teacher who had once managed a classroom during a tornado drill while someone's Hot Pocket set off the fire alarm. She did not panic. She assessed.

  The hallway was intact. The floor was stable. The emergency exits were marked, one at each end. The bulging wall was getting worse, but it was at the far end, away from her. She had time. Maybe not a lot, but some.

  She needed her phone. She needed to call Dave.

  The lockers were past the lobby. She'd have to go through.

  Sarah pushed through the double doors and stopped.

  The front windows were gone. Gone, frames and all. The front wall of Serenity Springs Spa was open to the outside, and the outside was not what it had been when Sarah parked her car two hours ago.

  The sky was orange. Deeper than sunset, more saturated, the orange of embers in a fireplace, pressing down on the landscape with a physical weight she could almost feel on her shoulders. The parking lot had cracked down the middle, a jagged fissure running from the building entrance to the road, three feet wide in places. Her car was the Camry. The reliable one, the one she'd driven here this morning singing off-key to the radio, was on the far side of the crack, tilted at an angle that said it was never going to start again. Its front left wheel hung over the fissure's edge, spinning slowly in empty air.

  The trees in the median strip had doubled in size and their leaves were the wrong color. Silver, metallic, catching the orange light and throwing it back in sharp flashes. The air smelled of sulfur and eucalyptus and ozone, and it was warm. Too warm for October. Too warm for Ohio.

  A man was lying in the lobby. Face down. He was wearing the spa's white robe, and the robe was red now, dark red, spreading from beneath his body in a slow, even pool. He was not moving.

  Sarah looked at him.

  She looked at him long enough to see that his chest was still. Long enough to note that the wound, whatever had caused it, was on his back, between the shoulder blades. Long enough to understand that he was dead and had been dead for at least a few minutes, because the blood had stopped spreading and was beginning to set at the edges.

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  She looked away.

  She would think about him later. She would think about how she had stepped around a dead man in a spa lobby and kept moving, and whether that made her pragmatic or something worse. She would think about it at 3 AM, probably, for years, in the dark hours when your brain replays the things you filed away during the day. But not now.

  Dave has Emma. Dave has Emma. Dave will keep her safe.

  The thought was a rope and she held onto it with both hands.

  The lockers were in the women's changing room, around the corner from the lobby. Sarah pushed through. Three women inside. One crying in the corner, her whole body shaking with the quiet, desperate sobs of a person who has run out of loud. One trying her phone, stabbing at the screen with trembling fingers, the same number over and over. One standing perfectly still in the middle of the room, staring at something in the air above her head.

  "Does anyone have a signal?" Sarah asked.

  The woman with the phone shook her head. "Nothing. Nothing works. I've been trying for… I don't even know how long. I need to call my mom. She's in assisted living, she can't—" Her voice cracked. She kept stabbing at the phone.

  "Keep trying," Sarah said. It wouldn't work, but the woman needed something to do with her hands. "And try text messages. They sometimes go through when calls don't."

  She went to her locker. Spun the combination. Her birthday, the same code she used for everything, the code Dave had told her at least four times was a security issue. He was right. She didn't care. When you spent your life keeping track of eighteen children's emergency contacts, lunch allergies, medication schedules, behavioral triggers, and parent pickup authorization lists, you did not have room in your brain for unique passwords.

  She pulled her phone out. No signal. She tried Dave. Nothing. Tried the school. Nothing. Tried 911. Nothing.

  She stood in the changing room in a spa robe and bare feet with a dead phone, and something cold settled into her chest.

  Get dressed. Get out. Get home.

  She pulled on her clothes. Jeans, T-shirt, the running shoes she wore everywhere. Her car keys were useless but she pocketed them anyway, because Sarah Thompson did not leave things behind. Her purse. She slung it crossbody, tight, so it wouldn't bounce.

  Something appeared in the air in front of her face. Text, white and clean, floating at eye level.

  ~*~

  System initialized.

  Name: Sarah Thompson

  Class: Warden

  Level: 1

  Abilities: Fortify, Structural Awareness

  ~*~

  Sarah stared at it. She reached for it. Her hand passed through. It wasn't solid. It wasn't projected. It was just there, the way a thought was there. Part of her visual field but not part of the physical world.

  The woman staring at the ceiling was also reading floating text. Sarah could see her eyes tracking left and right, reading something only she could see.

  "You see it too," Sarah said.

  The woman nodded. Very slowly. "It says I'm a Forager. Level 1." She paused. "Is this real?"

  "I don't know," Sarah said. She studied her own text for exactly three seconds, long enough to read it, and then dismissed it the way she dismissed anything that didn't immediately help her students. Interesting. Later. "But it's happening, which means we deal with it."

  She pushed through the changing room door and back into the lobby.

  The dead man was still there. The orange sky still burned through the missing wall. The world was still wrong.

  And something pulled in Sarah's chest.

  A physical sensation, like a hook behind her sternum, pulling northeast. Gentle but insistent. Warm. The way your body knows which direction is warm when you're standing in a cold room. Something inside her knew where her daughter was, and it was pointing.

  Northeast. Emma was northeast.

  Home was north. The spa was south of town. Emma should be north, at the house, with Dave.

  The pull said northeast.

  Sarah stood in the ruined lobby and thought. She thought fast, because she always thought fast, and she thought in lists, because she always thought in lists, and the list she built right now had two columns.

  Column one: Go home. Find Dave. Find Emma. The pull in her chest said northeast, not north, but Dave might be moving. If the house was damaged, he'd move. Dave was smart enough to move. He'd take Emma, he'd take the go-bag, her go-bag, the one she'd packed and checked quarterly despite his teasing, and he'd go somewhere safe.

  Column two: The school.

  She thought about the school. Her school, Millfield Early Learning Center, where she taught the Butterfly Room. Twelve three-and-four-year-olds who called her Miss Sarah and drew her pictures of suns with legs and brought her dandelions at recess and told her she was their best friend, which was against school policy to agree with but which she secretly agreed with every single time.

  The school was northeast of here. About two miles. Maybe less.

  It was noon on a Tuesday. The school was in session. Her kids were at school right now. Hers in every way that mattered, hers in the way that kept her up at night when Tommy had a bruise she didn't like the look of or when Maya stopped talking for a week. Her kids were at school with whatever this was happening outside.

  Twenty-three young children at Millfield Early Learning Center today. She knew the exact number because she'd checked the attendance sheet yesterday while planning a field trip to the fire station. Twenty-three kids between the ages of three and five, plus Maria, Jessica, Mrs. Okafor, and Mr. Pete. And another twenty, older, kindergarten through second grade. Forty-three children total.

  Sarah looked at her phone. Dead signal. She couldn't call the school. She couldn't call Dave. She couldn't call anyone.

  Dave has Emma.

  She knew this the way she knew her own name. She couldn't confirm anything. But Dave was Dave. The man who'd caught Emma six hundred times on the changing table. The man who checked the car seat straps twice every time, methodically, running his fingers along the webbing. Who slept on the side of the bed closest to the nursery door so he could get there half a second faster, a detail he thought she hadn't noticed but she had, immediately, the first night, and had loved him for it.

  Dave had Emma. And he would keep having Emma until something physically took her from him, which was not going to happen. Sarah had seen Dave pick up the back end of a car when a jack slipped while he was changing a tire. She'd seen him carry a sleeping Emma up two flights of stairs without waking her, moving with a gentleness that contradicted every physical fact about his body. Dave was capable. Dave was careful. Dave was the person she trusted most in the world with the thing she loved most in the world.

  But the kids.

  Forty-three children. Maria, who sang to them during naptime. Jessica, who organized the art supplies with military precision. Mrs. Okafor, who ran the front office like a benevolent dictatorship. Mr. Pete, who fixed everything and remembered every child's name for the last twenty years.

  If this was happening everywhere, those kids needed someone.

  Sarah looked northeast. The pull in her chest said Emma. Her brain said Dave has Emma. And her gut, the part of her that had walked into a classroom at twenty-two years old and known, immediately and completely, that this was what she was meant to do with her life, said forty-three kids who don't have anyone coming.

  She'd been a teacher for eight years. She'd made a promise every single one of those years, the same promise, to every parent who dropped their child off and walked away with that particular expression, half trust, half terror, trusting that Sarah would keep them safe.

  Today that promise meant something different than it used to. But it was the same promise.

  Sarah looked around the lobby. Her eyes landed on the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall by the front desk. Red. Heavy. Solid. Twenty pounds of pressurized chemical agent in a steel cylinder designed to survive building fires.

  She pulled it off the mount. It felt right in her hands. Balanced.

  The floating text pulsed. New lines, appearing below the status display.

  ~*~

  Quest: Reach Millfield Early Learning Center

  Status: Urgent

  Distance: 1.8 miles

  ~*~

  The system, whatever the system was, agreed with her. She wasn't sure how she felt about a floating computer screen agreeing with her gut, but she didn't have time to feel about it at all.

  "I'm going," she said. To nobody. To the lobby and the dead man and the orange sky. "I'm going to the school."

  She stepped through the gap where the windows had been, out into the orange light.

  The air was thick. Warm and humid, and the sulfur smell was stronger out here. The parking lot was cracked and tilted, and beyond it the road, the two-lane county road she'd driven in on, windows down, singing, was warped but passable. Some sections had buckled upward. Others had sunk. But there was a path. There was always a path, if you looked for it.

  Sarah looked for it. She found it.

  She started walking. Northeast. Toward the school. Away from the spa where a man was dead on the floor and three women were sitting in a changing room and Kristin was locked in a massage room. Away from the Camry, tilted over a crack in the earth, one wheel still spinning.

  She didn't look back. Looking back was how you lost time, and Sarah did not have time to lose. She had 1.8 miles of broken road and forty-three children waiting at the end of it.

  The fire extinguisher swung from her right hand with each step. Her running shoes crunched on broken glass and gravel and things she didn't look at closely. The orange sky pressed down.

  She felt the pull in her chest, steady and warm, and she followed it, and she tried not to think about the dead man or the screaming woman or the blood on the white robe.

  She thought about the school instead. Her classroom. Her kids. The building she knew better than her own house.

  She was going to get there. She was going to walk through the door and she was going to find her kids and she was going to do what she had always done: keep them safe.

  And then she was going to find her husband and her daughter.

  But first, the children.

  Sarah Thompson, Level 1 Warden, fire extinguisher in hand, walked northeast at a pace just short of a jog, because jogging used more energy and she might need every calorie she had before the day was done.