Chapter 4: Inferno

"—which is why it doesn't matter whether the thing is burning or rusting, because the electrons don't care, and that's exactly—"

The alarm went off in the middle of Mr. Bayer's sentence. A flat, ugly note on repeat, and every head in the room turned to the ceiling at once.

"Alright, students, that's the drill." Mr. Bayer shouted calmly over the alarm. "Burners off, lab coats on the hooks, single file. Take this seriously, please."

Chairs scraped. Eliana stood up with everyone else, and then she saw the bench at the back with the gas valve still open and a lit Bunsen burner sitting on top of it, and she walked toward it before she'd decided to. Someone had left it. It was the kind of thing nobody noticed until it was the only thing in the room.

She turned the valve and watched the flame shrink to nothing. Then she did the fourth bench's and the fifth's, because the habit was to check all of them.

When she looked up, the room was empty.

"Ms. Barker," Mr. Bayer called from the doorway. He was holding the door with one arm and counting heads in the hall with the other. "Now, please."

"Sorry, Mr. Bayer, there were a few valves still open. I'll be right there."

"Good. Come on." Down the hall, someone shouted his name, something about the east stairs backing up, and he turned toward it. "Right behind us, Ms. Barker!" The door started to swing shut behind him.

She picked up her bag and followed him into the hall. By the time she reached the corner, the line had already turned the bend toward the east stairs, a thin tail of sneakers and voices going away from her, and the alarm was still going.

She stopped, because there was a smell she couldn't place. Something warm, like a toaster left on.

Down the hall, behind the music wing, Lexie was in the padded closet the band used as a practice room. It had a drum kit, a bass amp, and a sign on the door that said STUDENTS: SIGN IN. Nobody ever did. It was Lexie's free period, and the band had talked their way in behind her.

"I'm just saying," Rodney said, adjusting a cymbal, "a yearbook photo is kinda permanent. Fifty years from now, my grandkids are going to see me in this."

"Even if you do somehow find someone who wants to have kids with you. Those grandbabies are gonna be embarrassed," Meghan said, tuning her guitar. "A yearbook picture is like a participation award for existing."

"Well, I do exist!"

"You don't have to be so proud about it."

"I told Mika I'd do it," Lexie said. "Don't make it a thing."

"It's a thing."

"It's a photo, Meghan."

"Fine," Meghan said. "But we pick the pose."

"Mine's a lunge," Rodney said.

"We're not doing lunges." Lexie tapped her mic four times. "From the second verse. And if somebody rushes the bridge again, I'm leaving."

They were in the middle of the bridge when the alarm went off.

Lexie noticed the pitch before she noticed anything else. It was a half step flat of the one from the last drill, and it sat in her teeth like a wrong note in a song she knew. Through the padding it came faint and thin. Rodney stopped first. Ryan's bass faded out under his hands.

"It's a drill," Meghan said, already putting her guitar in her case. "I'm not getting written up."

"Come on, Lexie," Ryan said. "It's still a drill."

"I know it's a drill." Lexie didn't stop. "You guys can leave. I'm staying."

"They count us, you know," Ryan said. "It's not like you can do anything here by yourself."

"Then count me absent."

Rodney paused at the door with the kick pedal still in his hand. "Dude—"

"Bye!"

They went. The door swung shut, and the alarm got a little quieter in the padded room. Lexie sang the second verse to a wall of foam panels, one hand on the mic stand, and sang it louder than she needed to.

After a minute, the room smelled like a campfire. She stopped mid-line, with the next word in her mouth, and listened. The alarm was still going, thin through the walls. Nobody had come back.

She pulled the door open.

Eliana made herself keep walking, and the smell got stronger, warm and faintly sweet, a toaster left on over something that stopped being bread a long time ago. She pulled her sleeve over her nose. The alarm had been going long enough that her ears had given up on it.

Then she saw the baseboard burning.

It was a small fire, a line of it no taller than her ankle, creeping out from under the door to the main stairs. The door sat between her and the east end of the hall, where the line had gone. Eliana stopped. For a second she honestly waited for someone to step out and tell her this was part of the drill. Nobody did. One drill all year, and the one time it went off, there was a real fire in the hallway.

Her stomach dropped. Had she missed a valve in the lab? But the lab was behind her, and this was coming from the stairs.

It bent. It curled around the corner and toward her shoes.

She stepped back. The flame stopped for a second, then inched toward her again.

A door opened down the hall, and Lexie came out of the practice room with the cable still wrapped around her fist and one hand pressed to her ear like the alarm was personal. She saw the fire and stopped.

"Eliana? Is that part of the drill?"

"No. It's real." Eliana's voice came out steadier than she felt. "It's spreading."

A second line crawled out of the first and slid across the floor toward Lexie's boots. Lexie looked down at it and took one step to the left. It moved left.

"Okay, why is it doing that?"

"I don't know." Eliana's thumb found the cap of her pen. "The main stairs are out. The fire's coming from there."

"Is there another way out?"

"The back stairwell, past the gym. It lets out by the pool."

"Then that way." Lexie grabbed her hand and pulled. "Come on!"

The pen slipped out of Eliana's fingers and skittered away across the linoleum. She let it go.

Her hand was warm and rough, and Eliana held it tight on instinct.

They ran. The alarm went on over their heads, flat and ugly, and behind them the flame slithered across the floor and climbed the walls.

Lexie ran fast, and Eliana had to push to keep up. She kept her eyes on Lexie's boots, because looking at anything else made her stomach turn over.

They passed the trophy case and the water fountain with the broken spout. Somewhere outside a window, a calm voice was calling names off a roster, and Eliana wanted badly to be on the other side of the glass. Everyone else had already made it out, and the alarm was the only thing in the building still awake.

Lexie let go of her hand.

Eliana almost fell. Lexie had skidded to a stop at the trophy case and was ripping the extinguisher off its bracket on the wall. She pulled the pin with her teeth, spat it on the floor, and aimed at the line of fire sliding up the hall.

The foam hit the baseboard in a thick white spray. For a second Eliana thought it had worked. Then the fire slid out from under the foam, whole and bright, and kept coming. Lexie emptied the canister anyway, until it wheezed, and threw it down. It rang against the linoleum like a bell.

"Isn't this thing called a fire EXTINGUISHER?!" Lexie said.

She grabbed Eliana's hand again, harder this time, and they ran.

Eliana looked back. She shouldn't have.

The flame had split into three, then five, thin bright lines fanning across the floor, and every one of them was pointed at her and Lexie. A row of paper pumpkins was taped along the wall, close enough to catch from a single spark. The fire went around them. It kept coming.

"It's moving around things..." Her voice started trembling, and her hands ran cold.

"I know," Lexie said, without turning around. "But don't look at it. You'll just scare yourself."

Eliana looked at the floor instead and held on to the hand she was holding. The heat had started to find the backs of her legs, dry and prickling, like standing too close to an open oven. Her lungs felt too small. The smell had turned to hair and plastic. Her phone stayed dead quiet in her pocket.

They hit the corner by the gym, and Lexie slammed her shoulder into the stairwell door. It busted open. Cold air poured up from below, and for one second Eliana thought they'd made it.

The flames crept up the stairs to meet them.

Lexie stopped so hard that Eliana ran into her back.

The fire was on the landing below, one bright mass now, pulling itself up the steps toward them.

"Okay," Lexie said, very quietly. "Okay, okay, okay."

"We can't go down."

It had beaten them here. Eliana's chest went tight. Nobody had told it where they were going.

Behind them the door was already glowing at the edges. The heat came through it in pulses. Eliana's thumb found the cap of her pen and clicked it once, twice, and then she realized there was no pen in her hand. She was pressing her thumb into the knuckles of Lexie's hand instead, in the same quick rhythm, and she had been for a while.

Neither of them said anything about it.

"The hall doors to the gym are chained since they redid the floor," Eliana said. Her voice cracked on "chained," and she hated it. "But there's a door on this landing. Bleachers, then the locker rooms, then the pool deck."

Lexie looked at the stairs, then the door behind them, then Eliana. Her jaw set.

"Then we're not walking."

"What?"

"We're taking a swim," Lexie said, already pulling. "Fire doesn't like water, right? We go through the deck and we jump!"

"Lexie, that's not a plan, that's..."

"What? You got a better one?"

Eliana's mind went blank. Lexie put her shoulder into the gym door, and it swung shut on the orange light behind them.