Wilder Girls(68)

Julia comes up next to me, worry written clearly on her face. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, shit, I—”

Suddenly, a hissing noise above us, and with a sputter the safety sprinkler system turns on.

   It’s a fine sort of mist, light and clinging. I squint up into it, feel my hair getting heavy with the damp. Too thick to be just water, the scent too clean, too chemical.

What the hell is this?

But I know. It’s whatever was in that canister. Carson and Julia and me, we carried it back in our own hands. We signed our own death warrant, laid our heads on the chopping block and handed Headmistress the ax.

Around me girls are covering their heads with their jackets as the mist thickens to fog, chatter rising. Somebody starts coughing, and it’s getting harder to see, harder to think. Droplets stick to my lashes, scattering light across my vision, and I run my hands over my face. They come away almost sticky, the pale, sickly cast of skin muted and flattened underneath the clinging fog. My chest thick, stuffed with cotton, and the deeper I breathe, the less air I can find.

We have to get out of here. We have to get out of here now.

The door is brand-new, built a few years ago, with a big square of glass set into it, run through with security wire. I know Headmistress locked it, but I test the handle anyway. Throw my whole body against it, and no give.

“Here,” Julia says, “my knife.” I step aside, and she crouches in front of the door, slides her knife out of her belt, and starts working it into the keyhole on the handle, trying to get it to turn.

It’s panic now, electric. Not just in us but everywhere, and whipping us into havoc. I can barely think over the shouting, can barely see through the fog. I tug my shirt up over my mouth and breathe through it. It helps at first. I can feel my head clear and my thoughts come whirring back, but there’s too much of it, still spraying out of the sprinklers, and there’s no place for it to go but into us.

   That’s when the first of us drops. Fast, there one second and down on the ground the next, angled all wrong, eyes open and staring.

“Oh my God,” Cat says, and then she’s out too.

“Julia,” I say, “you have to hurry.”

Sarah bends over Cat, shakes her shoulders. On the other side of the room somebody short and rail-thin is cradled in Landry’s arms. Someone crying, someone screaming, and if we stay in here much longer, there won’t be any of us left.

“This isn’t working,” I say. Breath too short, too shallow. “Can we break the glass?”

Julia stands up, looking faint. “With what?”

And she’s right. There’s nothing in here, not even a music stand, and the security wire in the window would shred the hand of anybody who broke through it. But that may be the only choice we have left. My head is clouding, my vision going. I don’t have long before I pass out. This has to be quick.

I take off my jacket and wrap it around my left hand, grip the fabric tight in my fist. I know this will hurt, but the fog is burning in my lungs, and it’s now or never.

   I hit the glass, hit it hard, once, twice, and again.

It smashes open. There’s a second after the break where I don’t feel anything, just the cold rush of new air, and then the pain slams into me, explodes up from my hand and knocks me out at the knees. I slump forward against the door, work my other hand through the gap in the window, and fumble for the lock. The metal turning in my slick grip, and I think I’m gonna be sick.

I lean against the handle. The world tilts wildly. Door swinging open, and above me a gray plain, wavering, blurring. I can’t feel my hand anymore, and I close my eye, sink to the floor.

“Hey, hey. Come on, now.”

I fight awake. Julia is kneeling over me. “Did it work?” I croak.

“It’s okay,” she says. “The air’s clearing. Here, lift your arm. I think you’re supposed to keep it elevated. You’re bleeding pretty bad.”

She hoists my arm up by the elbow and peels my jacket from around my shattered hand. It feels like skin ripping off me, but it’s nothing, just more pain, and I have enough of that already.

The rest of the room is coming back into focus, and around me, I’m starting to see. All of us girls, collapsed and sprawled out where we fell. Julia and me by the door, the others spread out across the room. Every one of us, some more awake than others and starting to stir, but all with the same hazy nothingness behind our eyes.

   “Outside,” I say. “We have to get out of this room.”

Slowly, the sprinklers stop spitting down, and Julia helps me cradle my arm across my chest as I get to my feet. Glass scattered, blood staining the checkered floor. I watch the girls left living drag the bodies past me, out into the hallway, and I stagger after them.

How could Headmistress do this to us? After all this time, after everything we’ve survived, how could she give up on us now?





CHAPTER 21


Sixteen dead. We take stock in the main hall, away from what’s left of the gas, Julia binding up my hand with strips of cloth ripped from a dead girl’s jacket. It’s mostly the little ones, only Emmy left from the youngest year, but Dara from my year is gone, and so are three from the year above. We line up their bodies and close their eyes.