The Hand on the Wall(27)

Except . . .

What happened next happened so fast that Stevie barely had a chance to register it. There was a loud clanking, a hissing. Something was moving, flying. There was an earsplitting shattering as the plates fell all at once, and some object was rocketing toward them. She fell back on someone as a scream broke out throughout the room.

When the clanking finally stopped, Stevie looked up from the pile of people she had landed in. A small canister was rolling on the floor. Aside from that, there was a heavy, confused quiet. Parts of Janelle’s machine lay in ruins, piles of glued-together plates and cups were shattered. From across the room, once voice cried out in pain. Then a few more gasped in alarm.

Stevie looked down at herself. There was some fine glass powder on her hoodie, but otherwise she was no worse for wear. Nate, Hunter, and Vi were all the same, more stunned than anything else. Vi immediately ran to Janelle, who stood in mute, confused horror.

Suda, the girl in the emerald-blue hijab, leaped up. She immediately ran to the hurt people and started assessing injuries. She proceeded quickly to Mudge and knelt down at his side. Stevie’s tall, goth friend, who always helped her in anatomy, was bent over his arm and weeping quietly.

The demonstration was over.





9


“SO,” HUNTER SAID, BREAKING THE SILENCE. “WEIRD NIGHT, HUH?”

“Not really,” Nate replied, picking through the bottom of a large bowl of popcorn, looking for any fully popped pieces that weren’t hard kernels in disguise. “This is pretty much how it goes. Something terrible happens and we all come back here and talk about how terrible it is. We don’t learn.”

Stevie elbowed him gently, but firmly, in the ribs. She sat next to him on the sofa, while Hunter was in the hammock chair, tacking softly from side as the fire crackled in the fireplace. On the other side of the room, Janelle sat with Pix. She had been crying almost nonstop all the way back to the house.

“They’re standard paintball-gun canisters,” she said tearfully.

“It’s okay,” Pix said, her arm over Janelle’s shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault,” Janelle said, tears flying as she spat out the words. “I built it. I’m responsible for what I build. The tanks were correctly pressurized. The regulators were set at a very low level. I don’t understand what happened. Everything about this machine was safe. It’s all benign. I tested it dozens of times.”

Pix couldn’t think of anything to reply to this with, and for a moment, neither could anyone else. Then Hunter stepped in.

“Carbon dioxide canisters are really common,” he said. “People have them in their kitchens. Those home seltzer things?”

“Carbon dioxide canisters?” Stevie said.

“Is that what you were using?” Hunter asked. “Or some other kind of canister?”

“Carbon dioxide,” Janelle said. “Yeah, people use them for making seltzer.”

Stevie began to quake a bit.

“Be right back,” she said.

She stumbled frantically back to her room and pulled down the coat and robe and other clothes from the hooks, the clothes that were hiding the sticky notes she had put up the night before. She looked at the blue ones.

Hayes Major: CO2 poisoning/dry ice

Ellie Walker: exposure/dehydration/immurement

Dr. Irene Fenton: house fire

She reached for the blue sticky notes and added one more.

Janelle’s machine: CO2 tank accident

There could be no doubt about it now. There was some hand in this—some quiet hand that tipped things in the wrong direction. It moved the ice, shut the doors, turned the knob, and now, perhaps the hand altered Janelle’s machine.

Why the hell would anyone want to ruin a Rube Goldberg machine? She glared at the four notes, demanding that they speak to her, that they make the picture clear. What did Hayes, Ellie, Dr. Fenton, and . . . some random students have in common?

Well, in two cases, Janelle.

Janelle’s pass had been used to take the dry ice. Janelle had that access because she was building her machine, a machine that was now destroyed. But those two things had no connection to what happened to Ellie or Dr. Fenton, unless there was a killer out there with the goal of messing up a few Ellingham student projects.

Stevie pulled off a few more sticky notes, listing all the things that played on her mind.

Janelle’s pass

The message on the wall

CO2 accidents

There was a light knock at her door, and Nate slouched his way in. Stevie grabbed her robe and some towels and made a half-hearted attempt to hang them back up to cover the wall, but Nate had already seen it.

“You don’t think that was an accident,” Nate said. “Whenever you leave a room like that it means you think the bad thing that just happened wasn’t an accident. It’s your move.”

“Do you?” she said, giving up and tossing her robe across the room, where it missed her bed by several feet and splayed dramatically on the floor.

“No,” Nate said, coming in and sitting down in her squeaky desk chair. “I don’t think anything is an accident anymore. Even I’m not that fatalistic. I do think it’s weird how someone or something hates this building in particular. It feels like we’re living in a parable.”