When I got back to the room, I had to tap out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” five times before she’d open the door. Already nervous, my anxiety shot up with each rap of my knuckles. By the time the door swung open, I was frantic. And then I saw what Mel had done while I was gone.
My eyes scanned from shelf to shelf. At first, I didn’t even understand. Everything looked different. Things weren’t where they were supposed to be. My emergency backpack wasn’t by the door, nor was Mel’s pink bag. She loved that bag, partly because it was actually hers. She’d brought it with her when she’d come to the Farm. She’d carried it for three years and another just like it for five years before that. It was bright pink, with cheerful flowers in sherbety colors. Right now it was packed with emergency provisions for Mel. Extra clothes. Half of what little food we had. And of course the tiny stuffed flying squirrel Mel had carried with her since she was five. My bag was gone.
Everything else—the carefully distributed chaos of all the lab equipment—was . . . organized. My heart rate jumped. Every item in the room had been rearranged by color. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Every lungful was a struggle.
Mel stood in the center of the room, the ladder-back chair clenched in her hands. She gnawed on her lip as she rocked.
Heart pounding, I looked from her to the contents of the shelves, as panic crawled up out of my stomach. I raced to one of the shelves, a blazing burst of pink and red across the top of the room. The pink backpack was just beyond my reach. I jumped up, trying to snag the strap and pull it down. Once, twice. I caught it on the fourth jump and it tumbled off the shelf, pulling a cross-sectioned model of a human heart with it. It crashed to the floor, snapping off the stand and breaking open the heart itself to reveal the interior of the chambers. I felt it like a crack to my own heart, a painful slash across my chest that cut off my air. The backpack was empty, its weight almost nothing.
I ripped open the zipper as my gaze searched the shelves. There was a neatly folded pair of bikini underwear on the green shelf. I grabbed them and crammed them inside. Our obscenely cheerful pink quilt was on the top shelf, too. Snagging it sent a model kidney tumbling to the ground. The dull gray neoprene gloves were on the bottom shelf. I dropped to my knees and with shaking hands shoved pair after pair into the bag. Too many. I stood, leaving the overstuffed bag on the floor, and kept looking. I found the hollowed-out CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Its thick spine and worn blue cover made it easy to find, but the gardening shears I kept hidden inside were gone. After that, I ran through the list of other things that had been in the backpack, pulling them off the shelves with one hand and clutching them to my chest with the other. First aid kits—white shelf. Spare socks—black, blue, white, yellow shelves. Bags of corn chips—orange shelf. The map—
Oh, God. The map.
Everything tumbled from my arms to land at my feet. Where would she have put it? White? No. A glance told me the white shelf was nearly empty. And it hadn’t been white anyway, had it? The cover had a picture of a road snaking up the side of a mountain. What sound would the map have made for her? The quiet brown for the mountain? Or the thrumming of the blacktop road? Or whistling wind in the blue sky? Or . . . there’d been a car, hadn’t there? What color had the car been? Loud red, like classic rock? Or sunshine yellow, like Vivaldi?
But my mind was racing too fast, spinning out of control, and I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t plan.
Shit.
The pink backpack tipped forward, spilling stuff all over the floor.
I bit back a scream of frustration, tried to hide my reaction from Mel. But there she was, blissfully humming Rachmaninoff. Like she thought this was romantic or something.
Dad used to call her a musical savant. Can’t you see what an amazing gift it is? he’d say. She’s an indigo child.
That crap used to drive Mom crazy. I’d never quite been sure how I felt about it. Now I knew. At this particular moment, when she’d wrecked all our plans, her autism was not an amazing gift. It was a curse. My curse.
“Lil-lee,” Mel said, in the odd singsongy way she had. “Lil-lee? Lil-lee?”
I swallowed my tears along with my scream and made myself look at her. She held her Slinky cupped in her hands and silent. Like she knew I was one sllluuunk away from tearing the thing from her and tossing it out the window. The muscles in my arms clenched and I fought the impulse to sweep everything off the shelves. To throw things and destroy. To stomp on beakers and crush things with rocks.
Instead, I forced a deep breath, then I took her hand lightly in mine. “Listen, Mel. I’m going out again.” She tried to jerk away. “Just for a minute. I’ll be right outside. You don’t even have to lock the door.”
She frowned and bobbed her head some more. “Tick tock. Tick tock.”
“No,” I assured her. “I won’t be gone long.”
I didn’t wait for her to answer. She wouldn’t. And even if she did, she wouldn’t understand. Plus, I didn’t want her to know how badly I’d screwed up. I couldn’t even blame her. This was just what she did. I knew this about her and I should have planned for it.
I palmed a geode from the brown shelf on my way out the door. I rounded the rows of waist-high lab counters with their black fire slate tops and crossed to the corner farthest away from the closet. Beside the door leading out into the hall, I dropped to my knees. With seven rows of lab tables between us, she couldn’t see me. Not that she would look. Nothing I did really mattered to her. It was all noise in the background.
Hands trembling, I whipped the hoodie off and let it fall to the floor. Then I lifted the rock above my head and slammed it down onto the floor. The sound was muffled a bit by the thick fleece. If only I’d brought the travel backpack with me when I’d gone out. I pounded the floor again. If only I’d been more careful with the pills. I brought the rock down again. If only I’d seen the Green who handed me the pills. Again. If only . . . Again. If only . . .
So many if onlys made my arms ache. All that was left of my frustration was the burn of tears pressing against the backs of my eyes.
I let the rock fall onto the sweatshirt one final time. My body crumpled over it. I pressed my forehead to the rough outer shell of the geode, my chest heaving with regrets.
God, I wanted to be strong enough to do this all on my own. To take this latest disaster in stride, but—
There was a noise in the hall, so soft I barely heard it over my ragged breathing, but I stilled instantly. I crouched there on the floor, bent over the rock, holding my breath as I listened. And tried to remember what exactly that sound was.
Something I knew well, even though I hadn’t heard it in months. A sort of mechanical swoosh, as unfamiliar to me now as the turning of a key in a car ignition or the chime over the door at the yogurt shop where I had worked after school.
I sucked in a breath. Elevator doors. I’d heard elevator doors opening. Someone had come up to the seventh floor. Someone not afraid of getting stuck in an elevator if one of the blackouts rolled across campus. Or someone too lazy to walk up the stairs, which described pretty much all the Collabs.
I thought instantly of the guy in the gray sweatshirt. No.
Had he really been that fast? I’d been counting on it taking longer for him to find a Collab and cut some kind of deal.
I rocked forward onto the balls of my feet and stood, hardly daring to breathe. The door leading out into the hall was open. I crept one step and then another until I was tucked behind the open door. I couldn’t see much through the crack between the door and jamb, so I squeezed my eyes shut, listening, as I considered my options.
Even if there was just one Collab out there, we were screwed. Before Mel had reorganized the closet, I’d known exactly where the CRC handbook was, and with it, my only weapon: the gardening shears. But now?
My breath caught in my chest as the realization hit me. I had the shiv. Not for the first time I wondered: would I really kill someone if I had to? In the Before, I didn’t even like to kill bugs. And I’d puked the time our old Siamese cat, Trickster, had left a dead bunny on our porch. How could I kill a person? Could I do it to protect Mel? I drew in a shuddering breath, my heart thudding so loudly, I was sure he’d hear it.
Why not? Why not at least try to take out the Collab? If there was only one, then I had a shot. It was sure as hell better than waiting for him to go get reinforcements.
I could hear footsteps in the hall. Coming closer. Was it one guy or two?
I stood there for a torturous minute, listening to his steady footsteps. Each pause of his stride, punctuated by the sound of a knob turning and a door sliding open and shutting with an ominous click. Only one guy, I was almost certain. But these weren’t the sounds of casual exploring. This was a methodical search. He was looking for us.
And he would find me. Soon.
I’d carelessly left the door to this classroom open. It was a miracle he hadn’t noticed it already.
Wedged between the door and the wall, heart pounding, eyes squeezed shut, I reached down and slid the shiv free of my belt loop, my palm damp against the metal handle. Through the gap between the door and the doorjamb, I saw a flash of gray pass. Not the blue of a Collab’s uniform but the heathered gray of a sweatshirt. I pushed aside the doubt that flickered through me. Then he was there, striding past me into the classroom. He paused for only a moment before heading around the rows of lab desks toward the storage closet.
I launched myself at him before he could get too far into the room. Leaping onto his back, I slung one arm around his neck. He gave an oomph of surprise and stumbled back. I brought the shiv up to his neck, but hesitated. That moment of doubt cost me.
His hands reached up to claw at my arms. The shiv slipped and clattered to the ground at his feet. Panicked, I used my free hand to leverage the other arm, squeezing tight against his windpipe. For a second, I seemed to have the advantage. I didn’t have to kill him. I only needed him to pass out. Just long enough to get Mel out of the storage closet.
Then he reeled with a grunt and slammed my back against the wall. The air rushed out of my lungs and I swear I actually felt my bones shudder. Damn, he was big. Not just taller than me, but stronger.