Her arms caught fire as she urged them to not give up. Her forearms protested but she didn’t listen. She could feel muscle fibers giving up all across her back, she felt a shard of glass forming in the meat of her left bicep, but she wasn’t going to give in to cramps and fatigue.
Overhead, the masked boy swung a foot onto the third floor, got his weight over his feet, and dashed away.
“Wait,” Lucy cried, but he was gone.
The weight of the Geeks below her pulled the cord straighter than a fireman’s pole. Lucy kept climbing, acid in her arms, until she pulled herself up to the third floor. She reached out for the edge of the ragged hole and grasped a piece of rebar that jutted out from the crumbling concrete. She transferred her other hand from the cord to the bar, with half her weight still resting on the knot in between her shoes. The knot’s resistance dropped away from her feet.
Too many kids climbing at once. The cord had been tied to a sprinkler pipe on the ceiling of the third floor. The slender metal bracket that had fastened the pipe to the ceiling couldn’t withstand the weight. The pipe had ripped out of the ceiling and bent toward the floor, dumping the cord right off the end of the pipe. It slipped away and fell.
She heard the other climbers crunch into the floor and wail in agony. Her weight pulled on her fingers, and tried to pop her knuckles apart. The rebar was cold, and rough, and angled down into the hole. Water burst from the broken sprinkler pipe above, spitting onto her. The water slicked the rebar, and Lucy felt her grip sliding down its length.
A minute before, she had felt ready to face death. The prospect of it had seemed like a relief, but now everything was different. She was dumbfounded that she had ever felt that way. She wanted to live. She wanted to cling to life with everything in her, to hang on until the end, and to wring every drop of happiness out of it before her time was up.
Her hands slid. The moans of the injured kids two floors down beckoned her to fall. She wanted to take one of her hands off the bar and reach for the edge of the floor but she knew that she couldn’t support her full weight with one hand. The bar would tear itself out of her fingers. She’d drop, accelerate to her death, and make a pretty mess on the floor. Her whimpers echoed. She slipped.
A hand grabbed her wrist.
She looked up.
It was David.
He grasped her forearm with both hands and pulled her up. They flopped back onto the floor once her knees cleared the hole. She rested on top of him, her arms planted over his shoulders. There was his face, better than she remembered. His features richer than they’d ever been.
A dam shattered in her heart. The love she had hidden away and had tried to forget came flooding through her. Looking into his eyes she felt the familiar jolt of connection. Her attraction to him was automatic. She had no control over it, and she’d forgotten how it felt to want someone so viscerally that thought never entered the picture.
“Where have you been?” she said.
David cracked a little smile and stared at her. He wrapped his arms around her and laid both hands on the small of her back.
“Back at you,” he said.
The desire was there. A tickle up her spine that told her he wanted her as much as she wanted him. It was the only way to explain how they could look at each other like this, like they were lying in a wildflower meadow with no one around for miles. The moaning two floors down and the hiss of spraying water were nothing more than ambient noise. All Lucy knew was the strength of David’s arms and the warmth of his smile. She leaned closer to kiss him, but the tip of her nose pushed into the clear plastic of his face mask.
David pushed Lucy off him. She rolled onto her back. Jarred by his sudden change, she lifted herself up onto her elbows and looked at him. “We’ve gotta move,” David said. “They’ll be coming up the stairs.”
He got to his feet and pulled her up. He put his hand between her shoulder blades for a gentle push forward, and she melted. David’s touch made her feel high again. She was transported back to a time when she had needed no shell to protect her, before she’d been hardened by the Sluts, back to when she’d been just a girl.
David led Lucy out of the third floor classroom and into the hall. To their right were the building’s foyer and the main staircase down into the school. He pulled her toward the stairs, but the thunder of footsteps echoing up made him freeze.
“Shit,” David said. He looked down the hall to their left and gritted his teeth. “We’re screwed.”
“What’s wrong?” he said, looking back at her.
Lucy was staring at a sign scratched into an upturned table. It warned about the hallway that stretched out to their left. The only place to go. Past this point-DEATH it said.
“Come on,” Lucy said, and started in that direction.
“We can’t,” David said, resisting. “It’s booby-trapped.”
“Yeah, and I know where. Come on, they won’t come looking in this direction.”
David looked at her like he wasn’t so sure he should be letting Lucy take the lead. He was the rescuer, after all. Not her.
“Trust me,” she said.
Lucy tugged David toward the rigged hallway that led to the library. She wasn’t as entirely positive as she’d let on about what traps were where, but she thought that up to the end of the first row of lockers was safe.
“Here,” she said, and they tucked into the darkness where the locker row ended.
Kids stampeded up from the main staircase and into the hall. Lucy closed her eyes and held her breath until the clomping of feet faded. She opened one eye and looked at David.
“They’re gone,” he said, “but we should stay put, just in case they come back.”
David kept his body only an inch from hers and never let her hands go. She was happy for that. His fingers stayed intertwined with hers. David’s breath whistled softly through his gas mask. She stared at him, and every minute or so, his good eye would flick from its diligent watch on the hall, back to her.
“Why did you come back?” Lucy whispered. She only wanted to hear one thing.
“To find you.”
Lucy sighed and smiled. “I never believed you were dead. Not really.”
David’s face became stern. His eye flicked back down the hall.
“I can’t take credit for coming in here,” he said, his voice dropping to a grave octave. “That was all Will.”