Moira felt her mind shutting down again, just as it had done when her stepfather showed up at school. She seemed to be looking down on herself, as if she’d flown up to the security camera. Then her hand closed in a fist and she scolded herself. Not again. Come right back here and deal with this.
Her mind cleared with an abruptness that made her body jerk. Her hand shot out and snapped the button for the second floor. When the lift stopped, she slid through the door before it finished opening, dashing for the stairway across the hall. Once inside, she hunched over against the pain in her stomach, but did not slow down until she reached the basement. Vast laundry machines filled the space, two of them spinning water and fabric. Pipes lined the ceiling. She heard voices to her left, so turned right, her soft shoes soundless on the concrete.
She turned right again at a corridor, then left. At the far end was a short flight of steps rising to meet a door. The words “Way Out” glowed red at the top. Fear masked her pain as she raced past stacks of boxes and shelves of linen. The lights were dim, and dark shadows on the floor seemed to shimmer with a water-like glint, making her skip past them to avoid slipping. At the door, she hesitated, hands resting on the metal bar that would release the catch. Was a guard waiting outside in case she tried this very thing?
She drew a quick, angry breath and slapped against the handle, hurling out the door, into cold rain. Blinking the water out of her eyes, she saw she was in an alley at the back of the hotel. Good. To her right, the alley stretched for a few hundred meters, with several large dumpsters against the hotel wall, overflowing with boxes and broken dishes. To her left, the alley ended a scant ten meters away. She turned right, just far enough to reach the dumpsters, where she stopped, ducking between two of them. Holding her nose against the smell, she caught her breath, and thought.
Did they know who she was? No, her mind said. Ask that later. Right now, ask how you get to safety. There were cameras in the alley. She needed to get by them. For that matter, there’d been cameras in the stairwell and the basement of the hotel. But she couldn’t do anything about that, now. It was the alley she needed to worry about.
Andy had told her about his trick to get into her yard in Chelmsford. She didn’t know how to hack into the security system, but there was some sense to just acting normal. The rain had stopped, so she pulled her Pad from its pocket and called up a game. Better to actually play one, than just pretend to play one. Once the game was going, she ducked her head and focused on the screen as she started a distracted ramble down the alley. Her walk was slow as she maneuvered her character through an obstacle course. She even stopped once, heart banging against her ribs, to get over a difficult spot. Nothing going on here, she thought to the cameras. No one’s in a hurry in this alley.
At the street she turned left, away from the hotel. Two blocks down, she stopped amid a crowd of pedestrians and glanced back. The men from the lift appeared, running around the corner from the hotel entrance. They stopped. One was reading a Pad, the other looking up and down the street, as if searching. She saw him spot her just as a bus stopped to disgorge a passenger. He tagged his partner and they headed for her at a run. She stepped through the crowd and onto the bus, waved her chip over the payment sensor, and forced herself through the standing passengers to the middle of the bus.
She sighed in relief as the bus moved forward, but it stopped again before it reached the next corner. Mutters of complaint worked their way down from the front of the bus, but people quickly fell silent. Moira peered past bodies and backpacks, and caught a glimpse of one of the hotel men talking to the driver. Stifling a moan, she turned and began pushing her way farther back.
Her movement was oddly easy. Purses and briefcases were held closer to bodies, feet shifted and hips swung back as she squeezed by, then everything surged back into place after she passed. Shouting reached her from the front of the bus, she felt the tension of the crowd as everyone reacted to what was said. The sense of it had not yet reached the back of the bus when she stopped at the back door, closed and guarded by a uniformed porter. He blocked her hand as she reached for the handle, and she dared to look at him, trying to judge if she could sneak past him.
He met her eyes. In her peripheral vision, she saw that everyone else was staring ahead, refusing to see whatever transpired. She understood. They had done what they could to help her, but it was all she could expect. Behind her, she felt the shifting of bodies as the men forced their way back. The porter stared at her for the space of a breath, then his eyes shifted forward as he declined to see her. The door slid open a few inches. She turned sideways, squeezing through just as the muffled shouting became a clear command to “lock down all exits by order of Security.” Then she was through, her pack catching as the door slammed closed. It tore free at the last nanosecond. Desperately hoping the men could not see out the bus windows, she ducked into the nearest store.
Her stomach screamed in pain, and tears streaked her face despite her best efforts to stop them. Her behavior did not pass unnoticed. Several people glanced at her, then looked away, maintaining their ignorance. But she knew the cameras remained focused, so she looked down, swiping her cheeks with the end of her scarf. This was a store for cheap clothing, sparsely furnished with shelves of sweaters and pants. Hoping there was a door to the alleyway, she moved further in, as if looking for something specific.
Halfway back, an open corridor connected this store with the one next door. She turned into it, seeing crowded tables that held a conglomeration of tools and metals stacked in haphazard piles. Fighting her anxious stomach, she weaved in and around the tables and spied a door at the back. She hurried toward it, but an annoyed clerk blocked her path, smirking at her past his nose. “This store is not a throughway,” he said. “If you are not purchasing, you can’t go that way.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice high. “I’ll just look over here.” She stepped past him to the third table a row closer to the door. Her hands shook as she rummaged through what looked like lug nuts. He watched her, his lips pursed in disapproval. She slipped behind the pile, hoping to keep an eye on him without having to turn around. As soon as she did, she saw her pursuers hurry through the corridor, looking in all directions. She gasped and the snotty clerk turned in her direction, not quite out of the way of the men. More alert this time, they avoided him, heading for Moira unimpeded. Frozen in place, she commanded her muscles to run, jump, dive ... do something.
Abruptly, her muscles obeyed. Both arms shot out, shoving the pile of lug nuts onto the floor in front of the men. She didn’t stay to watch, although she did catch a glimpse of one man grabbing for a shelf filled with fishing tackle as he fell. The crash behind her was very satisfying.