by Chloe Garner
Her whole body spasmed with the force of the jerk, and she went limp as one of the young men with relatively normal hair and clothing pulled her the length of the hallway like a heap of discarded clothing.
“He’s going to pull her shoulder out of its socket like that,” Lizzie said, stepping forward. Trevor hopped off of the lamp post and grabbed her shoulder.
“Already has,” he said. “I told you she was good.”
Lizzie didn’t know what was on her face, but she felt an ill sort of astonishment, as glass broke somewhere nearby.
“They can feel it,” Trevor said, putting his head up again. “All that energy with no place to go. They’re getting wound up.”
“What’s the point of this?” Lizzie asked, but Trevor dashed forward again, coming back an instant later to grab her arm and drag her along.
She found herself against a pole holding a hand rail. Trevor had his back pressed to it.
“You know that doesn’t make you invisible, right?” she asked. He grinned.
“Little do you know.”
She frowned. It looked like fun, from where he was. It really did. And a part of her was hopping up and down, wanting to join in.
On the other hand, the fire alarm had just gone off, and there appeared to be smoke coming out of the gym.
“Is that all you?” Lizzie asked. Trevor shook his head.
“It’s both sides. In a minute we can go in. I want to see how well Lara’s side is holding up without her. If we completely beat them, the whole thing’s going to go really wrong.”
She saw Dennis come out of a doorway nearby with a trash can that was leaving a trail of wadded paper behind him. She paused to watch, and Trevor turned his head to look at what she was seeing, then nodded.
“Dennis has a gift, too,” he said.
The forked-tongue, shirtless man threw the trash can at a window, and it shattered but didn’t break.
“Bad luck,” Trevor said.
“Does he ever wear a shirt?” Lizzie asked. Somehow, it was the only thing she wanted to ask.
“Not in my memory,” Trevor said, as if it was exactly the question she should have asked.
Dennis picked up the trash can again and started running once more.
Trevor pressed harder against the pole as a woman came running out of the building. She screamed as the door opened behind her and Robbie came running out after her, arms waving, sometimes running upright and sometimes using his hands on the ground. She came tearing past Lizzie and Trevor, and Robbie roared at her.
Lizzie knew that noise, and it made her blood cold.
He’d made it at her. Dozens of times. Out of control, manic, no longer making sense, he would turn back at her as she’d tried to get him someplace safe where he could calm back down again and he would roar. She found she was standing with most of her weight leaned against Trevor as she tried to get away from Robbie. She was nauseous.
“He doesn’t hold a candle to Sybil, but Robbie knows his strengths,” Trevor said. She turned her face away and when she put her hand to her mouth, she found that she was crying. Trevor turned her back to face the building.
“You came to see,” he murmured into her ear. “See it.”
Someone else ran around another corner, and there was a sort of gibbering behind her as someone went through the cars, smashing headlights.
“See it,” Trevor said again, his cheek bone against her ear.
Someone had gotten up onto the roof and was yelling. She wasn’t sure if it was language at this distance, but it didn’t last long. He came running to the front edge of the roof and started throwing textbooks one by one off of the building. Lizzie shook her head.
“This is lunacy,” she said. “This isn’t a war. This is you standing and watching a bunch of people tear things up.”
Trevor’s eyes were sharp, looking at things that weren’t there, reading things she couldn’t see.
“We’re winning,” he said. “But Robbie’s putting up a good fight. Let’s go see.”
He pulled her by her elbow up the stairs and into the building, where she heard more yelling. Sybil lay in a heap on the floor, unmoving, and Lizzie went to go check to make sure she was okay.
“If you touch her, she will bite you,” Trevor warned, grabbing her wrist and pulling her forward. “We’re headed for the office.”
“I need to get Robbie out of here,” Lizzie said. “They’ll have security cameras in a place like this, and he’s going to get in trouble.”
“Funny thing,” Trevor said, still pulling. “None of us ever get into permanent trouble. We’re their toys, and they wouldn’t stand for it.”
He pulled the office door open and a woman squeaked.
“You’ll want to run,” Trevor said to her without taking any further note of her than that.
“Are you okay?” Lizzie asked, and the woman gave her a quick little nod. As fast as she could, Lizzie looked back over her shoulder. “Get your keys out and go. The one of them who was out in the parking lot looks like he’s gone. Go now.”
The woman stood and started for the door, turning back as she hit it.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked her and Lizzie nodded.
“I’m not in any danger,” she said. “Go.”
The woman squealed again and ran. Lizzie watched her for as long as she could, but Trevor was headed for a back section of the office where a hall obstructed her view of anything else.
“You know that’s not entirely true,” Trevor said as he sat down at a desk and tapped a key on the computer keyboard there.
“What isn’t?” Lizzie asked, distracted by a thumping noise outside in the front hallway, like someone was driving a chariot made of trash cans.
“You being safe,” he said. “You aren’t paying attention. You need to stay close.”
“What is that?” Lizzie asked.
“Probably Rinaldo jousting. Could be a lot of things, but he likes long hallways.”
“Long hallways,” she said.
“Here,” he said, turning the laptop on the desk toward her. She came around the desk far enough to see the computer and frowned.
“How did you know where to get security footage?”
“For a high school dropout, I know a lot more about keeping out of trouble than you might guess,” he said. “That and… well, they don’t like us getting into trouble. So they make it easy.”
The universe was conspiring on his behalf. Awesome.
The front hallway was becoming a jumble of trash and furniture. Someone was dragging desks around and tipping them on their sides, creating a wall, and someone else was running into them at speed, knocking them down over and over again.
“Is this the war you were talking about?” Lizzie asked, squinting harder at the grainy images.
“They’re on the same side,” Trevor said absently.
“I don’t see a war,” Lizzie said. “I see chaos.”
He looked up at her as though she’d rung a bell.
Grinned.
“How do you fight chaos?” he asked.
“With order,” she answered and he shook his head quickly, turning the laptop back to watch with a sort of popcorn eagerness.
“By getting to it first,” he said.
“What?” she asked, coming all the way around the desk to watch the monitors over his shoulder. “That makes no sense.”
“You’d think,” he said. “But it does. Well, it doesn’t make any sense, but it works.”
They watched for a while longer, as the fire alarm continued to blare and the chemistry lab, apparently, began to flood.
“How far are you going to let this go?” Lizzie asked. “Do you smell smoke?”
“How do you think they got the alarm going?” Trevor asked without looking at her as he changed views again.
“With the little switch in the hallway,” Lizzie said slowly. He looked back at her and grinned.
“And what fun would that be?”
; “Hooligans,” she said quietly and he nodded, like she was finally beginning to get it.
“I need to get Robbie out of here,” she said. “This is getting dangerous.”
Someone had gotten a door disconnected and they were using it to surf a few inches of water where the floor outside the chemistry room was slightly lower than the surrounding areas. Out in the hallway just outside the office, two people went by beating each other with chairs. Lizzie stood taller and confirmed that, yes, those were drops of blood on the carpet.
“They’re hurting each other,” she said.
“War,” Trevor answered.
“I thought you were friends,” Lizzie said, and he looked up at her again with a frown.
“They really do need you. You just can’t see it.”
“I suppose they were on the same side?” she asked, indicating the hallway.
“Beaver and Tristan?” Trevor asked. “Oh, no, no. They can barely stand each other.”
She drew a breath to complain about how little sense any of this made, but that seemed pointless.
“Shut it down,” she said. “The police are going to be on their way.”
“The police are part of the point,” Trevor said. “It doesn’t really get chaotic until they get here.”
She froze.
“You’re kidding.”
He looked up at her again, then turned back to the laptop and took one more look, then closed it.
“No,” he said standing. “It’s time.”
“It’s time for what?”
He didn’t answer her.
“Trevor?” she warned, but he’d grabbed her wrist and they were moving again. Weaving through chairs and desks, around overturned trashcans and plants, down one hallway and then a next. Someone had used something heavy to start beating lockers into submission. She definitely smelled smoke.
She heard voices behind them, voices that weren’t the frantic, manic ones of the hooligans, but were rather men shouting to each other.
“The police are here,” she said. “We need to turn ourselves in and deal with this, or someone is going to get shot.”
“Now that would be the ultimate,” Trevor said, and she jerked her arm away. He came back for her, but she kept her arm away from his quick fingers.
“Are you trying to get someone killed?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, rolling his eyes up to the side, “no, but, I mean, if it did happen, it would put a big hole in them.”
“That’s not funny,” Lizzie said.
“What isn’t?”
“These are people you care about,” Lizzie said. “You need to be careful with them. If you really are leading them into this…”
“Keep moving,” he said, pushing her to the side like something was coming at her from behind. She held still, waiting for something to go barreling by, but nothing happened. Trevor watched as if something had gone by, then let her back off of the wall.
“This is a game to you,” she said. His posture went slack and he came to stand directly in front of her, no longer looking around like they were in an actual war zone rather than an empty school hallway.
“This could not possibly be further from a game for me,” he said. “Okay, yeah, I enjoy it. I do. But that’s my job. It’s why I am what I am, and why they picked me. Because I can handle it. Less and less with you around, though, I’ll add. Someday, if you turn into what I think you can be, you’re going to take that back. Remember this. You’re going to take it back.”
She blinked, feeling a shadow of a smile that she couldn’t understand and she couldn’t contain.
“You’re enjoying it.”
He nodded, the same smile creasing his face.
“And so are you,” he said, grabbing her hand again. “Come on. Let’s go.”
***
They got out through a door at the back of the school and sprinted away from it toward a stand of palm trees beyond the back parking lot.
“What about the rest of them?” Lizzie asked.
“A few leftover things to spring, and then rats off a ship,” Trevor told her, crouching against a tree with the glee of a boy watching a rocket go off.
A window broke and Dennis came crawling out headfirst, landing on the ground in a bit of a heap and taking off running before his feet got all the way down. Elsewhere, a pair of doors burst open and three others Lizzie recognized came running out. There were men’s shouts and more manic shouting in return. Lizzie stood taller to see, and Trevor pulled her back down.
“Too high,” he said. She glowered at him, but crouched.
“I want to make sure Robbie gets out,” she said, feeling torn at the hope that her brother would get away with illegal activity. How many times had she said that he had to learn to deal with the consequences; that maybe they would be what woke him up and got him to start trying?
And here she stood, outside of a massively vandalized school, giddy with nervous energy and hoping to see Robbie make a successful bolt for freedom.
“They did a lot of damage in really not very much time,” Lizzie said suddenly.
“It takes practice to do it,” Trevor agreed.
She shook her head. That was a note of pride in his voice she heard, there was no mistaking it.
“So who won?” she asked. He glanced up at her, one eyebrow up.
“You’re kidding, right?”
She shrugged and he shook his head.
“You’ve got one side that’s just enjoying creating chaos and the other side that’s trying to fight fire with fire, but without any equipment to speak of. Of course my side won. If you want your side to win, you’re going to have to do a lot more to help.”
“Since when have I had a side?” Lizzie asked.
“You do,” Trevor muttered. “I just can’t get you to see it.”
She shook her head, then stood tall again. Robbie was running away, arms in the air, yelling gibberish, with two officers chasing after him. Trevor pulled Lizzie back down into a low crouch as Robbie ran across the parking lot and swerved hard.
“He’s doing really well,” Trevor murmured. “Doing it on purpose.”
She shook her head.
“They’re going to catch him.”
“You know the range on a taser?” Trevor asked.
“Never really needed to know that one before,” Lizzie said, angry now.
“Less than twenty feet,” Trevor said. “They aren’t going to shoot him because he’s unarmed and he’s not a threat. They think they can outrun him, but Robbie’s a lot faster than anyone gives him credit for. Long as he stays out of taser range, he’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” Lizzie said, leaning out and around the tree as Robbie started down an embankment on the far side of the parking lot quite a ways to her right.
“He’s beating them,” Trevor said. “Believe it or not, that’s a big part of the point, here.”
“Is it war? Is it chaos? Is it sticking it to the police?” Lizzie asked. “Will you get your story straight, please?”
“It’s all of them,” Trevor said.
She sighed as Robbie went out of sight.
“Don’t worry so much,” Trevor said, still watching the school. “The chaos is on our side.”
“That makes no sense,” she said. “Let’s start with the fact that chaos, by its simple definition, cannot have a side.”
He laughed. Loud. Rolled his shoulders along the tree so he could sit on the ground and look up at her.
“You’re finally beginning to get it.”
She frowned and he grinned, rolling his head back further to look up at the sky.
“That was fun,” he said.
“What about Sybil?” she asked. “She would have been right at the front doors.”
“Oh, Sybil takes it to a whole level all her own,” Trevor said. “She’ll have bit the first person to touch her, and she’ll be in custody now.” For a moment his face darkened. “The furlings… they talk to
her like they don’t, with other people. I never know what she says, but she always ends up on the curb outside the police station with marks on her wrists from the handcuffs, and maybe a few bruises, but they don’t ever keep her for more than a few hours.”
Lizzie squatted next to him and they waited some more.
Everything had gone quiet, and as they sat, the two police men came back past them, without Robbie. Trevor nudged her and she nodded. She saw it and she knew what it meant.
And then there was an explosion like a wave of thunder, one that Lizzie felt in her chest. Glass blew out of half a dozen windows and the police threw themselves on the ground. Trevor grabbed Lizzie’s elbow and jerked her back away from the school, walking and then running directly away from it.
“What was that?” Lizzie asked when they were out of hearing, her ears ringing enough she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hear his answer.
“That’s why we need you,” Trevor said, moving in a sort of serpentine motion, head up, watching everything, eyes everywhere at once.
“What?” she asked. “I didn’t do anything. You need someone to talk them out of blowing things up, I think you’re better situated than I am.”
He shook his head.
“That wasn’t us,” he said. “That’s exactly what we were trying to prevent.”
She stopped and he pulled her harder.
“It blew up,” he said, loud and slow. “It fell on the chemistry lab.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, matching his volume and pace. He shook his head, walking faster.
“We need to get to the bus and back to the house.”
“My car,” Lizzie realized suddenly. “They can get my name from the license plate.”
“I stole your keys and gave them to Woody,” Trevor said. “Your car is already back at the house.”
She stared and he shrugged.
“Better than being tied to a major arson event,” he said.
“What did they do?” Lizzie asked. “Why?”
“I told you, we didn’t do it,” Trevor said. “But there are too many furlings running around and they snowballed. We took out as many as we could, but they got away from us.”
They found a sign for a bus and he sat down on the bench, leaning back against it and putting his arm across the back of it. Lizzie thought about sitting at the far end, now that he’d finally let go of her elbow, but that was more spiteful than she actually felt.
