“Not so far as I know.”
Max nods. Robert looks out of the window. The muscles in his neck look tensed, and a small vein has appeared on his temple.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s look outside. There might be some way to climb up. We’ll get up there, don’t worry.”
When we step outside I squint up at the sun, which has passed the midday point at the top of the sky. It’s after twelve. Less than twenty-four hours until the police arrive.
This helps to loosen the hard knot that has formed in my chest. I can almost breathe again.
One day. We can make it.
We just need to get Emmy down, then carry or drag or support her back to the church—it’s not far, it should be fine—barricade the doors again and wait it out. We have water and honey. We can do it.
I can’t even think about Tone right now.
Max has walked straight out onto the cobblestones, and he studies the building up and down. What he sees doesn’t seem to encourage him, and I soon realize why: the façade, gnarled and ugly as it is, offers nothing to climb.
“Around the back,” he says. Robert just nods and sets off at a trot, with me hard on his heels.
I can’t even look him in the eye right now. I know what he must be thinking.
If only I hadn’t insisted on coming here, if only I’d just listened to them, if only I hadn’t persuaded Emmy to come with me … Then none of this would have happened. Then Emmy wouldn’t be lying hurt up there right now.
But I can help. That has to mean something.
As we round the corner I run straight into Robert’s back. He’s stopped abruptly at the start of the alley.
The back of the school plot is small but strangely sweet, a square patch of land that was presumably once trampled down by games and sports. The skeletons of four neat picnic tables stand in a row next to the building. The wood has shriveled and contracted down to their metal legs, which have rusted into a deep red and started to disintegrate.
But it isn’t the tables Robert’s looking at.
It’s the fire escape behind them.
Of course. Obviously there had to be a fire escape.
Robert starts heading toward it, but I stop him with a hand on his arm.
“It won’t hold you,” I say.
“It’ll hold,” he says sharply, but I don’t let go. I shake my head.
“Look at it,” I say, “it’s rusted. You must weight what, a hundred and seventy pounds? A hundred eighty?”
At first Robert doesn’t answer, but I see his shoulders droop slightly.
The steps on the ladder are rusty, but they don’t look broken to me.
“I’ll go,” I say.
I give myself a quick shake, try to force myself to focus as I step up to the fire escape. It looks less stable up close. Some of the steps are thin as pencils.
It’s OK. It’ll be fine.
Behind my back I hear Robert shout:
“EMMY! We’ve found a fire escape! We’re on our way!”
I pull myself up onto the first step, expecting it to snap under me, but it holds. Then the next. That one holds, too.
My heart is pumping in hard, powerful thuds. It’s just like the bridge again, only crystallized into something else, something smaller, weaker, worse. The water coursing beneath me.
I’m trying not to look down, but my feet have already passed the first row of windows. A faint breeze against my back stirs up my sweaty, ruffled hair and makes the small hairs on my neck stand on end. I stop.
My breaths are coming in short, sharp stabs, but whether that’s the exertion or the fear talking I can’t tell.
“Alice!” Max shouts below me. “Are you OK?”
I don’t reply. My mouth is dry.
“Alice!” he shouts again, louder this time. “Do you want to come down?”
That’s all I want to do.
I can already feel it: the step cracking beneath me, the first split second of shock. The fall, short and frozen and beautiful, and then the smack of me hitting the ground, that absurd shift from speed to stillness. The crack of my skull as it smashes against the stones.
But Emmy’s up there and she can’t get down. Emmy, who held me when I would cry until my whole body shook, who picked up the phone again and again and again, who listened to me and looked after me and loved me, until me and my anxiety wore that love down to nothing. Emmy, who’s lying up there all alone, her ribs broken, because I asked her.
“It’s OK,” I shout back, my voice shaky, and then I start climbing again.
I take the last steps faster, refusing to think about the height or the rust on my fingers. When I come level with the next window, I see it’s already completely free of shards. A small blessing.
I grab hold of the window frame and heave myself in over it. The relief is greater than the effort it takes, and I manage to pull myself into the room and get my feet down onto the floor reasonably smoothly.
I dry my palms off on my jeans, leaving ugly rusty marks on my thighs, and look around. It isn’t hard to figure out where I am. It’s the school nurse’s office; that tall, empty room with the bed in the far corner.
“I’m in!” I call out of the window to Max and Robert, and then I call inside:
“Emmy? It’s Alice! I’m here!”
I stride across to the big, stately doors, which are already slightly ajar.
I open them.
Emmy is lying flat on her back by the door to the science room. The gaping hole where the stairs once were comes as something of a shock to the system.
“Emmy?” I say, walking over to her.
She’s staring up at the ceiling, I see as I come closer. She isn’t looking at me. Is she angry? That wouldn’t exactly be surprising.
“I’m sorry,” I begin, now beside her. “We’ve found a fire escape. We’ll get
