He relaxed a bit. Whatever he saw on his visor must have corroborated her story. “I’ll call her. Don’t move.”
She glanced around a bit anyway as if she were reflexively looking for Ruby. A couple of centaur robots paced around the building. She looked at the vehicles more closely. Two seemed to be official cars of some sort, maybe one of them the car with the red lights she had seen racing to the farm during the night.
Ruby came running out of the big, hulking building, and she, too, wore a visor and mask. She got in with barely a glance at the guard or Irene. “Home,” she told the car—not Irene—and it started up and began to move. The guard lowered his gun and walked away.
After a moment, Irene said, “Will is very upset.”
Ruby grunted.
Irene took a deep breath to work up the courage to ask: “What kind of farm is that?” She hoped it would seem logical to ask, since a gun had been pointed at her.
Ruby said without hesitation, “Experimental animals.”
“Oh.” Irene nodded as if she believed it. The rest of the trip took place in silence.
Even before the car came to a full halt at the house, Ruby dashed out. Irene watched her run in without bothering to close the door behind her. Irene closed it and went to Nimkii’s pen. He was touching the barbed wire she’d used to repair the fence with his trunk as if he were thinking.
“Hey, Nimkii,” she called from the far side of the pen, “come over here. I’m back.”
Avril found her room empty. “Went to the clinic on the second floor,” a note said. Good. She found her phone and switched it off so the centaurs couldn’t follow her inside the building—unless her phone couldn’t really be turned off. It might be permanently on. By law, the software didn’t belong to her, so it could legally do anything at all.
After the mutiny, we’ll change that.
She left the room, ran to the stairway, and opened the door to it a crack, listening for centaurs. Instead she heard a torrent of footsteps. She peeked in. Students packed the stairs, running down them. She joined the human river cascading over the steps and out the nearest exit. The girl next to her wept with relief as she stepped outside.
Avril kept running across a wide lawn and downhill toward the lake, aware that if they were all exposed to the delta cold or whatever it was, now they would spread the illness. Well, she wasn’t the one who had imprisoned them without access to help. Some disasters weren’t her fault.
Near the lake, she stopped and turned her phone on.
Mom had left a several messages over a period of hours. The most recent: “Are you okay? Call right away.”
She called. Mom could be in trouble, too.
“Avy, how are you?” She was calling from work at the property management office, walking down a hallway, and she looked as frightened as she sounded. And she was wearing a purple blouse.
“I’m okay. What’s going on?”
“There’s an epidemic.”
“Here, too,” Avril said.
“Everywhere. It might be that delta cold, Sino. No one seems to know. Are you safe?”
An honest answer would make Mom feel worse, but she always wanted the truth. “No. We’re sick, I mean, not me but other people, dying, and campus security was holding us prisoner in our dorm, and we were cut off from communications. That’s why I didn’t call. I couldn’t. But we just escaped.”
Her mother seemed to need a minute to take that all in, and oddly, she didn’t panic. “I see you’re wearing purple.”
“There was a plan.”
“I know. Your dad is in on it.”
“Really?” She felt herself smile. “I thought he would be!”
“And me, I’m in, whatever I can do. Avy…?”
“Tell me everything you know, Mom. Please.”
A centaur voice was shouting from the other side of Dejope Hall. Avril hurried away toward the lakeshore.
“I don’t know much at all,” Mom said. “The city declared a state of emergency. I’m going home. Your dad is going to stay at work. They have a lot to do, a lot to disobey.” She smiled, then someone shouted her mother’s name. “Oh, god. I gotta go. Avy, I’ll let you know everything I can find out. You’ll do the same?”
“The truth, even if it’s bad.” A centaur was coming around the building—there was no time to explain.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” Avril started running with no plan of where to go. The lake—yes, she could run to the lake, down into a marshy area, where she could hide. She crashed through the underbrush, and Drew was suddenly running beside her. She sank ankle-deep in mud and kept going. Drew ran ahead of her, but he turned and grabbed her hand to pull her toward the open water.
She was thigh-deep when a noise hit her so hard she fell to her hands and knees: the centaur noise. Her head was underwater. She tried to get up and fell again, too dizzy to balance, not too dizzy to know she might drown. Keep your head up. But which way was up? She was going to vomit, and she had to keep holding her breath. Her head was about to explode. She felt the lake bottom under her hands and knees and crawled as fast as she could in the direction she hoped was toward the shore. The lake bottom eventually sloped up almost enough for her to raise her head.
Drew was next to her. He pulled her arm up and supported her so that she could kneel. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. The whining centaur stood far beyond the shoreline trees. It wouldn’t see them there.
She tried to stand, stumbled,
