I need to get moving.
It’ll take all night for the dust to fade.
There’s no reversing it.
It needs to eat away at itself, lose its own power, reach its own limit before it’s gone.
The breath I loosen is silent, but thick. It’s strange to not hear it, like my ears are submerged underwater, padded with wool, all noise blocked—and it’s nothing less than disorientating.
I scoot down the stairs, one solid step at a time.
The thuds send jolts up my spine, all the way to my throat where my breaths are jutting out of me.
I feel them.
Don’t hear them.
The strappy heels on my feet clatter on the wooden floorboards—and I outstretch them, fumble them around, because the banister finally ends, and I think I’ve reached the atrium.
Now the hard part.
My mouth circles around a steadying breath.
My heart doesn’t pound in my chest, itslows, as though to beat too hard and rapidly means to alert hidden threats around me that I’m here.
My insides are ice, ice spreading through my chest, trickling along my bones.
A violent shudder wracks me before I push up onto my heels, hands splayed against the dark.
I reach out in front of me—and feel nothing.
I take a tentative step.
Nothing obstructs me.
I take another, sliding the sole of the strappy sandal along the floorboards, a direct shot across the atrium.
And another, over and over, my gut worming, because the atrium and the corridor across it should be the busiest areas in the blackout.
I should be getting close to the corridor now.
Hands outstretched, my slow sliding steps drag me across the atrium—but it feels like it’s taking forever, and I’m out in the middle of open darkness, exposed.
I suck in a sharp breath.
The prints of my fingertips graze something—and I clammer back a step.
Tingles reach all the way through my wavering fingers, my breaths warm and choppy at my parted lips.
My throat juts with a harsh swallow.
I tilt forward, reaching my hand out, feeling around for whatever is in my way.
Maybe a wall, maybe a podium, a pillar.
Maybe I’ve gone off track and wound up at the second corridor, the one that leads directly to the basement level.
I touch it again.
