Something sliced my arm on the way down. A shard of glass. A flying bolt. I don’t even know. I just know my skin is open and bleeding like it’s offended at me.
The alarms kick in overhead, shrill and animal and relentless, and the emergency strobes start pulsing red-white-red-white, turning the smoke into something alive and hostile that breathes around us.
“Kim!” Mara screams from somewhere to my left. “Kim, talk to me!”
“I’m up,” I choke out, even though I’m not all the way sure that’s true yet. “I’m up, I’m fine, I’m?—”
Another explosion booms somewhere deeper in the building, closer to the kitchen entrance this time, and the floor jumps under my feet like it’s trying to buck me off.
The dining room dissolves into screaming.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
High-pitched panic shrieks. Deep, animal bellows. Someone sobbing the word no over and over like a prayer.
Smoke pours in through the blown-out kitchen doorway in rolling, chemical-thick waves that taste like burning plastic and gasoline and something metallic that coats my tongue and makes my eyes sting so hard tears pour down my face whether I want them to or not.
“Everybody up!” I shout, my voice coming out raw and hoarse and way louder than I know it can get. “Move! Front exit, now! Leave your shit, leave your bags, just go!”
A man in a suit stands frozen at table three, staring at his overturned water glass like it personally betrayed him.
I grab his arm and haul him to his feet.
“Move your ass!” I scream in his face. “You can have a breakdown on the sidewalk, not in my dining room!”
He stumbles toward the door, coughing, eyes wild.
Mara is dragging one of the servers—Lily, nineteen years old and shaking so hard her knees are knocking together—toward the front.
“I can’t see, I can’t see,” Lily sobs.
“I’ve got you, baby, I’ve got you,” Mara keeps saying, her voice low and fierce and steady in a way that makes my chest ache. “Eyes on me, just walk toward my voice.”
A couple of customers are on the floor, either knocked down by the blast wave or frozen by shock.
“Get up!” I shout. “Up, up, up, come on!”
Someone drops a tray behind me.
It shatters like a gunshot.
The sound punches straight into my nervous system and turns it into static.
Another wave of heat rolls through the room.
The lights flicker and die completely.
We are suddenly in smoke and red strobe and screaming and alarms and nothing else.
“Kim!” Ishaan’s voice roars out of the kitchen, distorted and panicked. “They are blocking the back!”
My stomach drops through the floor.
“What?” I shout.
“They are here!” he yells. “There are men with guns at the service door!”
Of course there are.
