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“I’ll stand here,” I say. “Like a good owner.”

He ducks through a narrow door in the side wall, into the mechanical room next door. I hear his voice and Grady’s through the wall, low and muffled. A panel. A bolt. Grady saying see.

I stand where he told me. I look at the iron rings on the walls and try to figure out what the one at seven feet is for. I take out my phone to text Merek a picture of the bed with the caption LOADING DOCK.

Above me, a cable snaps.

It’s a loud, flat crack. I look up.

The counterweight is moving. One of its two cables is whipping loose through the air, and the block is still hanging from the other one, and it’s swinging out from the wall like a wrecking ball. The whole oven-sized block of it, coming across the room in a long fast arc, low, at the height of my head. Straight at the bed. Straight at me.

I don’t think. I drop.

I go down so hard my knees crack on the floor, and I throw myself flat, and it goes over me. I feel the air move. Then it hits the bed.

The iron headboard, the one as thick as my arm, folds in half.

The sound is enormous. Metal screaming, wood splitting, the whole bed frame bucking off the floor. The counterweight swings back, slower, out over the middle of the room, and the steel bar overhead drops on one end with a crash, and dust and sawdust come down everywhere.

Then it’s quiet, except for the cable creaking, and the counterweight turning slowly in the air, and my ears ringing.

I lift my head.

My phone is on the floor in front of me, screen cracked. My knees hurt. My palms are scraped raw where I hit the floor.

The headboard is bent at the middle like a paper clip. Thirty seconds ago, I was standing right in front of it.

Stand there, he said. Away from the rig.

It was the safest spot in the room, as long as the counterweight hung straight. Nobody planned for it to swing. If I’d been standing up when it came across, it would have taken my head off.

I get up. My legs don’t want to, and I make them. I need to get out of here. I need to find Tav.

I run for the door.

I hit the bar on the door, the panic bar, and push.

It doesn’t move.

I push again. I throw my whole body against it. Nothing. It doesn’t even rattle.

Then the alarm goes off.

It’s a long, rising electronic whoop, so loud it hurts, and a strobe starts flashing white in the corner of the ceiling, and a recorded voice says words I can’t make out over the noise. Then, from the ceiling, all at once, there’s a roar.

White fog pours out of nozzles in the beams with a loud, steady hiss. It rolls across the floor and up the walls, and in a few seconds I can’t see the bed anymore.

I can’t tell what it is. It’s cold and dry, and I keep trying to take a deeper breath. My lungs fill up, and it’s like they didn’t.

I know this is bad. I don’t know how I know. Some leftover training video from the restaurant in Fresno, some laminated card in a break room, if the suppression system activates, leave the area immediately.

I can’t leave the area. That’s the whole problem.

“TAV!” I scream. “TAV!”

I bang on the door with both fists. I kick it. I don’t know if anybody can hear me over the alarm.

There’s a fire extinguisher on the wall by the door, a red one in a bracket. I yank it off. It’s heavier than I expect. I swing it at the door, at the little wire-glass window at eye level, and it bounces off and nearly takes out my teeth. The glass doesn’t even crack.