‘We’re not dying. I feel fine.’ Jarli stood up, and immediately wobbled. He was still a bit woozy from the gas.

  Anya’s phone beeped. LIE

  Lanagan had said the toxin would paralyse them.

  Jarli could still feel all his fingers and toes. Would they go NUMB when the botulism started to take effect? Or would he still be able to feel everything as his muscles went slack, one by one?

  He had a sudden flash of his parents seeing him through the glass, here in this airlock, his body frozen on the floor.

  His parents had been acting strange lately, particularly his father. It was as if they thought Jarli was up to something. That hadn’t seemed to matter this morning—Jarli had thought he’d have plenty of time to get back in their good books. Now he might never see them again.

  Blinking away tears, he paced back and forth in the airlock. ‘We might not have been exposed,’ he said. ‘We’ve gotta get to a doctor who can examine us.’

  ‘We cannot leave.’

  ‘If we hold our breath—’

  ‘We cannot leave,’ Anya said again. ‘What if the disease is contagious? I do not want to accidentally make humanity extinct. Do you?’

  Jarli hesitated. That would be bad.

  His eyes settled on the hazmat suits. There were two of them, hanging from hooks on the airlock wall. ‘Do you think those would fit us?’

  ‘We have already been exposed,’ Anya said.

  ‘Maybe. But they could protect us from the gas, and they could stop us from exposing anybody else.’

  Anya looked at the suits for a minute. Eventually she said, ‘How much air do you think is in those tanks?’

  Jarli peered at the tube on the side. ‘Six point eight litres, apparently.’

  ‘How long would that last? Assuming it is full. Which it probably is not, since we just saw some people using them when we arrived.’

  Jarli shrugged. ‘Dunno. I’ve never been scuba diving. But it would be long enough to get us out of here, right?’

  ‘We will not fit through the air ducts with those suits on.’

  ‘We don’t have to. There are doctors held hostage right here in the hospital. We just have to find them.’

  Anya didn’t look convinced. ‘They will be guarded, surely.’

  Jarli threw up his hands. ‘Well, either we give it a shot, or we sit here waiting to die. Which would you prefer?’

  ‘Alright,’ Anya said finally. ‘Let’s try the suits.’

  It took fifteen minutes just to get the suits on. They had special airtight zips at the back like the kind on a bag of dog food—Jarli and Anya had to help each other get zipped up. The crinkly plastic sleeves were heavier than they looked. The helmets were designed to be screwed on. Jarli had to turn his around and around several times before it was tight.

  When he got the visor facing the right way, it lit up with a special heads-up display. Most of the numbers meant nothing to Jarli, but he quickly found the important bit: 61 MINUTES AIR REMAINING (APPROX).

  Would that be enough? Jarli had to hope so.

  ‘How much air do you have?’ he asked Anya. His own voice seemed deafening inside the helmet. There was a faint hissing as his breaths were sucked out and fresh air pumped in from the tank.

  ‘Sixty-four minutes,’ Anya said, her voice muffled by the suit.

  ‘Plenty,’ Jarli said. ‘Let’s do this.’

  PART THREE: ESCAPE

  ‘An unintended side-effect-the app makes it difficult for the user to lie. If you’re focused on the app, it’s hard to come up with a plausible story and gauge whether the other person believes you. But I’m not interested in fixing that bug, because it’s easy to avoid. Just tell the truth, people.’

  —From the documentation for Truth, version 4.3

  HELL OR HIGH WATER

  Doug was walking around the perimeter of the room, knocking on the red brick walls.

  ‘There’s no way out of here,’ said the nurse—he’d introduced himself as Amon. ‘We checked.’

  ‘No harm in checking again,’ Doug said. The bricks were really cold. There was probably dirt on the other side. So deep, so tightly packed, that the sun’s warmth never seeped down to it.

  ‘You should save your energy,’ Amon said.

  ‘For what?’ Doug asked.

  ‘As you may have noticed, there’s no food down here.’

  Some of the other hostages grumbled quietly. They were sitting on the floor, leaning against walls and cages. There wasn’t enough room down here for twenty people.

  Doug had heard of the rule of three: a human being could survive three minutes without air, three hours without heat, three days without water, three weeks without food. But he’d eaten lunch only six hours ago and he was already hungry again.

  ‘What if the siege goes on for weeks?’ Amon was saying. ‘That’s not unheard of.’

  Mr Hayes patted the air—a settle down gesture. ‘The police must be here by now,’ he said. ‘Nobody panic. I’m sure we’ll be out of here soon.’

  Doug wasn’t willing to wait. Viper, the monster, the big boss, was right upstairs. They had to get out of here now.

  ‘What about water?’ he asked Amon.

  Amon gestured to a sink in the opposite corner. ‘Go nuts,’ he said.

  Doug walked over to the sink. It was a deep trough, maybe designed for rinsing bedsheets. He turned a squeaky tap, cupped his hands under the flow of cold water and took a few sips.

  As he turned off the tap he examined the sink. He had hoped that maybe the drain would be big enough to escape through, but it was no wider than his hand, and the pipe beyond equally small. They couldn’t get out that way.

  There was a power point nearby. Could he use electricity to burn through the door somehow? Unlikely. And dangerous, especially given the flammable cladding in the walls which Lanagan had mentioned.

  Doug turned the problem over and over in his mind. He was good with mechanical problems. His mother always said that he understood absolutely anything with wheels. ‘And nothing without them,’ she would add, when she thought he wasn’t listening.

  We could block the drain, Doug thought. Flood the trough. Fill this whole room with water. Then what would happen?

  Well, the hostages would float to the ceiling. What was up there?

  Doug looked up. Nothing useful. A few more small pipes. Two ventilation grills, each about the size of pencil cases. Too small to escape through.

  But water was heavy. Doug did some quick maths. The room was about five metres wide, eight deep, three high. That was . . . a hundred and twenty cubic metres of space. A cubic metre was a thousand litres, a litre of water weighed a kilogram, a thousand kilograms was a tonne.

  Doug walked back over to the fire door. It was wooden. Strong enough to resist a kick. But could the mop outside support a hundred and twenty tonnes of water? Surely not. It would snap, the door would break open and they would be free.

  First problem: it would take a long time. Doug visualised himself filling a litre jug from the tap. How long would that take? Say five seconds. Which meant that filling the whole room would take . . .

  six hundred thousand seconds. Ten thousand minutes. One hundred and sixty-six hours. The last calculation—one hundred and sixty-six divided by twenty-four—was too hard to do precisely in his head, but he figured it was about a week.

  Second problem: depending on how the pump worked, the water might stop flowing when they were only neck deep.

  Third problem: even if he could get the water flowing faster somehow, and guarantee that it didn’t stop, he was pretty sure the patients in here would be too weak to swim.

  Maybe they could build a raft out of something. He looked around for buoyant materials. But everything in here was made of brick or iron.

  He turned to Bess and opened his mouth to ask how well she could swim. But she spoke first.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked.

  Doug hesitated. ‘Uh . . . maybe.’

  Bess turned to Amon. ‘That’s the furnace, right?’

  She was pointing at a huge iron box built into the wall. There was a rusty grate on the front.

  ‘The incinerator,’ Amon said. ‘Some things can’t be reused, and are too contagious to just throw away. We have to burn them.’

  ‘So where’s the chimney?’

  Amon hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There must be one,’ Bess said. ‘Those little air vents up there wouldn’t be enough to clear the smoke.’

  ‘I guess it’s behind the wall,’ Amon said. ‘It would get pretty hot. They wouldn’t want to risk someone touching it.’

  ‘How wide is it?’

  Amon raised his eyebrows. ‘The chimney? I don’t know. I’ve never been up on the roof.’

  Doug liked the sound of this plan. Climbing a chimney might be difficult, but it would be better than treading water for a week.

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ he said, approaching the incinerator.

  ‘Doug,’ Hayes said. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’

  ‘I’m just taking a look.’ Doug opened the grate to expose the inside of the incinerator. A row of rolling cylinders lined the floor, so things could easily slide in. Ash carpeted the floor beneath them.

  He pushed his head and shoulders right in. The incinerator was cold, but it smelled like a campfire. It was deeper than it had looked from the outside, which meant that a section of it was behind the wall. He couldn’t see a chimney. But with his shoulders blocking the light, he couldn’t see much of anything.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and brought up a torch app. He shone the light around the inside of the incinerator. The walls were charred black by thousands of fires, so it was still hard to see.

  But there was a chimney in the low ceiling. It was square, about as wide across as Doug’s desk at school. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but he could fit.

  Actually climbing it would be another matter.

  He wriggled backwards out of the incinerator. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘I think.’

  ‘It might be possible for a fourteen year-old kid,’ Amon said. ‘But there’s no way the adults will fit.’

  ‘They don’t have to,’ Bess pointed out. ‘If one person can climb up to the roof, then they can come down the stairs and let the rest of us out.’

  ‘And then what?’ Hayes said. ‘The exit is guarded. We’re safest if we stay here and wait for the police.’

  ‘Why do you think the police haven’t come in yet?’ Bess snapped. ‘It’s because they know the bad guys have hostages. If we hide somewhere else in the building, and the bad guys don’t know where we are, then the police can come in safely.’

  ‘And how are they supposed to know that we’re in hiding?’

  ‘Because Doug can signal them when he’s on the roof, and tell them about the plan ahead of time. Right, Doug?’

  Privately, Doug wondered how he could tell the police anything. Would they hear him, shouting from the rooftop? But it seemed like the least doubtful part of this plan, so he nodded.

  ‘Well, that’s settled,’ Bess said.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Hayes said.

  But Doug was already crawling into the incinerator.

  ‘Good luck,’ Bess called.

  Doug didn’t respond. If he opened his mouth, he was pretty sure it would fill up with ash.

  He wriggled along the rolling cylinders towards the back of the incinerator. It was wide and long enough for a human being, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the hospital used it to cremate bodies. If someone died here and they had no family to collect them, the hospital would need to get rid of them somehow.

  This made Doug think about his own family. His mum and dad must know about the crisis by now. They would be really scared. Dad didn’t handle stress well. And if Doug died, they would be so mad at him.

  He decided not to die.

  The chimney didn’t go straight up—it twisted back and forth, forcing Doug to contort his body into uncomfortable shapes. He bumped his head a couple of times as he crawled upwards, feeling the shape of the chimney as he went.

  Soon his hands found a thin wire mesh blocking the tunnel. It felt like a fly screen. It was probably supposed to stop dangerous particles from shooting up the chimney and pouring out into the atmosphere. All this dust was probably TOXIC. Doug couldn’t wait to get home and have a shower.

  The mesh wasn’t very strong. Doug jabbed his finger through it, then ripped it wide open with his hands and crawled through.

  ‘You OK in there?’ someone called. Hayes, or Amon—the echoes made it hard to tell.

  Doug still wasn’t willing to open his mouth. He rapped his knuckles on the iron wall twice instead— tong, tong.

  The rest of the chimney was directly above him now, going straight up. He could see a tiny speck of light at the very top—even the night sky was brighter than this pitch-black tunnel. There was no ladder, and no handholds. But the gritty walls felt like sandpaper. If he pressed his hands against the wall on one side and his back against the other, he wouldn’t fall.

  He started climbing, inch by inch, wedged between the walls. It was like crawling on his hands and knees, but upwards. A funny thought struck him—this must be how Santa feels, climbing chimneys. The image was so ridiculous that a burst of hysterical laughter almost bubbled up out of his throat. He swallowed it back down and kept climbing.

  Once he was a couple of metres up, the burnt-toast smell didn’t seem so bad. Maybe the worst gases lingered near the incinerator. Or maybe his nose was getting used to it.

  Doug’s arms were already starting to tremble from the strain of supporting his body. Take it easy, he told himself. Three metres up—it was just a guess—and only fifteen or twenty to go.

  Another laugh threatened to dislodge him. He was losing his mind in here.

  And then he heard something from down below. A rattle and a clank.

  The door to the basement was opening.

  FEE FIFO FUM

  When Jarli and Anya got back to the corridor with the destroyed air vent, they were alarmed to see that it was empty. The sleeping giant had disappeared.

  Jarli blinked, turning around and around. It seemed impossible that something so big was just gone.

  ‘Maybe his friends came and found him,’ Jarli whispered.

  ‘How would they carry him? He was as big as an elephant. And anyway, the gas would have knocked them out too.’

  ‘So you reckon he woke up?’

  ‘I think we have to assume that,’ Anya said, her voice muffled by the helmet.

  ‘At least that means the gas has gone.’ Jarli started fiddling with his helmet.

  Anya grabbed his arm. ‘Wait. We do not want to infect anybody else with botulism. And even if there is not enough poison gas in the air to sedate a giant, you or I may not be so lucky.’

  ‘You’re so negative,’ Jarli muttered. He looked around for footprints. There were none. They couldn’t be sure which way Anaconda had gone.

  ‘The plan is unchanged,’ Anya said. ‘We need to find the doctors.’

  ‘Let’s try the surgical theatres,’ Jarli suggested. ‘That’s where they were going before the bad guys showed up. Maybe we can find out where they went.’

  He followed Anya through the winding corridors of the hospital. They paused to peek around every corner, wary of the giant. Jarli’s helmet was freaking him out. He couldn’t hear properly, and the visor wasn’t wide enough—he had no peripheral vision. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Anaconda was sneaking up on them. And the tough plastic made it hard to move quickly or quietly. If they were spotted, they wouldn’t be able to outrun the criminals.

  Finally they reached the first theatre. The door had been smashed open. Pieces of it lay all over the corridor.

  ‘Looks like the bad guys got in,’ Jarli whispered.

  ‘Someone broke out,’ Anya said. ‘The pieces are in the corridor, not the room.’

  They peeked through the doorway. The theatre looked empty. A table had been dragged across the room to a different wall. No blood anywhere.

  ‘Hello?’ Jarli called. ‘It’s us!’

  ‘Anya and Jarli,’ Anya added.

  No response. No-one was hiding in here.

  ‘Let’s try the other one,’ Anya said.

  They shuffled over to Theatre Two and tried the door. Locked.

  Jarli could hear SOUNDS from inside. Humming, clicking, whirring. Mechanical sounds, but not repetitive. Not random, either. And the steady beep, beep, beep of a heart monitor. The sounds of an operation in progress.

  Jarli knocked on the door.

  The sounds continued.

  Jarli knocked again, louder. ‘Hey! It’s just us. Let us in!’

  For about twenty seconds, there was no sign that whoever was inside had heard him. Jarli was about to try again when the strange noises stopped. All but the beeping of a heart.

  Jarli waited for someone to call out, or open the door. But no-one did.

  The room wasn’t empty. If it was his friends in there, or other hostages, Jarli felt sure that they would say something. But no-one did.

  So someone else was in there. Doing surgery.

  Anya and Jarli both backed away from the door. Jarli wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  ‘This way,’ Anya hissed. They ran towards the stairs. But as they got closer, Jarli heard someone coming up from the ground floor.

  He grabbed Anya. ‘No! Go back.’

  They hurried back up the corridor and ducked through the smashed door into Theatre One. Once they were inside, they hid behind the operating table.

  They waited for a long time. No-one passed by the corridor outside. Jarli didn’t hear the doors to Theatre Two opening. Whoever was doing the surgery, they had decided to ignore the knocking.

  ‘What do we do now?’ he whispered.

  ‘Keep searching, I suppose. The doctors must be somewhere else.’

  ‘But so are the bad guys. And we only have thirty minutes of air left in these suits.’

  ‘You have a better idea?’ Anya asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Jarli said. He ran over to the laser scalpel. It wasn’t the same one Doug had been told not to touch, but it looked identical. The trolley had a control panel mounted on it. The buttons all lit up when Jarli twisted a key which had been left in the ignition.

 

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