Chapter 19: Doors (Part 2: Finale)

The backpack lay by a wooden bench, outside the class.

Milo had forgotten about it. Neither the principal nor the secretary reminded him of it, probably because they didn’t think he actually brought one.

Instead of heading down the corridor after it, he followed Mr. Cald’s path to the back, and from there to the right.

Even if his memory went off the rails, he would’ve recognized the doors by their emergency seals. While they looked normal at first glance, the slightly discolored metal was a giveaway to anyone paying attention.

The turns were often abrupt, unpredictable, and nonsensical given the destination. It was all staff rooms too, and maybe that was the point, that no one would think of walking in circles—

Milo froze.

All of them.

All of the doors were unlocked.

Why?

The man had turned the key in the relics room. To avoid easy detection, obviously.

So for him to abandon that safety measure here, in his own nest... could he have an accomplice waiting back there?

Milo’s journey quickly went from smooth sailing to turmoil.

The next door had no glass. Someone had plugged its keyhole with a twist of paper. If Cald’s accomplice was behind it, Milo would find out by opening it.

Why the hell would anyone do this?

Facing solid wooden doors, he routinely pressed an ear to them. The wood was cool on his swollen cheek as he listened for at least a minute before mustering up the courage to open one.

He noted the furniture in each room, particularly the tall pieces. He could drop them as an obstacle when running from the partner in crime.

Eventually, he passed a confiscation closet. Decades of seized student property crowded its labeled shelves: slingshots, dice, love letters filed by year, contraband snacks fossilized into geology.

Milo approached the letter stack from year 619 of the current millennium, dust coming away on his fingertips as he searched for the month of February.

Once, in his more social days, he had tried getting into the whole Valentine’s thing. After finding an envelope with characteristic blue strokes at the edges, he set the Iron Turnhook by the rack and carefully pulled it out without collapsing the stack.

From Milo Zeuqe to Zadie Durand.

He unpinned the envelope and slid the note out of it with his thumbs.

In his handwriting, it read:

Not a confession of an overwhelming feeling, but an intellectual admission of respect. Thank you.

Zadie had been the second thank-you of his life. Unfortunately, he had never gotten to deliver his first one.

Before the town had been erased, Dylan, a teenager from the neighborhood who had sought to bring civilization upon the tribes lingering in the far forests of the country, had looked after him.

Milo smiled and turned his head away, only for his eyes to stop at a mirror: violet bloom, crusted red, one eye almost entirely pressed shut, vomit on the sleeve.

Given that one was dead and the second erased, it was not quite the time to feel joyful.

He slid the note into the envelope and placed it back amongst the other letters. He picked up the Iron Turnhook and made for the door.

The labels outlived the owners; half these kids graduated, some of them were dead, and the school wouldn’t give back their slingshots. As a professional scavenger, Milo suffered a genuine moral crisis speed-running past the first unguarded loot of his life.

He pivoted back, dropped the nearest dice into his left pocket, grabbed a random love letter and a slingshot, and put them both into his right pocket.

Having collected the goods, he hurried to the door and opened it.

Red brick.

Milo backed away a step and blinked.

Dead end?

A look up revealed no emergency seal at the top. A look to the right revealed another door with a discolored emergency seal.

"Seals," he muttered, pressing his ear to the correct door. "Look at the seals."

With each room bringing him closer to the nest, his heart beat harder and his jaw set tighter. Any time now.

As long as the baton’s outline hadn’t left the first floor and was moving, he wouldn’t be made from the back. If the man dropped the baton, however, that’d be the end of it. Milo would be stuck in an impossible scenario. There were other rooms to hide in, but they were all sealed.

He didn’t wish to test out if his Turnhook could bypass those mechanisms.

Past a records room and an out-of-service school shrine, he reached a glass-paned door. Inside sat a man on the ground. And farther yet, behind another glass-paned door, lay another individual.

The man, sitting up front, had dark hair and a phone next to his ear.

"Yes, they are nowhere to be found," he said into the phone, nodding. "Might be."

It was Henry.

"What the fuck..." whispered Milo.

Squinting at the farther room, he made out three bodies, maybe four, lying right next to each other in the cramped space.

One of them had red hair.

The four bullies?

"I have also contacted Mr. Cald," the instructor continued. "We tried searching together, but the students have vanished."

Milo spotted a metal bowl of water and a plate of dry bread inside.

Was I supposed to be in there too?

Nobody set out bread for a corpse. Henry wanted them alive, and he wanted the school to stop looking for them.

"Might be. Might be. Seb wasn’t himself when he left your office. No, we haven’t found him. Yeah. Yes. And what do I tell the other teachers? All right, I’ll say that."

Ending the call, Henry let his hand drop and leaned against the wall.

Milo pulled back from the pane and pressed himself to the wall, trying to piece together what he had just witnessed.

He was two names into the list of people in this building who were lying when a notice sounded over the academy’s comms.

"Ahem, good afternoon, dear students," Mr. Thwaite said. "Thank you for your patience. Aldous is on his way." The principal swallowed. "Please remain in your classrooms and report any... any entities seen in the corridors. To your teacher, please."

He can’t be talking about me, can he?

"Do not open sealed doors," Mr. Thwaite added. "For anyone."

═══════════════════

⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "The Exit" ... ⤵︎ [!]