“Makayla, look,” Jaden said, grabbing me by the arm.

He turned me around to the front of the boat, and I saw a school submerged in water with the wide, high front doors thrown open. Whatever was inside those doors, we couldn’t tell, because all we could see was blackness.

The captains of our ship piloted the boat through the double doors and then inside. They took us to where the stairs emerged from the water.

“Take the boy,” the man in the back of the boat barked.

“Did you think we were going to leave him with you?” I shot back.

The family reached over for him. They didn’t seem like bad people. Maybe it was just better to let him be with them. But then the boy moved just a bit toward Jaden and me. I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder. He didn’t move again. I placed my hands into his armpits and gently pulled him up. He was limp like a rag doll, and I was surprised he could stand on his feet. Those little shoes kept flashing their silver pictures up on the sides: basketball players jumping, cars racing, motorcycles roaring by. The boy stood, and I linked my arm in his. Standing, the top of his head came up to my chest. That made him just about four feet tall. I helped him over the edge of the boat, onto the first stair that rose out of the water. He slowly placed one foot in front of the other as I pulled him along. The other people in the boat followed us.

At the top of the stairs, there was a landing that looked down over the pool of water that had forced its way into the school. Floating in the water were test papers with red grades on them, pencils, pens, markers, art projects. A papier-mâché head was floating in the water like a decapitation. Off of the landing, there were two double doors, one on either end, without any windows. They were closed. As the men in the boat roared off, Jaden and I pulled the boy toward the one on the left. We stood in front of the double door in silence. We all stood there listening.

“Do you hear that?” I said.

“Yeah,” Jaden replied.

Behind the door, there were sounds of chaos. Moans and yelling and a kind of wild laugher that didn’t come from anything resembling joy. What was back there?

I placed my hand flat on the door, spreading my fingers wide and seeing the chipped polish on my nails. The door was ice cold, like the air all around us. For some reason, I had expected it to be as hot as fire.

“Do we go in there?” I asked.

“What else can we do?” Jaden said. “We can’t exactly swim to safety.”

I took a deep breath and pushed the door open.