And Michael. Michael had been trapped by them before. She looked at him now, and saw how sharp and focused his expression was, how tense the muscles cording his arms and chest. He was struggling to control his own fear.

The sprinklers were firing off everywhere around the building; running would just send them straight into the arms of their enemies, but hiding wouldn’t do, either. Not for long.

“Move,” Shane said. Myrnin did, backing up a few more feet, which allowed Shane to push past him to another barrel sitting on a pallet behind him. It had the same paint scheme as the barrel the two of them had rolled out to the car. Claire watched as Shane hunted around and came up with a small crowbar, which he used to lever open the seals on the top of the barrel. The top was hinged in the middle, Claire realized, and he flipped that part over. “Score,” he said, and raised the crowbar in triumph. “Who’s your daddy?”

Myrnin stared at him as if he’d gone completely mental. “Excuse me?”

“Figure of speech,” Claire said hastily, and rushed over to join Shane. Michael beat her there, but he’d stopped, frowning, looking down into the barrel.

“Sorry, but what the hell?” He’d found a plastic scoop in a holder, and was poking around in the barrel. “What is this stuff?”

Shane took the scoop away and dug it into what looked like … soap flakes. “You remember in junior high when there was, oh, I don’t know, maybe some incident where a boy threw a giant firecracker down in the toilet and blew it up and maybe there was a big flood?”

Michael blinked. “I remember the toilet blew up and the bathroom flooded half the hallway.”

“And what happened then?”

“You got detention.”

“Before that. The janitor had to clean it up, and I had to help him.” He slapped the side of the drum. “Super Slurper. Developed by NASA. Absorbs about two hundred times its weight in water. Sprinkle it on, wait a minute, and scoop it up like powder. Watch.”

He walked past Myrnin to the pooling liquid, gave it a little bye-bye wave, and dumped the scoop of powder on top of it.

A high, thin tone ripped through Claire’s ears—a tiny bit of the draug scream. And then the powder darkened, and the liquid drew into it, pulled against its will.

Bound up in a chemical matrix and completely, utterly, trapped.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, and felt her whole body heat up as the realization spread through her. “Oh my God, Shane!”

Myrnin came a hesitant step closer, staring. His eyes were very wide, fixed on the powder as it absorbed the water. He dropped to his knees to watch, then leaned over it.

Then he poked the remains.

The powder had turned darker, but it was still powdery—a little mealy, maybe. He picked up a sample and rubbed it between his fingers.

Then he sat back and looked up at Shane with an absolutely unreadable expression.