My hand went automatically to my belt, and I felt the tiniest fraction of relief when I found my set of Chaos Cuffs there. I might be here alone, but I wasn’t trapped. Forcing myself to refocus, I looked around. In a room where everyone was panicked and running, I felt like I was moving in slow motion as I took in the row upon row of upturned sewing machines that cluttered the already packed space, the piles of scrap fabric that lay everywhere just waiting for their turn to catch fire, and the disordered swirl of panic at the far end of the room where workers were still frantically trying to open a door that I knew would never open. And in that moment, I felt the enormity of it all in a way that I never had before in a simulation. Because these people were real. They weren’t generated by a computer. They were someone’s mother, or sister, or friend, and almost every face that I saw wasn’t going to survive the next ten minutes. Someone bumped into me, and I was jarred from my horror and back to the task at hand. I’d already wasted ten seconds. I didn’t have ten seconds to waste.

I tried to look at every panicked face, hoping to see something that would let me know that I’d found Agent Chris. The room was unbearably hot, and I wondered that my skin wasn’t boiling. I could breathe just fine thanks to that pill, but my lungs still felt thick and dirty from the smoke. Or maybe it was panic that made my chest feel like it was getting smashed by a hundred-pound weight. It was hard to tell.