I look at Ash, my eyes widening. “Please tell me we didn’t just trap ourselves.”

But he’s not looking at me, he’s walking and so are the others. “Not sure yet.”

I grip the branch a bit tighter, as though I were protecting it from an unseen threat, and follow them to the end of the hall.

Aarya opens the door to the women’s room and Ines and I follow her. She quickly bends down, checking underneath the stalls, and opens the door again, beckoning Ash in. He locks it behind him.

He looks at the bathroom like he’s planning a battle. “No windows.”

“Not a one,” Aarya says. “And despite my applause-worthy work with that guard, I’d say we have about ten minutes before he comes back here looking for us.”

I scan the room, my eyes falling on a vent near the ceiling. “Don’t commercial buildings have huge heating and cooling vents? Could we maybe—”

“That only works in the movies,” Aarya says.

“While some HVACs might be large enough to fit us, if we attempted to crawl through it, we would make an untold amount of noise,” Ash explains.

“So what exactly are we—” I start, but stop as I realize they’re now staring up. I would stammer about how we’re not actually going to climb through the ceiling, but of course we are. It makes more sense than any other route right now. And suddenly I’m reminded of something Professor Basurto said during my first tree-climbing class. There’s my favorite use of trees—evasion. They are the perfect escape route because they offer unpredictable terrain. While this isn’t a tree, it follows the same basic principle of evasion by using the things around you in unusual ways.

Ash carries over a fancy garbage can that has a small hole in the top and a wide lip. He climbs on top of it and pushes aside one of the ceiling tiles.

He sticks his head up into the ceiling. “It’s wide enough,” he says, and the moment he says so, Aarya and Ines start unzipping their dresses.

“Unless you want your skirt to get caught on some wiring and potentially plummet through the ceiling, I suggest you change now,” Aarya says, and I don’t waste a moment.

Ash pulls off his black-and-gold cape and tosses it into the ceiling with a light thud, climbing up after it. I yank my skirt over my head, and as it hits the floor, Aarya scoops it up, climbs onto the garbage can, and hands all three of our dresses and masks up to Ash. I can hear them hit the bathroom ceiling in various places as he throws them, which I suppose makes more sense than trying to drag them behind us.