The person passes her, breathing hard, muttering to himself. Is he mad? Malorie doesn’t know. Can’t know. She only slides along the wall, finding herself, incredibly, feeling a slim sense of gratitude for the two years they have lived here. For the respite from the road. But that indebtedness is a marble fallen to a beach of glass orbs, never to be found again. A horror she’s long expected has arrived.

Don’t get lazy.

Her three-word mantra means nothing now. Proof: she’s already gotten lazy, she doesn’t know where her kids are.

A metallic bang thunders throughout; the music and alarm get louder.

Malorie doesn’t try to calm the children she hears. She doesn’t reach out in her darkness to help them. She only slides, so flat now the bricks draw blood.

Movement ahead, coming at her, quick, flat steps. She holds her breath. But this person does not pass.

“Malorie?”

Someone with their eyes open. A woman. Who?

“Leave me alone,” Malorie says. “Please.”

She hears the echo of her own voice pleading, six years ago, in the attic in which she gave birth.

“Malorie, what’s happened?”

Malorie thinks it’s a woman named Felice. All that matters is whether or not this woman is mad.

“Did they get in?” the woman asks.

“I don’t—”

“Everybody’s mad!” the woman says.

Malorie doesn’t answer. This woman may be armed.

“You can’t go that way,” the woman says.

Malorie feels a hand on her bare wrist. She pulls back, cracks her elbow against the bricks.

“What’s wrong with you?” the woman says. “Do you think I’m mad?”

Malorie walks from her, arms out, prepared to be hurt. She moves toward the end of the hall, where she knows a glass case dominates the wall, a thing that once held trophies, accomplishments, proof of progress in a school for the blind.

She connects with it before she can stop herself.

Her shoulder cracks it first, the cuts coming fast and warm, the pain loud. She cries out but her voice is inhaled by the rising chaos in the halls.

She does not stop moving. And she still doesn’t call their names. Touching the wall with fingers painted freshly red, she approaches the wailing, the shouts, the metal on metal, the fists on fists.

Someone brushes against her shoulder and Malorie turns quickly, pushes at them, shoves nothing.

Nobody is there. But she feels cold. Doesn’t want to be touched by anyone.

By anything.

She thinks of Annette, blind but mad.

Yes, a person could go mad in the old world way. But Malorie knows the look of the particular madness delivered by the creatures.

Annette did not simply snap. And if the woman cannot see…what happened?

“Mom!”