Malorie stops. Is it Olympia? The urgent but distant cry of the girl she did not give birth to but has raised as a daughter all the same?

“Somebody turn off that music,” Malorie says, needing to say something, needing to hear a familiar, sane voice as she drags her fingers along the bricks, as she feels the pegboard where community notices alerted people to school events for the last two years.

Ahead, a scream. Behind, the cracking of wood. Someone bounds past her. Someone follows.

Malorie does not cry. She only moves, her knees weak, her shoulder bright with the fresh injury. Her ears open for an echo of the voice that cried mom, one of her own, perhaps, rising to the surface for air, before sinking back into the raging waves ahead in the hall.

She tells herself to move with purpose, but slow. She needs to be sharp, needs to be standing.

A boy cries out ahead. A child. Sounds like he’s gone mad.

She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She walks toward the maddening volume, the sounds of an entire community losing their minds at once. A second child, perhaps. A third.

“They got in,” she says. But she doesn’t need to say it. And this time her own voice brings her no comfort.

To her right, a door rattles. Ahead on the left something on wheels crashes against the bricks. People scream profanities. Malorie tries not to allow herself to imagine what these scenes must look like. The expressions on the faces of the men and women she has shared this edifice with for two years. The chips in the bricks. The wreckage. The bruises and the blood. She tries to deny herself even the memory of sight, as if imagining what happens in the space might drive her mad.

She refuses to imagine a creature. She will not even allow herself that.

Something clips her bad shoulder. Malorie covers it with her hand. She doesn’t want to be touched. Is thinking that Annette was touched. Is worried, horrified, that the creatures have begun…touching.

But this was a piece of wood perhaps. Another brick. A finger sent sailing from a hand.

A woman howls. A child speaks.

Speaks?

“Mom.”

A hand in her own.

It doesn’t take more than a second for her to recognize the hand as Olympia’s.

Mania fattens ahead.

“This way,” Olympia says.

Malorie doesn’t ask her daughter why they are walking toward the violence rather than from it. She knows it’s because Tom must be on the other side of this scene.

Even at only six years old, Olympia leads.