Xiomara hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, but why—”

A loud thump interrupted her. We all jumped, whirled around in panic, our eyes looking to the closed door to the corridor.

“Is it locked?” Xiomara whispered.

There was another thump. It didn’t come from the main door.

It came from the bathroom.

Dad, I thought, with a child’s panicked desperation.

I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud until Xiomara said, “What? In there?”

It was the sound of something hard hitting the inside of the door. A hard clank on impact, the faintest whisper of a scrape as it drew away.

I stared at the door. Closed, these ten years, a door that had slammed again and again in my memories, waking me from sleep in a cold sweat of terror that I might find myself here again—

There had been a knife in my father’s hand.

A knife in his hand and a cut in his arm and blood soaking through his clothes. His eyes wide. His voice high and terrified. My mother had slapped him—watching from my bedroom doorway, I had gasped in shock. My parents were never violent. They had never hit me or each other, not once in my entire life. But that day Mum had slapped Dad, and for a second, the briefest, cruelest second, my father’s senses returned. The babbling stopped, and he looked at my mother, looked at me. He inhaled—as if to speak, but it was only a gasp, a breath. Without a single word, he had fled into the bathroom. He took the knife with him.

Identification: Roy, Vinod

Position: Chief of Botany and Horticulture

Location: Personal living quarters 7.23-S

Time of death: 17:37:04 01.03.393

Cause of death: Hemorrhagic shock

The bathroom door rattled again. Something hard dragged over its interior surface.

“What the fuck is that?” Xiomara’s voice was rising, rising, a shout that stung my ears. “How can there be somebody in here?”

“Jas,” Baqir said. “It can’t be.”

“Can’t be what?” Xiomara said.

“I know,” I said, or meant to say, but the words did not make it past my lips.

There was something in the bathroom. It thumped against the door again, again. A faint cracking sound followed, like ice breaking.

“Go,” Baqir said. He yanked at my arm, shoved Xiomara toward the main door. “Go, go, get the fuck out of here!”

We scrambled across the room, clumsy and jostling each other in our panic. Xiomara hit the panel to slide the door open, then whirled around. “My helmet!” But her momentum was wrong, she turned too quickly and kept spinning, arms grasping for the door frame but failing to catch it.

“I’ll get it,” I said, pushing her through the door, and Baqir right after her.