4.46: Emergency response

My scream sounded a lot louder in my ears than expected. It took me a moment to realise that it wasn’t just myself that I was hearing; the sound of at least a couple of dozen confused, panicking, upset people crowded the air. The ground beneath Saina was the flat, smooth stone of the Pit platform. Someone had turned the simulation off.

In my peripheral, I could see people in brown surrounding the platform, holding the crowd back. Janitors, maybe, or Malas’ apprentices, or some other group that wore service brown that I wasn’t aware of. I’d have to look up from Saina to know, and I didn’t care enough to do that.

Suddenly, Hammond was in front of me. He didn’t touch Saina, but dropped to his hands and knees in front of her. “Pavi? Pavi, please, please wake up.”

The crowd of spectators were pushed further back. Someone was sobbing nearby.

“Pavi, please, you have to be okay, you can’t just go like this, you can’t…”

Malas strode onto the platform and knelt behind Saina. “How long has she been unconscious?”

How long? How was anyone supposed to know how – ?”

“Twenty three seconds,” someone called. Probably an apprentice.

Malas nodded and gently touched her shoulder. After a few seconds, he sat back.

“Is she going to be okay?” Hammond asked.

“Vitals are all stable,” Malas replied, pulling a bottle and a small syringe out of his coat. “Neck and spine are completely intact, optic nerves both firmly attached, blow was too high to damage the teeth or jaw.” He filled the syringe from the bottle. “The skull is fractured but the pieces haven’t moved out of place, they can heal in time.”

“But is she going to be – ?”

“What do you expect me to do here?” Malas snapped, injecting Saina’s arm. “Diagnose the extent of brain damage in an unconscious patient with nothing but a material reading prophecy? How?”

Saina groaned and squeezed her eyes tight.

“Pav – ?”

“Everyone get back.”

We got back. Malas spoke gently to Saina, and she mumbled one-word responses without opening her eyes. I couldn’t understand what they were saying; it sounded like Urdu, and the only Urdu phrases that Saina had taught me were ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, and ‘I love you’. Malas shone a small light into Saina’s eyes, tapped on her in a few different places, ad then very gently picked her up to lay her on a stretcher that must have been wheeled in while I was distracted. The spectators gave doctor and patient a wide berth as she was wheeled out of the room. I made to follow, but Hammond put a hand on my shoulder.

“Let the doctor work,” he said quietly. “I’m sure they’ll let us know when she’s ready for visitors.”

If she’d be ready for visitors. If… she’d been hit across the head quite hard. There’d been a lot of blood.

And then things were a lot more quiet, except for the person crying next to me.

It was Tessa. She was staring at her hands, which had a few fleks of blood on them.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered between sobs. “I didn’t mean to.”

Right then, I wanted nothing more than to punch this stupid girl in her stupid face. She could have kill – Saina might di – Saina was hurt, because she’d attacked her, smacked her across the head with a big piece of fucking wood, all for some stupid prize in some stupid game. She should be crying. She should understand the seriousness of what her stupid, selfish, awful choices had –

Pretty much everyone was watching me while I watched Tessa. (Why me? Maybe a lot of them had heard me mention offhand, very occasionally, when it came up naturally in conversation, about how Saina and I were dating.) I took a deep breath, let it out with my stupid, irrational, completely unfounded anger, and put a hand on Tessa’s shoulder.

“This wasn’t your fault,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I hit – ”

“You hit someone in the arena? The same thing people do every single day with no consequences? The thing that about half of the games played here are specifically designed around doing? People hit each other a lot worse and a lot harder than you did, every single day, and nobody ever gets hurt. None of us had any way of knowing that this would happen. This isn’t your fault, it’s equipment failure.”

“Someone would have died if you hadn’t hit her,” said the Robin who’d been on the bridge.

“What?”

“Either me or this one,” he continued, jerking a thumb at Peter, “would’ve ended up at the bottom of the gorge. You think anyone’s surviving that fall?”

“Whatever went wrong with this place,” I said, “it was the fault of the system, and whoever’s job it was to make sure it didn’t break. Not yours.” I glanced at Hammond for backup, but he didn’t say anything. His jaw was tight, fists clenched. He turned and marched away, the crowd parting easily for him, either out of respect for his feelings or out of a firm desire not to be crushed under the distracted feet of a humanoid tank.

I left, too. I didn’t want to look at the blood any more. Or anything else in there.

Not that I had anywhere else to go, or anything else to do. I mean, yeah, I had plenty of stuff to do, but I wasn’t exactly going to be doing any of it. How could I concentrate on maths homework without knowing if Saina was going to be okay? She seemed okay, Malas had said her spine and stuff were all intact, she’d woken up just fine, but if her brain developed any swelling or there was bleeding in there or, I don’t know, any of the other weird stuff that could happen when someone got cracked across the skull with a big bit of wood and lost consciousness for half a minute, then there wasn’t all that much that Malas could do beyond what a normal doctor could do, was there? Was that kind of damage likely, or was I freaking out over a minor thing just because there was so much blood? I wished I knew more about brains.

Half an hour. I’d wait half an hour, in case Malas was doing emergency treatment and couldn’t be distracted, and then I’d go and find out if I needed to be worried or not.

I just needed to… go be somewhere. For half an hour.

I let my feet carry me wherever they wanted, and they wanted me to go sulk in my room, apparently. That was as good a place as any. I found myself pacing up and down the room, tripping occasionally on the stupid rug we’d put down to cover the damaged floor.

This was stupid. Why was I waiting? I could go right now, and if Malas was busy then I could just come back later. I could get some indication of how things were. Maybe he’d tell me she was going to be fine, and I wouldn’t have to keep worrying.

Kylie and Max opened the door. “Can we come in?” Kylie asked.

“It’s your room,” I pointed out.

“Are you alright?” Max asked.

“Of course I’malright. I didn’t get hit.” I checked my tablet. Twenty six minutes, and I’d go see her.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Kylie said. “Malas is – ”

“Malas can’t do shit for a lot of the types of injuries she could have and you know it,” I said. “But maybe nothing is wrong. Plenty of people get hit in the head with stuff.”

“Maybe,” Kylie said.

Max cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “one of the safety mechanisms on the Pit failed.”

“Pretty damn publically, too,” I pointed out. This was better, this was what we should be discussing. Rather than thinking about Saina. “With this and the ventilation thing last term, practically everyone has to be worried about things breaking down. Maybe the staff will try to repair stuff and figure out this whole Child problem and solve it without us.”

“Or with our help,” Kylie said. “If this will convince them that it’s urgent…”

“Then telling someone like Miratova or di Fiore might be a good idea,” Max said thoughtfully.

“But if we tell them and they don’t come around, we’re just making things harder for ourselves,” Kylie pointed out.

“Yes. We’ll have to see how the staff respond, I think. Then we can decide whether sharing with the class is a good idea or not. They might go in the other direction; this is going to be a PR nightmare for the school, so they might go for damage control and duct taping the problem to worry about later when things have died down, meaning that us sharing too early might elicit part of a ‘damage control’ response rather than an actually helpful response.”

“This means we’re running out of time, though, doesn’t it?” I said. “I mean, we were already on the clock because of the Fionnrath thing, but if the school’s going to start breaking down in dangerous ways…”

“Maybe,” Max said. “We don’t know enough to put a calender on this.” He retrieved a small notebook and wrote something down. “I’ve been talking to other people about weird stuff they’ve experienced; corridors not leading where they’re supposed to, minor light or intranet connectivity problems, that kind of thing. There have been several subtle inconveniences that people have just put up to a glitch or getting los or their own mistakes, and the frustrating thing with that is that some of them probably are their own mistakes, and there’d be other things that people assumed were their own mistakes and forgot about immediately, so we can’t be really sure about how many things are failing, or how often. And we don’t know the actual mechanisms that control these things so even if we had perfect data, that wouldn’t tell us much.” He bit his lip. “I’m pretty sure that there are widespread minor glitches in the school’s magic systems. But I dont’ know if that means anything. It’s possible that there have always been little glitches, or it’s possible that this is new and alarming. I don’t have the data to know if the rate of glitching is increasing, or how fast, or how dangerous that would be. So I don’t know if this means we’re running out of time or not.”

“So we wait to see how everyone reacts to this, and then decide on whether we want to rope people in?” Kylie asked.

Max nodded. “And keep working on our own in the meantime. I think that’s safest. Kayden, what are your thoughts on di Fiore?”

“Um, what?” I pulled my mind back from worrying about Saina.

“Your surveyanto. He’s said cryptic stuff about important stuff in the depths of the school before, roght? And awhile ago you told me he was interrogating you on how you knew about the compulsion against speaking about curses being spells. Do you think he knows anything new and useful, or is he just using general knowledge to dick about politically?”

“I… don’t know,” I said. “In our initiation year he did hint at being here because of something valuable under the school, so he could know secrets we don’t. Or he could’ve just been talking about the Pit in general, and wanting to work at the school for personal power reasons. Or he could’ve just been trying to impress a teenager for fun. I don’t know. Should I let him discover that I know more than I should?”

“Can you do it without revealing any plans to destroy Refujeyo?”

“Easily. He’ll assume anything weird we’ve done is part of his imaginary Miratova-centric political conspiracy.”

“If you can make yourself seem more valuable without looking dangerous to the school, I say go for it. He might share more with you and we need more information.”

I glanced at my tablet. Twenty one minutes.

“Screw this,” I said. “I have to go see Saina.”

“Malas might be – ”

“Then he can tell me to fuck off himself. I’m not waiting any longer if I don’t have to.” I headed for the door.

I had to know if she was going to be okay.