Chapter 12: Shame

"Why are you smiling?" Layla asked.

"My muscles are tight." Milo pointed at the violet bruise on his cheek, where the swelling stretched the skin around his eye and pulled at the corner of his mouth.

For punctuation, he opened the split in his lip with his tongue and, like a vampire, licked the fresh blood off.

Layla tilted her head and drew a breath for the follow-up, but Milo asked faster.

"How are you even out here? The whole place is sealed."

"I was on my way to the bathroom when I heard plague and lockdown come out of an office in the same sentence." The girl smoothed her coat, visibly pleased with herself. "I didn’t wait for a third word. Nearest exit, straight line, and here I am."

She checked on Grace, who was pacing the front path with the phone at her ear. Too far off to hear anything quieter than a scream.

Her whisper came warm at his ear. "Should we tell her about yesterday?"

"We were treated." Milo matched her volume. "She’ll hear Misprint and stop listening, so let her deal with the people who are actually sick."

While making the argument, he tracked the baton’s black outline behind the second-floor brick. Previously gliding as if emergency seals did not exist for it, it now stopped.

If the treatment worked, he and Layla were clean. The four bullies at the bend were another matter. No one had tested them, much less done anything about an infection.

Seb’s blood went up Tessy’s nose in the morning. By early afternoon, the school was sealed.

In the air, the thing could drift for days without raising a cough. In the blood, it showed inside an hour. That was the hypothesis.

Patient zero was probably that girl, who had only come downstairs to fetch a report.

"How are we supposed to do that?!"

The shriek came from the path.

"Miss Grace? We’re right here." Layla walked over to her. "What did he say?"

"Mr. Thwaite wants us back inside the building." Grace had both hands on the phone now, and neither was steady. "He says there are matters to discuss in person. And that nobody should be outside. Containment." The earpiece murmured, and she nodded at it as though the man could see her. "From what they’ve seen, it spreads by blood."

...Bingo?

One look at the darkening cheek and the fresh red seam in his lip put Grace a step back, off the gravel and onto the grass.

The earpiece murmured on, but none of it came clear. With every sentence the woman’s face fell further, and at the last one she looked at him as if she’d been ordered to pick him up bodily.

She took the phone off her ear and thrust it out in front of her, so the principal could hear the argument for himself.

"Sir, the student, the ex-student, is bleeding! You want me to bring him inside? With everyone else?"

"It spreads by blood, right?" Milo cut in, the words tugging at his split lip. "Then don’t touch the blood. I’m not throwing myself at anyone."

The speaker went quiet.

"...Yes," Mr. Thwaite said at last.

"Miss Grace." Layla stepped between them. "He can walk. You won’t have to put a hand on him."

"The filtration is running as well," the principal added. "The air inside the building is clean."

Nobody was happy with the plan, which was how Milo knew it was final: he would come inside... and go straight into the isolation room beside the entry.

The main door had sealed with the building. He got to it first and put his palm out for the handle.

"NO! DON’T TOUCH THAT!!!"

He flinched, the motion grazing his knuckles along the near end of the handle. When Grace saw it happen, her eyes went straight to that hand-span of brass and stayed.

"Sir." She spoke into the phone without looking away. "The front door. Do I open it?"

Something short from the speaker.

"The key. Yes."

The secretary fed the key in at arm’s length. The bolt gave. She leaned her elbow onto the far end of the handle his knuckles hadn’t grazed, pushing the door inward.

It drew shut behind them on its slow spring.

Huh.

She wouldn’t touch what he touched.

Milo walked the entry hall half a step behind the women. Two floors up, the outline had not moved since. He had no plans to rot in a locked room while that was up there.

One door down, Milo inspected the isolation room’s outer lock. A pane of glass was set into the plain wood at head height. Inside were a bed and a water dispenser, with smooth plaster walls all around.

Grace swung the door wide and gestured him in.

At the threshold, he nodded. He wiped his palm along his bleeding lip, then ran the hand over the lock and the handle in one slow, thorough coat.

Lacquer work.

Behind him, Grace made a low sound in her throat and pressed a wrist to her mouth.

Milo stepped in, the door drifting shut on its own weight.

The pane showed him the corridor and Grace with her keys clicking in her palm, every glance ending at the smeared lock. He hung his silver jacket on the bed’s edge and lowered himself beside it, jostling the principal’s recommendation letter onto his lap.

Layla leaned into view, waving and frowning at the same time. "I’ll go find out what’s happening. Don’t touch anything."

Before Layla finished her goodbye, he lifted a hand off the bed. The secretary outside was getting far more of his attention.

To lock this door, a key had to travel the last knuckle’s width into a lock coated with his blood. Every voice Grace trusted had spent the day repeating the same three words at her.

Blood. Spread. Touch.

Grace took a deep breath. Well, the building was sealed. Every other exit, bolted from high over her head. Even if the boy left the cell, there was nowhere for him to go.

The secretary raised her key and scratched it along the wooden doorframe, a good hand’s width clear of anything he’d touched. On a phone line, it could sound like locking.

"We’re coming, sir," she said into the phone, setting off down the corridor with Layla at a pace just short of a run.

Milo’s expression flattened.

He had expected to work harder at frightening her. Almost a shame, how little it took.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "Sink and a Towel" ... ⤵︎ [!]