The city was still soaked in daylight. Rai made a detour back to the office to switch out his incriminating blue hooded jacket for a leather one, and find a pair of replacement gloves. When he lumped himself back in the driver’s seat, he looked his hardy self again. Sao treated himself to a nap as the sedan rattled onto the highway toward the cafe where Jasmine had agreed to meet.

When he woke, he thought he hadn’t.

“Why are we here?”

Rai was backing into a space in a terribly familiar parking lot. Outside were the high-rises with bright signage, packed together over sloping streets. The South Bank, where the Rock Pool lay in wait.

“It’s close.” Rai punched the gear shift. “In the mall. We don’t have to go into the maze today.”

And yet its heady presence loomed over them as they came through the lot doors and entered the mall, descending to the ground floor plaza where the cafe was located. A cafe where the entire south-facing wall was a window made of glass, overlooking a trimmed grassy slope - with the drainage gutters serving the concrete maze no more than a foot from where the green ended.

At least, Sao thought, the huge glowing logo mounted on the Rock Pool’s frontage was not visible from here - it faced the waterfront on the opposite side of the district.

“Do you wanna change seats?” Jasmine asked, breaking him out of his observation. She leaned forward on her elbows.

“Oh, no need. I’m just reeling, I was unsure if we’d be able to meet you and here we are.”

She smiled at him. She was very small, shorter than he’d expected, and he could see the top of her head where chestnut-color roots were growing in, above the marshmallow-lavender dye. She was also more leaner than he’d thought. She’d done daily exercise as part of her recovery plan, according to her parents, and it showed.

Behind her was the painting. It looked miniscule in real life. Sao mentally kicked himself. Real life — as if the photo she’d sent was not reality to begin with. Reality was, they were speaking to a zombie. Assumptions could be put aside.

Preparing for this meeting was a two-coffee affair for Rai.

As with her friends, Jasmine gravitated toward Rai immediately. “Mr Kir. Maya told me about you. I follow your mom’s Neocam group.”

“Just call me Rai.” Rai answered without looking at her (instead focusing on with sugaring his coffee). “My mom doesn’t really use the internet. Or take photos.”

“It’s run by fans. I really admire her. A comfy fashion icon. Plus, she has flawless taste in music.”

“Hm.” Rai finished stirring and took a bracing gulp of his first cup. “So where have you been hiding since you escaped the hospital?”

She glanced around furtively, for the drama more than actual caution. “At my stepmom’s old house. She was the kind to leave a spare key under the planter - that’s not the real hiding place, that’s just an example.” She giggled.

“She and your dad didn’t say anything about that. Did they ever go there, do you think they suspected?”

“No, it’s a bit out of the way. Of course they didn’t come looking. They think I’m… you know.”

“Uh, right. I’ve been on this case a while, picking away at this zombie situation, I forgot you were assumed dead.” Rai took another sip. “Your dad actually requested an autopsy be done today.”

“Oh no. I hadn’t even thought of that. But why would they ask for a…?”

“To make sure nothing was missed. Closure. Although finding closure’s probably not made much easier if the body has gone missing. Looks pretty bad for the hospital, too.”

“I’m so sorry. I really didn’t think – I’ll come clean. Um, soon.”

“You don’t have to turn yourself in. But could you give us a hand with just a couple of things right now?” Rai went for his phone. “We know about the E34 drug, of course. Once Orchid was found, that info started spreading. We also heard of some kind of ‘project’ that involved staging your suicides with the help of this drug, a project initiated by Hazel. On behalf of a friend.”

“Something like that.”

“At some point, a kinda guide was called in to help. This was a woman named Aquila, an ex-military E34 litigator. Though she did not introduce the drug to the project, she was one of the only people in the city with in-depth knowledge of the stuff — and conveniently had experience in staging suicides from her espionage days. However, before she could contribute, she was attacked in her home. The ‘guide’ who turned up at Orchid’s house was an imposter. This same imposter who found and attacked Maya.”

“And you thought he might come after me?”

“It’s hard to say, since we don’t know his motivations. A theory as of now is he’s some agent of the military looking to track and possibly do away with anyone involved in the reappearance and distribution of E34, though he may not know exactly how the drug works.”

“So we’re found out…”

“As for the ‘project,’ we’re still mostly in the dark. While Sapphire seems to have been an influence, the fact that she’s already cremated puts her out of the picture, I think. Aside from Hazel, Orchid, Maya and yourself, we suspect there’s one other person in your group. An older man, possibly this one.” Rai set down the picture of the yellowed man on the gurney.

A jolt ran through her. “When was this picture taken?”

“When he was taken to the mortuary, one day after Hazel was. An unidentified man who was killed in a traffic accident. But like Hazel and yourself, he was seen making a breakout - we have some camera footage suggesting he and Hazel helped each other escape. And that Hazel helped you break out, a few days later.”

“Yes. But…” Jasmine tapped the screen and pouted. “‘Unidentified man’? You’ve talked to Maya and Orchid, and they didn’t tell you about him?”

“Nope. I think they recognized him, but got defensive.”

“I see. I see how it is. They want me to take the heat.”

“We’ve talked to them a few times already. If there’s something we-”

“Not from you. Hazel. The others were always afraid of her. I guess that does make me the best person to spill all the secrets, short of sending you to Hazel herself.” Jasmine settled back in her chair under the painting. “I might as well tell you how it started. I don’t want to make it seem like I hate Hazel, or anything. I first met her a little over a year ago. She asked me to draw a header image for her profile. I was surprised, hadn’t heard of her before. But she said she’d seen some of my recent posts about my mental health, how I was taking a year off school, and she wanted to support me. She commissioned a row of black dahlias and hellebores - I think she just liked the names.

“Our content didn’t overlap at all, aside from that, but we made an effort to boost each other. It was ironic, at first, but people liked it. Not that Hazel would have stopped if they’d hated it. She didn’t try to be a people-pleaser. One moment she’d be your hero, but she could turn on you in ways that made you want to die.” Jasmine played with the neck of her thin cotton vest. “Um, sorry. I know her life was bad, it made sense that she was guarded. There were actual beatings. If she said anything about a psychiatrist, they’d throw it back in her face. Say they’d call the cops if she was found to be crazy, and she would committed to the ‘looney bin’ for the rest of her life, drooling and braindead on pills. Or they’d say Hazel was the abusive one. It was clear that she hated them, especially her dad, but she never smeared them online. I think the fact that she avoided that topic in public meant she was really afraid. Neocam and online friends were like a refuge. In real life, I saw her shy away from people, like she expected to be hurt.”

Her voice dropped several notes. “I tried calling a social service hotline and reporting them once. Nothing seemed to happen. If something did, Hazel doesn’t talk about it. She didn't know it was me. I hope.”

She appeared ready to withdraw. Rai cracked open his second cup of coffee, ripping the tops off several sachets of sugar at once and emptying them in. “You knew Hazel before the others. But you all met in person due to an event organized by Sapphire. What was she like?”

“Oh, well, we did a collaboration for Sapphire’s wellness week. She didn’t shy away from talking about difficult things, and seeing someone who had worked out all the problems we were facing, had done the lifting and made it out better than ever, made us hopeful. Hazel looked up to her, I think because Sapphire also had a difficult family life and very few means of support beside herself. Hazel boasted - or rather, denigrated herself - quite a bit in front of Saph. But… we actually never got to know Sapphire very well. It was such a short time now that I think about it.”

“She killed herself, and nobody saw it coming.” Rai slurped his coffee patiently as Jasmine just nodded and went quiet. “After that, you recruited this new guy. John Doe.”

“‘Recruited’ is a strong word. Hazel just brought him into one of our gatherings at the Rock Pool. She was the one who called the meetings, since Sapphire wasn’t… there. We were still messed up, and it was weird to suddenly have this old man around, but Hazel was clear that we weren’t going to be exclusionary. Hazel was egalitarian, that’s what I meant when I said that. Maya was pissed at first. The man himself seemed a bit uncomfortable and kept saying he would leave. But it was clear he was starving. I’m pretty sure he was homeless. His name, what he told us, anyway, was Fin. Like a fish’s fin.”

Fin. Rather than fish, Sao found himself instead imagining the grainy endcard of an old movie.

“His presence, arguing about it, perked Hazel up for a while and was actually a welcome change of pace, but it didn’t last long. Things were getting ugly for all of us. Maya’s breakup. Orchid’s mom and the cancer. And for Hazel, things were always bad. Almost every time we met, someone mentioned wanting to ‘end it all.’ It made Fin antsy. 

“He had a very strange view of suicide. He didn’t say anything normal like ‘you have so much to live for’ or ‘think of who you’ll leave behind.’ No, he made these detailed breakdowns. He got quite graphic, tearful too. He talked about people who fell thousands of feet from planes would shatter their bodies but live. A hanging gone wrong, that didn’t break your neck like it was supposed to, could leave you choking for half an hour. Even shooting yourself in the head - angle a little too low and you’d miss the brain and just blow out your eyes or teeth. Or graze the wrong nerve and get paralyzed, locked in conscious and unable to move or talk… he was trying his best to get us to drop the topic. What he said was scary, but Fin the person never was. He mostly ended up scaring himself.”

“How did Hazel take it?”

“Hazel said he was nitpicking. She really laid into him one day, asked him why he always complained but never had any suggestions. He was really cagey, but eventually let on that he ‘had a condition.’”

Sao flinched. That was a familiar little line.

“Something happened during his military time, something he couldn’t go to the hospital for. It wasn’t a mental, but a physical block. It stopped him from taking his own life. ‘I can’t die,’ was exactly how that conversation ended. On his part, anyway, he wouldn’t say more. I thought he was a bit delusional. But Hazel called him a privileged coward.

“She didn’t kick him out. She still respected him. Even if he wasn’t being truthful she sensed something wrong with him - and that’s what she liked. He always looked so beaten down. He was definitely her aesthetic, but she never took his picture because he wasn’t comfortable with it. He was a secret. She probably liked the idea of that too.”

“A secret,” Rai repeated. “Fooled us for a while. We suspected there was someone there, a fifth person taking the pictures.”

“I didn’t think of that. Hazel did ask him to handle the camera. It surprised me that she was so loyal. Or maybe it was the other way around. She controlled where he sat and when he turned up, and he took her commands like a puppy. In any case, the suicide talk stopped… for a bit after she confronted him.”

“The idea came up for her again, eventually, didn’t it?”

“One - no, it would be two weeks ago. My sense of time is a mess. Two weeks ago, Hazel had… an especially awful day. Apparently her dad and brother did something to her that she didn’t walk to talk about. She called an emergency gathering, she wanted to talk, but nothing we said got through to her. No condolences were enough, and being forceful made her clam up completely; we didn’t really know what happened. She got upset, and threatened that we’d never see her again. The horrible thing was she was doing it in this weird, quiet voice. Hazel was usually super brash, even more when she was worked up. So the fact she was so subdued…” Jasmine shook her head.

“Fin was there?”

“He was. He just sat there drinking a soda and looking nervous.” Jasmine had grown rather antsy herself. “I hid in the bathroom a while after Maya and Orchid left, thinking I’d go back out and try to talk to her. When I headed for the table again, I saw Fin hand her something and say it ‘makes it easier than any poison’. And the night after that was when she did it.

“According to Hazel, she took the pills Fin gave her but absolutely nothing happened. She got annoyed, made a video, then took some poisonous powder she’d found online. And, well, she passed out. Or died. I’m not sure what to call it.”

“She told you all this in person?”

“Yes. After the video was aired. I almost had a heart attack. It was like hearing from a ghost.” A tiny smile crossed her lips at the memory. “But when we met her again at the Rock Pool, it was like – she was even more alive than she had ever been before. And the one with the big story was Fin.

“He finally told us everything. He was the trial subject of an army drug experiment, ten years ago. To make soldiers who could resist - no, keep moving after insane amounts of bodily harm. A zombie, they were literally called that. But something went wrong - the experiment shut down and the zombies, with all their injuries and messed up insides from the unfinished tests, were left without any support.

“There was a lawsuit, but the zombies’ side got broken up, and each of his friends and allies were taken in by the military with the pretense of being cured.

“Fin had avoided being involved in the lawsuit, and with his identity secret, he was left to hold evidence including his friends’ leftover pill packs. Over time, he thought he was being watched, so he went into hiding along with his stuff. Maybe the lawsuits would come up again. They never did. None of the other test subjects were heard from again. The whole thing got covered up.

“Like seven or eight years of waiting. When he said he couldn’t kill himself, it was horribly literal. He’d tried and wished he was dead.”

They lost themselves in the clinking and mutterings of the coffee shop for a bit.

“Sounds a bit crazy, I know,” Jasmine muttered. “If he’d just said it all out of the blue, I would have brushed it off. But there was Hazel, alive thanks to his intervention. And she was furious on his behalf. That’s around when we came up with the ‘project’. Although, maybe a better way of putting it is an awareness campaign.”

“Like Sapphire’s Wellness Week.”

“It wasn’t about getting well, this time. It was about bringing awareness to those who, even at their most unwell, didn’t even have the option of giving up on life. Fin’s victimization, his… inability to take his own life, eclipsed all of Hazel’s prior issues, it was something bigger than herself and her family and what they did to her. Orchid proposed the suicide chain. She’s seen how raunchy or extreme content could be immortalized online, spreading so far and fast that the military couldn’t stop it. Attempts to halt it would actually be met with suspicion. And in the end we’d all come back alive, too, that would be a surprise for all of the followers as well as the press. The reveal. Hazel thought that was great; it integrated what she’d already done so she could be considered the founder. She really wanted to make sure the zombie experiment was known, and could never be covered up again.”

“So Fin was the friend who motivated all this,” Sao said.

“And explains why Orchid and Maya perked up when Cole suggested we throw a shitfit if anything unpleasant happened to them,” Rai muttered. “E34 wasn’t just a factor, it was the point all along. But didn’t Hazel place herself among the immortal suffering? It seems Fin snuck her the pills, but she had you all knowingly following in her footsteps. Spreading the sickness that she was protesting.”

“It sounds so stupid but… at the time we had all been considering suicide already. The fact Hazel had come back from it better than ever made us all dizzy. And there was Hazel, saying what a weight off her chest it was. How it was worth trying, dying, at least once… I was next in line. I guess you know that.”

“Walk us through.”

“Hazel gave me a packet she got from Fin. He wasn’t at the meeting when this happened, so she must have convinced him to trust her with it. It was 12 pills. She said to take them all at once, within 6 hours before… doing the thing. She didn’t tell me to stream the whole act, I just thought of it as I was setting up. You know, say goodbye and go right to it. I’d considered hanging myself before because sleeping pills didn’t work the first time...” She blushed, as if she’d admitted some youthful folly. “But I screwed up. Again. Maybe I should have asked Fin for advice. It was horrible, I didn’t expect it to go on that long. It was like a headache that just kept growing and growing but never exploded like it was supposed to. I tried to stay still at first but by the time it got really bad, for some reason I couldn’t raise my hands high enough or stop my legs from shaking. And then I blacked out.

“Hazel woke me up. I was in total darkness and it smelled weird, kinda rubbery - but clean. Hazel’s voice, somewhere I couldn’t see, said to pull an inside lever upward, and to find a bag under the corner desk. I actually went right back to sleep after that. It was the best rest of my life.” She blushed, again. “Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it?”

Rai smirked at that. “You didn’t get to see Hazel, then. She shaved her head to sneak into the hospital with Orchid. She pretended to be Orchid’s cousin, there to see her mom’s body.”

“What?” Jasmine fell right into a melodic laughter that Sao felt entirely at odds with the subject matter.

There was something about her that made him feel simultaneously shocked and a little guilty. Her giggle, her intermittent shyness and little nervous behaviorisms; ducking into her collar and bobbing her head; were all genuine. But the fact that she could face down such horror with exactly the same subdued, girlish expressions set in him a mild panic. To force down everything, not lie but limit oneself so, there must have been some horrible energy burbling beneath the surface, pressure building, just moments away from implosion. Something that urgently needed tending to in a manner he wasn’t sure of.

The sensation was oddly familiar.

“When I got up again, it was very quiet,” Jasmine went on with a little grin for Rai. “I pushed up a sort of metal bar and saw some light. I was in one of those fridges for dead people, on my back. I had some ice on my hands and I was totally naked except for a plastic sheet, but I didn’t feel alone or afraid, for some reason. I was still feeling pretty good after the long rest. And I found the bag Hazel mentioned. Clothes, a cheap new phone and some cash.

“I only talked to the others via message after that. Hazel said we had to be wary of the army catching on, and even a clueless cop intervention was bad for our timeline. But after my slow mess of a death, Orchid and Maya were petrified. My fault. So Fin said he’d put us in contact with an expert. They could be trusted; they were family to a zombie experiment victim who was covered up too. One who was supposedly taken to be cured but disappeared.

“So Orchid did her thing. She copied me a little, but in her style. Her hanging was weirdly violent. And the thing is she didn’t die, or black out, like I did. I have no idea what happened that was different. I didn’t see the the assistant–”

“We’ve been calling him a guide,” Rai said.

“I didn’t see the guide do anything but set up the noose and-”

“Wait, that was before the recording. You saw them prepare?”

“Orchid took me to her grandpa’s house after one of our meets, so I knew the address. I was… nearby when she announced the stream, so I snuck over. They didn’t know I was there.” She looked away, out the window and over the outdoor seats, down the hill. “The whole thing happened by a ground-floor window. I saw her moving, with her head gone, and I called emergency. Which I guess messed things up even worse.”

“So that was you.” Rai’s tone was gentler than Sao thought he’d ever heard before. “How did that mess things up?”

“Orchid got taken to hospital and Maya did a runner. Hazel was really upset, about the surprise possibly leaking and Maya running off. It was going to kill the buzz. She asked me to delete pictures of us together to try to throw off attempts to link us. I left a few because… I don’t know, it seemed suspicious to wipe everything.”

“Did she have any other plans?”

“Her plan was to stick to the plan. But she and Fin had some kind of a falling out. I thought they were hiding together, but last I heard from Hazel, he was asking to reveal everything early, or stop the awareness campaign altogether. The violence was too much.”

In the outdoor seating area beyond the window, the evening lights flicked on. Was it already so late? Sao cursed the summer. It wasn’t even dark yet, the sun would be burning just as furiously as it had all day for a good hour or two longer. The lights were being wasted.

“But Hazel said extreme shows would garner more awareness. We just had to stand by our work.”

Her concluding words were staggered, as if she were searching for a better conclusion. She came up with none, and shrank back in her chair, slack and still. Zombie-like.

Rai had his hands tented over the now-emptied coffee cups. “And?”

“I haven’t heard from her since then. Or any of them, until Maya’s message today. I suppose we were all waiting on Hazel to call us back.”

“I’m glad you were willing to talk.”

“Obviously the others were expecting me to.”

They regarded the large window for a while. A few unwitting patrons had ventured out into the sun with their drinks, as if beckoned by the night lights coming on. If anything, the incoming sunset made for an even less pleasant viewing experience than the midday sky. Today’s almost hurt to look at. Blood-red scrapes across a sky rendered flesh-colored by the smog.

“I should have bagged my head,” Jasmine said, “When I hanged myself. To guarantee I’d suffocate faster.”

“Please don't say that,” Sao answered, reflexively.

“But I mean it. Does it ruin the good girl vibe?” Her tone was biting. But when he looked, all he saw was a young girl with a diffident blush who wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Your friends said that about you,” Rai said. “That you were a good one.”

“They didn’t really say it out of respect.”

“I know. They meant that you had it easy. You had suicidal ideations since you were little. Did they think that wasn’t enough?”

“The problem was I didn’t have a good reason to want to end my life. I’m not abused or disabled or marginalized. I had friends before Hazel and I could have made more. My super-young stepmother wasn’t bad - just the opposite, actually. She or dad paid for anything I asked, without question. I got everything I needed to get better. I actually have no reason to want anything to be better because it’s technically all fine. Even if a god came and asked me what I needed to make my life better, I wouldn’t know. I just…”

She sniffed, a deep breath to steady herself. But when Rai moved the tissue dispenser her way, the tears began.

“I just can’t seem to be happy. Life just feels like a constant downhill slide. It’s slow but it doesn’t stop. Any good there is, is bookended with a horrible climb and an inevitable fall back down that meant it wasn’t worth it. My therapist asked me to picture a time in my life when I was happy. I blanked. My problem is that I can’t get over myself. One thing just leads to another.” She took a tissue, but did not use it, just looked at it. “When I think about vacations, it’s all the fights and stress that went into planning, the money and the fear of getting lost or forgetting a map or sun cream or socks. And we’d have to talk to someone and get kidnapped or separated or raped or sold or killed. Times with mom, their goodness is just inflated, they’re only good because they won’t happen anymore, and I remember all the fights and how bad I was as a kid, when I refused to walk on the street or didn’t want to wake up for school or lost something and blamed her and we screamed and screamed and will never be able to say sorry now, and any memory goes right back to painful. Even something small like just taking the bus; there’s the lines and the ticket I could forget or one day not have money for, and the argument with the driver and the people, and even if I get on, the seats, and sharing them with a person who’s loud, who’s mean, who’s sick or is slow to walk and stops the line when I need to get out – and, um. Stupid problems. Self pity, that’s all it was...”

“Sounds like anxiety,” Rai said.

Sao marveled at his disengagement. His own head felt like it was being pressed in a trap.

“But anxiety’s not a reason to be really sad,” Jasmine snuffled.

“Is that what you were told? You were medicated for depression too.”

“I shouldn’t have qualified. I think it’s just… because I played up the bad because I couldn’t do the good any justice.”

“Is that what you think, or what Hazel made it sound like? Because you didn’t have visible hardships like them?”

Jasmine went quiet and set her brown doe eyes out on the darkening green again. The grass and the single valiant coffee-drinker who had remained outside had turned black under the bleeding sky. The man was wearing a jacket, too. Perhaps he was the sort who loved sunsets, enough to sweat buckets for the sake of a better view.

“Hazel wasn’t wrong. I never hurt myself before the hanging,” Jasmine said. “I don’t know how serious any of my ideas were before that. Maybe the reason I went ahead with Hazel’s plan at all was because it wasn’t really suicide. I expected to live. And I’m glad I did. It’s strange to say in hindsight, and I… accept that Hazel isn’t a totally good person. But if she asked, I’d do it all over again.”

Rai was quiet, his gloved hands squeezing one of his dried-out cups.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad that you’re alright,” Sao said.

She looked at him, spearing him with a look of abject pity.

“Maya and Orchid didn’t like you much, did they?” she said. “Nice-guy condolences and nodding in agreement just bounce off people like that. They think it’s lame. Hazel picked fights because she was looking for something to pierce through the nonsense. Even if it was something more nonsensical…”

“You think her project’s nonsensical?” Rai asked.

The person outside had finished with their coffee. They pulled up their hood, a swift movement that caught Sao’s attention. Face shadowed, they headed for the door to re-enter the cafe.

“No,” Jasmine said. “I… I think I’m bringing it down.”

“What about Fin? He didn’t like how this was going, right? Any chance he’s in on the recent sabotage? Orchid’s death going haywire, Maya not getting to do her video. Would he happen to have another connection?”

Connections, Sao thought. A professional-sounding term for something that was such a mess, a tangle of people and places, which themselves were always messes. Where did the outdoor drinker go?

“No way. You didn’t meet him, but he’s sweet as can be. Actually harmless. Downtrodden horribly. No friends and no family of any kind. He’s been in hiding almost ten years and you can tell. He knew Aquila, but that was because of the lawsuit. The attack I saw with Orchid… no, I can’t see that as someone he has any control over. The way the guide cut the wire for the noose…” A shiver went through her, and that was familiar too. “I should have called the cops or something, then and there.”

She shook her head and stood, abruptly. “I want to get another drink. Do you want anything? A coffee, maybe?”

“I’ll get one myself in a minute.”

Off she went. They had a good view of the counter. She wouldn’t be out of their sight, as long as they kept their eyes peeled in that direction.

But Sao wanted to look at the window again.

“I know how she feels,” Rai said.

“Huh?”

“Not being good or bad enough.”

Some easy platitudes flowed through Sao’s mind the moment he heard that. Pulling together cordial responses was second nature to him and some of them sounded quite good. Don’t sell yourself short. Our worth is really up to whoever sets our salaries. You’re doing better than I am. But he considered Jasmine’s disdain when he’d fed her one of them. Her glare, her swerves away from his topics, her exhausted attempts at toughness. They reminded him so distinctly of Rai.

Sao had done a pretty poor job of relating to these women thus far. They weren’t seeking comfort and easy passage from difficulty, Jasmine had said as much. Rai, though, had been doing unusually well. He had the secret sauce. I know how she feels. Rai was trying to bring him closer to that secret. But what could possibly be said in response that wasn’t horrendously intrusive?

He set that matter aside for later and kept his mouth shut.

In a bid to tune himself into something less stressful, he wondered where the blue-hooded patron had gone. What a coincidence, that colour of the hood–

Sao stood up so quickly he knocked the tissue dispenser off the table.

That was when the fire alarm went off.

—

Rai’s first reaction to the alarm was irritation. It looked like Sao was about to say something, right before the blaring started and everyone was up and running.

Rai replayed the timing of events in his mind, but wasn’t sure he’d got it right. Sao stood up like he’d been electrocuted, and then the fire alarm started wailing. Or Sao had stood up, like he knew something was about to happen?

Or maybe he’d gotten it garbled and Sao had stood up after the noise began.

Rai joined the movement of evacuees. He was groggy. Contemplating Sao gave him a headache sometimes. And before that, he had been thinking about her again.

They made a rush for the door that led back to the plaza. Only, Sao kept stuttering every other step, glancing back at the glass door that led to the confined patio. He meandered near the serving counter to get a better look. Was he so soft in the head that he thought anyone would be sitting out there, or that people outside couldn’t hear the eardrum-bursting sirens? Rai wanted to scream at him. Luckily he’d become accustomed to not touching the guy, or he would have grabbed him by the neck and waistband and pitched him out the door.

But watching Sao, he remembered who they were both supposed to be looking out for. Jasmine.

He must have wandered even more off track, because Sao was now the one yelling at him from somewhere closer to the door that they had to go; it wasn’t safe. A hot prickling sensation was building at the back of his neck. Yes. They needed to go.

With the fire sirens shrieking right overhead, liquefying his brain between his ears, Rai scanned the emptying cafe.

Jasmine was ducked near the trash receptacles. She was holding her cheek where she’d been grazed in the stampede. Rai tried to pull her up and she screamed something, eyes closed, pressing him away with her stained hands. He saw that the wound was not a graze, but a cut. A fairly deep one.

Sao was yelling, and Jasmine was yelling and the alarms were yelling. Rai senses were tripping all over each other, and his feet weren’t doing much better. He dragged Jasmine toward the door, where Sao was waiting, uncomfortably wedged in the crowd while trying not to touch anyone.

The door slammed shut before they made it out.

Rai’s mouth filled with the taste of bile.

Before them stood a very tall man in a blue hood and a high collar.

Jerking back, Rai dropped Jasmine, and swore feebly. The hooded man was on them in an instant. As Rai fumbled to block his path, Jasmine scrambled away at lightning speed for an injured woman with blood spattered over her eyes.

Rai caught hold of the hooded figure's arm and was thrown back like he was made of paper.

One of Rai’s favorite movies involved a masked and hooded killer with a knife running wild over the course of a high school theater production. It was more of a mystery than a horror flick, where the killer was known to be one of the cast who was picking off the rest one by one in visually striking and frankly unfeasible ways. One of the kills involved lifting a fully grown man (playing a high schooler) and nailing him to a wall by stabbing a prop machete through his hands.

The trapping of this movie, and indeed many of its spin offs, was that the culprit ended up being the twig-armed soft-spined ‘loser’, the nerd, or the sensitive boyfriend that nobody suspected, and who also couldn’t possibly have lifted a fully grown man three feet in the air. Rai didn’t mind too much. There was a secret stroke of catharsis to believing the little guy could prevail. Plus the whole scenario was so unrealistic that he couldn’t help but feel if a real, rational person were dropped into that runaround, they’d get out without a hitch.

Rai hadn’t felt very rational nor real for the better part of a week.

The blue-hooded figure was, modestly speaking, a head taller than him and moved like a guillotine. Rai felt like he was flinging himself at concrete when he hit him, and when the man shoved him back, Rai hit concrete again, this time literally.

At some point in the scuffle, Jasmine had been caught, and cut again. Blood was smudged all over the once (mostly) polished floor, making it slippery. The sirens had masked the screams of the second strike and Rai wished he could blow them up. He couldn’t hear anything anymore. Jasmine was still upright, at least, shuddering with her hair all frizzed like a terrified cat. Her face and neck were dripping red, as was the hand clenched to her bleeding throat.

Finished with her, the attacker turned to him, pivoting on a heel and striding forward so casually Rai thought he’d walk right by. Rai held his hands out. With a sort of curving motion, like he was coming in for a hug, the attacker held out his hands too, in which there were two short hunting knives. Over the sirens on top of sirens and the screaming that could be assumed rather than heard, Rai registered an even higher pitched ringing. Fear.

He lunged and the attacker took the lunge, and swung back with two or three times the force. Rai felt a ripping sensation; his glove; but also a crunch and squirming as the knife pierced what was inside the glove.

Rai was propelled back by his hand, impaled, falling for what felt like a full 360 degree rotation until the tip of the knife landed in one of the tables. He dropped to the ground with a thud. The attacker gave the top of the knife an affectionate punch which secured it in place and sent a stream of not-quite-pain but general unpleasantness up Rai’s arm.

Then the attacker darted through the patio door, hopping the tall fence and disappearing down the hill.

By then, the state of the world was beginning to clear up for Rai and he felt ridiculous.

Sao’s voice from behind the closed door wasn’t helping. “Don’t hurt them! He has nothing to do with this! He doesn’t know anything! Please, I’ll do whatever you say, just–”

It barely sounded like him. Rai squeezed his eyes shut and stood. It took a while for his shaking hand to dislodge the knife; dislodge the hand that had been pinned. The blade left a hole clear through his palm; he could see the cafe in disarray out the back of it. He pressed the glowing skin together so it would seal up. “Jasmine?”

“I’m here.”

She was closer than he expected. She was up on her feet, walking close to him, one hand wrapped in tissues and pressed to her neck. “He only cut me a little. You scared him off.”

I didn’t do shit, Rai thought, but she sidled up to him and pressed her face and jumble of matted purple hair into his shoulder, breathing wet raspy bubbles into the leather.

Sao’s bleating from just outside the door was setting his nerves on fire. Rai nudged Jasmine slowly toward the exit and pulled back the bolt with his one good hand, the other holding the knife it had been struck with. “Can you help me open this?”

Jasmine pushed with her free hand. She almost stumbled as the sliding door flew aside, revealing Sao pulling from the other side. Sao stepped away as the two toppled onto the cafe welcome mat.

“You’re okay,” he said.

“I’ve been better,” Rai mumbled.

Sao hit him with a fleeting smile and backed away. The crowd seemed to part for him. Nasty as it was to note, Rai thought Sao wore fear like a fashion statement too.

And the police were there along with the crowd. They had been the ones to add just that extra layer of sirens. They claimed to have received a tip that a man in a leather jacket was assaulting a woman, and so they put him in handcuffs and took him away.