Klara has been dead for three months.
That shit dungeon had snatched her up on their way home from school, and the useless EID hadn't even found half the captives when it swept them all off.
Sara had stayed late to work on her project. She'd never finished that project. She could have gone with Klara. Maybe if there'd been two of them walking home together she wouldn't have been taken. Or maybe they both would have been.
Sara is working on a project. A different one. Obviously.
She is carefully pasting a series of panels onto a model wall, creating an optical illusion. From one angle, a butterfly; from another, a bat. It's delicate detail work, given the wall is about the size of her hand, and the panels smaller than her thumbnail. It takes focus.
Sara spends a lot of time working on models, working on homework, working on extra-curricular assignments and volunteering and anything, everything-
The models are easiest, though. She can spend hours working out plans, putting it together in her head, finding materials and cutting and clipping and pasting and folding and making it perfect, the vision in her mind becoming real. If writ a little small.
She barely even finds herself looking around. Klara used to read or write or draw with her, sometimes, but it was quiet time. They almost never spoke, comfortable in the presence of the other.
This is a nice, heated room. It's cool for late April, but nothing to winter temperatures, and the school furnaces can handle it easily. It always gets a little hot, though, when it's above zero outside, and the heat is still running. Sara keeps having to stop to catch her breath, the room feeling a little too warm and a little too close.
She opens a window. She knows it's a waste of money and heat, but she can't exactly control the thermostat, and it's stifling in here.
The air helps, at least for a little while, before she's forced to open all the windows in the art room, even letting in a little breeze.
It's not enough, though, and she thinks there must be something wrong because surely it shouldn't be this stuffy with all the windows open? She can't breathe- carbon monoxide? It's supposed to smell but- maybe something else-
-she climbs out the window. It's only one story up, and she can't get downstairs, not when that will mean going further into the building and away from the windows that are probably the only reason she's still alive. Carbon monoxide poisoning kills fast, she thinks, and sneaky, and it causes brain damage too, she's pretty sure.
Anyway, her careful scramble down the side of the building gets her to the ground safe enough. A few scrapes and maybe a mild sprain, nothing serious. More than worth it, to escape a gas leak.
Gas? Why? Air she needs air- can't breathe too thick too gas needs- need fresh air-
She stumbles over to the stairwell doors, pushing her way inside. Maybe- if she can just get higher, get out of the- gas must be on the ground floor-
She makes it up three flights, somehow, before dizziness lands her foot in the wrong place, and she skids, and slips, and falls thirteen steps down to the second floor, just outside the art room she'd started in.
The impacts don't knock her out. She lies on the second floor landing, and something is definitely broken, and she still can't breathe.
She needs to get higher, broken bones won't matter if she suffocates to death-
A custodian finds her halfway up the steps, dragging an obvious broken leg, among other injuries. She tries to fight him when he stops her progress, tries to keep crawling up the steps, desperate and mad and clawing at his arms as the panicking man holds her back and shouts for a coworker to call an ambulance.
She's restrained for the ride. They'd learned quickly the man who'd found her wasn't exaggerating how desperately she would fight, and a desperate teenager with multiple broken bones is still able to bite and scratch. A human bite is no joke.
They're forced to sedate her before they even get to the hospital, for fear she'll injure herself worse with all her thrashing.
