Before they leave they notice a corpse. It's floating in a bathtub, as if it was trying to avoid the fire that way. The face is badly burned and hard to recognize, but it doesn't have many other injuries. What hair remains is red.

They do note that. Does the corpse have enough awareness to hear them discussing it?

Not for at least an hour after they find it.

Then it will have no idea of what their plans are or the timeline for it!

For example, it will be taken completely by surprise when, after the addition of some flame-retardant materials around the perimeter of the district and smoke-scrubbing machinery held overhead with cranes, they circle back to finish up the job of burning the place to the ground!

The Amentans keep being bad in ways that Meelia didn't even consider! Meelia makes a break for the perimeter, her face badly burnt and her body clammy. She's not running as fast as she would normally and it hurts a bunch but she does not want to be burned more then the amount she already was. 

The flame-retardant materials have some things to say about that, i.e. no.

She tries climbing. If that doesn't work she's going to try to get the attention of someone outside the perimeter.

The flame retardant is a little hard to climb - you don't want flaming vermin pelting into the street - but not impossible. Fire's actually pretty loud, though, so nobody's going to hear her right away.

Meelia isn't the best amalien climber but she's still better than any Amentan. She's scaled cliff walls before - she can climb over this.

When she gets over and plops onto the ground she gets hit with a blast of flame-retardant foam.

Yuck.

Why is Amenta like this.

Well, in this case, it's so she doesn't catch anything on fire.

She'll have a long wait if she doesn't want to get out of the foam herself.

She tries to dig her way out. She is very tired and going slow.

It's not super stiff flame-retardant foam.

"Shit, is it alive?"

"Even a red wouldn't leave their kid behind in an abandoned district, what the fuck?"

"Is that a red - could be orange - I can't see -"

Meelia's hair - what's left of it anyways - is definitely red. Her face is also very badly burnt.

She doesn't know what to say so she won't say anything.

"Definitely red."

"Check missing persons just to be sure, I don't want to mercy-kill some orange who just needed a week in the ICU."

"Checking. No missing orange kids... missing purple kid but he's four foot eleven... I guess it could be an edgy stupid kid on a dare with illegal hair dye... no missing grey kids, no missing green kids, no missing yellow kids, no mi- shit???"

"What?"

"Didn't this district get shut down because they couldn't find the amalien?"

"Shit!"

She is confused and out of it but still manages to break down crying when she realizes that if she were a red kid they would have killed her rather than helping her. Her tears hurt her burnt face.

"Okay if it's the amalien we can't mercy-kill it, they're magic or some shit - who do we call about that -"

"Some blue, looks like, and the cops, and I guess an ambulance, if they can't fix her they can hardly make her any worse!"

"Right, I'll phone it in, you two keep an eye on her and get her with the hose if she tries to run for it and get pollution from here to Pioppi."

"Roger."

Meelia is not a fan of being called an it. She will wait, her expression - on what's left of her face - rather angry.

There are sirens and vehicles and then someone shoots her with a tranquilizer dart.

She has not actually seen a gun used before so she doesn't know it's coming.

Her last thought before falling unconscious is that that must be what Tish meant by paintball.

When she wakes up she is in a hospital bed. There are flowers on the bedside table, one of her ankles is shackled to the bed and one of her arms shackled to the other end, and Tish is sleeping in a foldout bed by the window looking rather wrecked.

Meelia is angry about being shackled and sad about the red haired people and scared about what happens next and also, despite the scale of everything else, really sad about Tish.

She tries not to cry but fails pretty fast.

This doesn't wake up Tish, whose sleep schedule is kind of a catastrophe, but it does make one of the medical devices she's attached to go off and an orange bustles in.