At the noise of the bullet, Hot Sauce seemed to come online again—she dragged Nona into a tiny alleyway, away from the stampede. She said, “Go!” and Nona was grateful to have her back, grateful to let her take the lead. They had to climb mounds of leaking garbage sacks, and Nona cut herself terribly on a jaggedy old can. She squealed at the pain, but stuck her hand in her pocket to hide it. The noise grew terrible: alarms, yells, backfiring trucks. They scrambled up and down fences—the wires cut their hands—they skidded and fell down in broken and half-demolished buildings. It seemed like the sound was always right behind them and they couldn’t get away from it.
“Nona!” called a voice. “Nona! Hot Sauce! Girls!”
This voice came from a truck with a grille. This truck had mounted the pavement and other cars were honking at it. It was the Angel, sitting in the passenger’s seat. She had the window rolled down, and she was twisting herself into a knot to open the back door. She bawled, “Get in!”
Hot Sauce and Nona didn’t need asking twice. They threw themselves at the truck, scrambled up into the rough, potholed back seats, and shut the door behind them, panting. Noodle was there lying in the bit where your feet went, looking baleful at all the noise and interruptions.
The Angel said to someone, “Drive.” They were separated from the passenger seat by a fine black mesh, but the Angel had peeled it back so that she could look at them. She said sharply, “Are you hurt?”
“Nona got cut,” said Hot Sauce, grimy and dirty and bloody herself.
“No, I didn’t,” said Nona quickly. “I thought I did, but I didn’t.”
“You’re covered in blood.”
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
The Angel, having ascertained that neither of the girls was bleeding out, said— “Buckle yourselves in. Both of you deserve to be bloody pancakes. Kevin was in hysterics.”
“How did you know where we were?” asked Nona, wrestling with the seat belt.
“I’m not stupid—I’ve been doing doughnuts around the school building for the last half hour waiting for you two to turn up.”
Nona was amazed that she and Hot Sauce had gotten as far as the school building, but also that they had not gone further. It seemed as though they had been running for ages.
Hot Sauce said, “Where are the others?” and the Angel said, “Safe—the moment I knew you two had scarpered, I decided to pull everyone back in case they got the same idea. Go left,” she said, to the unseen driver. “For God’s sake, don’t use the motorway, everyone’s driving like maniacs. Don’t take anything that feeds onto the Civic. And don’t rear-end anyone.”
“Who is driving this fucking car,” said the driver. They had a low, terse voice and surprisingly good House.
“You, so make sure we have a car to drive by the end of the journey,” said the Angel. She turned back to the girls. She had fixed her face into steely, teacherly disapproval, and Nona writhed beneath it. She said, “Hot Sauce, I’m driving you to the shelter.”
“No shelter. I’ll bunk with Honesty,” said Hot Sauce distantly.
“As if. I dropped off Honesty myself—you know where Honesty lives, and you’d be going back in the wrong direction, inside that mess.”
“No shelter. They’re autocrats,” said Hot Sauce.
“Okay. You can sleep in—a place I know. It’s mine, but I’m not going to be using it.”
The driver said, “You’re not?”
“If I don’t go home with you, you’re going to crouch outside my door all night.”
“Don’t make it sound like it’s my idea,” said the driver.
Hot Sauce subsided into silence; Nona watched her face flatten, which meant that she had no argument to make. The Angel turned her sights on Nona instead and said briskly, “Nona, where do you live?”
Nona told them. The driver tried to crane their neck around to look at her, but it was simply impossible; there was too much grille and they were wearing a thick desert muffler round their head. The Angel, who could crane, had craned immediately. She said, bewildered: “I thought Joli was funning me. The Building? Inside of it, you mean?”
“Yes,” said Nona, who was about to elaborate on exactly where but remembered Palamedes and Camilla’s warnings, and shut herself up in time. She said, “I do live there, really truly.”
The Angel righted herself in her seat. She said, “We’ll go there first, then.”