I didn’t move from there for much too long. The second warning bell went off somewhere behind a distant mountain range, and only the certain knowledge that I was about to be incinerated got me into motion. I levered myself onto my hands and knees and started lurching down the corridor in a three-legged crawl, still pressing down on the back of my skull with the hand that had got banged. Of course I should have pulled myself together and taken some kind of remedy, but at the time, I was still completely sure on some visceral level that I was keeping my brain from falling out of the back of my head.
Somewhere behind and above me, I heard a door bang shut loudly and footsteps coming, along the metal walkway and down the spiral stairs and into the corridor. I kept on creeping along, too slow but moving. I knew it wasn’t anybody I knew, and then I knew it was Liesel, but I still kept crawling because I couldn’t do anything else yet. Then she caught up and grabbed me under the arms and heaved me standing. Her face was still angry and flushed under the pink shimmer, but what she said, harshly, was, “Where is your room?” and she helped me limping on towards it.
We got about halfway before the final warning siren went off, and as it did, the door three down from where we were slid open and Orion came out. He froze like a deer caught stealing hubcaps in the headlamps of a police car, then noticed that I was there to fall down in front of a wall of mortal flame and die rather than to yell at him. Not that I didn’t do my best to combine the activities as he grabbed me under the other arm, but he ignored the violent wheeze I aimed in his direction and helped Liesel get me into his room just as the loud crackling went off behind us, accompanied by the first panicked scrabbling of mals starting to run. Orion paused in the door to throw a last longing look down the corridor, then slid it shut with an unhappy bang as Liesel heaved me onto the bed.
“What happened?” Orion asked, coming over.
“She fell coming out of the bathroom,” Liesel said shortly.
I didn’t fill in the additional details. Knowing she got furious enough to commit murder but also couldn’t go through with it in the end gave me rather a fellow feeling for her. “Give me a glass of water,” I muttered, and when Orion gave it to me, I took a few deep breaths to temporarily keep from vomiting and then sat up and cast the simplest of my mum’s healing charms on the water. Then I took out the little plastic bottle I keep on hand for exciting emergencies like this one, downed it, and drank the whole glass of water as fast as I could. I managed to keep it down for a count of fifteen, and then I lurched over to the floor drain and did vomit, energetically. Afterwards I rolled away and curled on my other side with a groan, but it was a conscious protest, not whimpering; I was already better.
“What is that?” Liesel said, picking up the bottle from where I’d dropped it, and giving it a wary sniff.
“Tabasco and butterscotch,” I said. That isn’t actually part of Mum’s charm; it’s my own addition, of which I’m sure she’d disapprove quite a lot, but something about forcing the horrible mixture down makes the healing charm work lots quicker. I think there’s even some kind of science behind that, worse-tasting medicine works better or whatever, but it might just be the mana from deliberately making myself swallow something that awful. It doesn’t actually have to be Tabasco and butterscotch, it just has to be absolutely vile and yet still technically edible, so you don’t waste the healing charm on being poisoned.
Anyway, after that I wasn’t concussed or in howling pain anymore, but I still felt extremely sorry for myself. I climbed back onto Orion’s bed and just lay there for a bit to recover. Liesel started talking to Orion like a normal and civilized person, getting back only mumbled and distracted answers. “If he tries to open the door, brain him with the chair,” I muttered after the third time.
“I’m not going to open the door,” Orion said sulkily.
“Shut up, you lunatic, you’d absolutely open the door,” I said. “What if the wall down by Aadhya’s had gone this time?”
“I’d just—have come back here,” Orion said, as if it were that simple to deal with being caught between two walls of mortal flame sweeping towards each other, each with a leading wave of frenzied mals, and no exit anywhere in between. Nobody would open the door in a cleansing, not even if they heard Orion Lake or for that matter their own mum calling on the other side. Anybody stupid enough to do that died during freshman year when they did open the door and got eaten by the myna grabber on the other side. “I wasn’t planning to go anywhere.”