Crawlers

11:25pm

It was like someone had dashed acid in Jasmine's face. Her visibility, fogged to start with, instantly dropped almost to zero as her eyes wept furiously to protect themselves. Though she was pressing her school tie to her mouth and nose with both hands, the gas still sent what felt like sparks to the back of her throat, scorching down into her lungs. But she kept running. 

It was impossible to tell exactly how many pairs of feet were pounding the Barbican carpet behind her - it sounded like a lot of them. She hoped Samantha and Lauren and Ben were still with her (If anyone got caught, she told herself, they would have made a noise - wouldn't they?) But even if they were, they definitely weren't alone. The multiple clumps of closing footsteps were the only sounds Jasmine could hear. 

Her heart juddered in her chest; panic jangled in her mind. The way those adults had snuck up on them was like something out of a nightmare. The silence now also grated at her nerves: Jasmine would have preferred shouts and noise, even the screams that had come from Hugo and the sentries, but there was nothing but footsteps. 

Ahead of her in the mist and a little off to the left, a row of yellow lights appeared. The lights had black markings that resolved themselves into stick figures, male and female. Jasmine had just identified them as toilet signs when the grey concrete wall they were attached to abruptly loomed out behind them, forcing Jasmine to swerve left. The pursuing footsteps followed her, getting closer. 

Jasmine hoped it was Ben and Samantha and Lauren back there, but she was so scared it wasn't, she didn't dare look round to find out. 

As she ran, she tried to keep the position of the main entrance and her relationship to it anchored in her mind. By setting out at an angle from the doors, the balcony walkway had taken her off at a tangent, and this wall Jasmine was following had turned her even further. At some point, she hoped, there would be another way down to the foyer: if there wasn't, she was taking Ben, Samantha and Lauren into a dead end. But if she did find a way down, she would then have to find her way back to the main entrance from wherever she'd ended up - and the Barbican was hard enough to navigate even when it wasn't filled with tear gas and enemies. 

She needn't have worried about finding the stairs, at least: to Jasmine's horror, with her next step her left foot dropped further than she'd expected. She lurched forward, barely keeping her balance, feet clattering, pain jarring through her ankles and knees. But the flight was mercifully short: twelve steps later she was on flat floor again. As footsteps thundered down the stairs behind her Jasmine took a chance. She pulled the tie from her mouth, yelled 'Left!' and swerved again, hard. 

Instantly one of the foyer's giant concrete pillars seemed to lunge at her out of the thickening fog. Jasmine managed not to run straight into it: instead she used it to orient herself, running around it. She was now moving parallel with the wall she'd followed earlier past the toilets. Now, however, she was one floor down, and running in the opposite direction - or so she hoped. 

Jasmine was now on the foyer's upper level - where the main entrance was. She was conscious of the space opening out around her but the gas was thicker down here: it seemed to claw at her eyes. Denied the senses of sight and smell she concentrated on sound, but what she heard was strange and frightening. Gasps and hisses came out of the fog all around her. She heard sudden movements: their origins and direction were impossible to identify, but her heart was gripped with a sudden, icy certainty that there were living things in the mist with her, reacting to her, aware of where she was. At any second, she was sure, someone or something was about to leap out and grab her. But still the pursuing footsteps continued to pound at her heels, driving her on. 

Was she going the right way? Were the others even still with her?