Caution

Eleanor didn't want to go blind.

She backed away from the fume hood, letting memory guide her toward the sink and the adjacent emergency station, arms outstretched to feel for the counter's edge, the sink's metal lip. Her eyes watered and burned, pain searing into her skull. Half-formed thoughts wrestled with each other for her attention, pushed back by the all-consuming fire in her eyes, and the panic that had flooded her body when everything went so wrong.

She stumbled forward, foot catching on a trash can with a hollow, plastic clatter. She had to be close, hands raking the air for another landmark.

Her hand caught on the emergency shower handle as she fumbled through the blur before her, and water poured from above, soaking into her clothes and hair. Eleanor tilted her head up for a second, forced her raw eyes open and let the water hit them, let it rinse the spots on her skin where the liquid had splashed her.

She clicked the emergency shower off, got her bearings, and lunged straight ahead for the eyewash station. She hunched over it, flipping the protective yellow cap off the nozzles and starting the water with a forceful push on the paddle by her right hand. Warm saline solution mixed with tears and acid, coated her eyelashes, and brought a brief relief from the burn that had bored from her eyes into her skull. She kept her eyes open wide, pulling at her eyelids, hoping she had been fast enough.

Every movement had felt so calculated and so slow, like she was rehearsing for a crisis rather than living through one.

In case of emergency, she thought, remembering the safety training a few months earlier, the eyewash station must be located within ten seconds of the fume hood. It couldn't have taken her more than a few seconds to get to the eyewash station after patting herself down and ensuring the acid hadn't hit any other exposed skin. It had been torture to try and focus as the pain in her eyes grew more urgent.

She had walked by the metal and plastic contraption, with its yellow cap and green pipes, more times than she could count. She hadn't bothered looking at the emergency station twice. It was as mundane as a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. Something she saw so often she forgot about it, something she couldn't have described, or told anyone where to find.

Working in the lab had become second nature over the last year. She got to the graduate offices in the morning before anyone else did, to sit at her desk in the near darkness and sip on her coffee, read through an article or two and, when the coffee was either tepid or gone, start working on her analyses. She would plug her earphones in and let herself into the lab, taking a minute each time to admire the state-of-the-art, expensive machines, the clean counters and organized glassware, the cabinets marked with different colored stickers based on the danger level of their contents.

She was a gear in the clockwork of the lab, synching up with every other person, every other piece, understanding how to keep things neat, and organized, and safe. Eleanor knew she looked absurd, but she wore her purple latex gloves, and kept her safety glasses on at all times, even though they slipped down the bridge of her nose. She wore a lab coat, and looked the picture of a scientist, never breaking protocol.

Until today.

Today she had missed a step. The clockwork lab, dependent on her, ground to a halt.

She pictured the red warning label she'd memorized, the dire warnings on most of the chemicals she worked with. The instructions she'd internalized but ignored, the kind of thing she expected she would wake up and remember in the middle of the night when she was long retired, the words playing in her mind like a ghost prayer.

In case of contact with eyes, flush liberally for fifteen minutes. Seek immediate medical attention.

In the early morning quiet, Eleanor remained folded over the eyewash station, turning her head in a figure-eight over the saline stream. She hunched in place, dread spreading like a cryogenic cold through her veins. She couldn't tell if the burning was subsiding, being replaced by irritation from the saline; she couldn't tell if she could really see, vision blurred and limited to the glassy cloud of the saline solution and the cold metal sink below. Her back ached, and her eyelids fluttered in protest as she kept them propped open, counting the seconds away.