Nada's Escape

5- Smoke.

Smoke. I look away from the stage, frowning. I peruse the crowd of students filling the hall. No one else has noticed. A girl two years ahead turns, sensing my gaze. I cower back down in my seat, hiding amongst the crowd before she can glare at me.

But now I can definitely smell it. Like burning plastic. Heads turn all around me, looking for the source. Then the stage curtains catch ablaze and the room erupts. I duck underneath my seat, huddling down. Leather shoes vibrate the floor. A line of chairs topples behind me. Crash. Scream. Clatter.

I scuttle mouse-like, under the chairs towards the side door. My head spins from the noise. I reach a death-trap of chair legs and rise with trepidation. A blast of acrid smoke leaves me choking. I stumble further on. Where is the exit? Where is everyone?

My hands run into flesh, my eyes gushing. I push. No one is moving. I can see white and navy uniforms writhing pointlessly against the door. The lights spark and darken. A boy peels away from the mass, shoving me to the ground. My head cracks against the boards. Pain lashes down my back. Growl. Crackle. Sizzle.

I look up, terror pulling my eyes wide. The smoke drifts aside and in the glow of the flames I survey the hall. The stage is taken, piles of chairs melting in fiery blue and green lines. All chairs are empty. The doors are locked. Around the edges frantic bodies scramble against the doors, maybe fifty left trapped. Heat brushes my cheeks and I flinch as a poster, burnt from the wall, flutters past in an eerie up-draft.

Then I watch it emerge from the flames. A beast created from heat and burning fuel. It gallops down the length of the hall, stampeding, devouring, cackling.

"Get up, you lazy turd," A voice invades my dream. I jolt upright, my mouth filled with phantom smoke so real I feel the papery touch of ash flakes on my tongue. Heart pounding, I blink at the grey stone of my cell and at the miserly morning light leaking through the open door. I try to cement myself in the present, grazing the wall with my hand and fighting to stay conscious. I'm so tired.

I was up all night clinging desperately to a ladder and botching the latest escape. Then, enthralled, I was marched back into Seven and ordered to sleep. The icy tendrils of that command still slide, like physical worms, along my thighs. I shiver in revulsion at the violation. How could they be so-

"Didn't you hear me, fighter?" The warden's voice crushes my thoughts. Gravelly, but female, it must be Mildrith, the only female warden. I gaze blearily up at her; skin and hair brown like the bags of mushroom compost we'd spread on the vegie garden back home. In her eyes that brown is tossed with green, like manure.

She grabs my shoulder with a meaty hand and shakes. My head begins to ache but I am too rattled to make a move. Mildrith hauls me out anyway and I stumble behind. I roughly take in that the hall beyond my cell has now become a dining area. Four folding plastic tables and benches have taken up residence in the centre and the other girls are nowhere to be seen.

"School. Now." Mildrith growls when we reach the main doors. She roughly shoves me at the wood and I catch myself on my wrists. I expect the brutality. It can only be expected, I suppose, when the wardens equally expect violence from me. I lean into the door to open it and stumble out, my headache protesting the light. A wisp of heavy smoke tangles in my lungs and I wretch. Eyes blurring in the smoky wind I spot the source. The drover's shed is aflame.

I stagger out of the streamers of smoke, the taste of misery mixing with ash. Those wardens really stick it where it hurts. That was our refuge from their spying eyes, the source of our nails and wood, and the hidey-hole for the last of my belongings. Just a collection of mementos, really: scraps of paper, a broken pencil and a scrolled-up T-shirt for a rainy day. They didn't know how important it was until we built our escape plan on it. A soon as we show our hand, just an overlooked pile of sticks, they destroy it. I miss it already.

My head pounds and my skin itches. I need to get away from Mildrith, evaluate the situation and plan what comes next.

"I just need to freshen up." I say to Mildrith as I back towards the toilet block. Her middle-aged features fold menacingly as she follows after me.

"Two minutes, no more," She warns.

"Of course," I lie and slip through the swinging door in triumph. Of course, I do have ablutions to take care of, but really I need the space to think. The terror-filled sleepless night presses on my head as does the cubicle wall but the gears of my mind are ticking over.

Seven's walls are approximately 15 metres high or more than 46 rungs on a ladder. The gatehouse is always manned and the drover's hut will be utterly destroyed in a few short hours. Outside Seven the Huntsmen have a veritable village; no doubt the wardens live in some of those houses when not on duty. Where the lights cluster around larger buildings must be their headquarters. Likely they keep weapons close by there. There was no indication of vehicles anywhere. Other than that village there is nothing else out there. Most likely because we're in the middle of the desert where even budgerigars barely fly.

I curse at the hopelessness of our situation and my inability to find a way out of it. I curse that that one Huntsman decided to go for a walk beside the walls of Seven in the wee hours of the morning and caught us. I curse their devilish powers and their ham-fisted schemes to convert us to be their minions. Cursing won't help us but it makes me feel better, almost erasing the aching of my head.

"Let's go Nada," Mildrith calls and I know why she's decided to interrupt. "Finley's here to see you." I hurriedly replace the rectangle of frosted glass in the minuscule toilet window, where I'd espied Finley's arrival myself. My shirt, now a ragged crop top from where I'd taken fabric for our ladder ropes, rises almost to my nipples at the movement. I rip it down again and bounce to the cement floor, meeting Mildrith in the body of the bathroom area.

"You'll need to wear something nice, and preferably clean." She sniffs in a tone of false cordiality. It's better than I usually get at least. If I wasn't going to see Finley there would be no faked civility. The wardens like visiting Huntsmen to think they run Seven ethically, as if there is any way to ethically kidnap and imprison children.

"Don't have any," I grunt with a scowl. Not only is cleanliness pretty low on my priority list but I can never hold on to belongings in this place.

"I thought that might be the case." Mildrith's face twists. Wait; was that a grin, or a grimace? An attempt at humour is rare among the ever-changing ranks of stony-faced wardens. She chucks me a bundle of cloth and almost in the same motion grabs my shoulder.

"You can change on the way," she snaps. Now that's more like warden behaviour, I think to myself as she starts hauling me back into the courtyard. Before the main doors I shrug off her hand.

"I'll walk there myself," I say, not at all wanting to see that infuriating Huntsmen but faking compliance for a few minutes anyway. I readjust my cropped shirt and stalk down the centre of the hall, approaching its second exit: the grate. I unravel the cloth in my hands as the wardens in the antechamber room press the button to open the grate. The fabric in my hands can barely contain its deadly floral pattern. Frills garnish the bottom, as useless as parsley in a butcher's cabinet, and puffed sleeves ruin the top of the dress. I grimace; someone chose this specially to make me look like a buffoon.

In the passageway beyond the grate Mildrith glares at me pointedly and I begrudgingly shrug the dress over the top of my ripped T-shirt and shorts. I look like I'm playing dress up but there is no way they're getting me to give up my shorts for this hideous contraption, no matter how dirty they are. I stare with loathing at the frosted glass door at the end of the passageway. In the light from window, the entrance to the visiting room gleams as though daring me closer. Mildrith is a solid wall behind me as I regrettably acquiesce to the summons.