Page 56 of Emma on Fire

A BLAST OF Beethoven’s Ninth blares from the phone in Peregrine Hastings’s hand. He’s just been woken by reports that Emma Blake has fled and campus security is pursuing her. He hits the greenACCEPTbutton. The symphony of his ringtone is replaced by the panicked voice of Thomas Takada.

How did he get this number? Hastings wonders, before what Thomas is saying jolts him even wider awake.

“She’s doing it,” Thomas yells. “She’s streaming!”

Hastings grips his phone, heart pounding. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know! I can’t tell from the picture.”

Hastings races around his bedroom, nearly falls putting on his pants. “Have you tried calling her?”

“It goes right to voicemail.”

“Did you leave a message?”

Belt, where is my belt? There, on the dresser. Socks, socks, they don’t match, it doesn’t matter—

“No one leaves messages, Mr. Hastings! Even if I had, she’s not going to listen to it! Not before she—”

“Meet me in the quad. Bring your friends.”

“Sir?” Thomas asks.

“She’s somewhere on campus, and we need to find hernow.”

He hangs up. Grabs a shirt from the back of a chair, throws on shoes. He’s pulling into the roundabout two minutes later, and in another two he’s standing in the dewy grass with a small crowd of terrified-looking students. The birds sing like nothing at all’s the matter. It’s not even 7:15 a.m.

Thomas steps forward, holding out his phone screen, and Hastings feels his guts twist. He sees Emma Blake, dark eyes blazing, talking right into the camera. He can’t make out what she’s saying. Next to her, the chat window autoscrolls: fire emojis, crying faces, voices urging her on.

Hastings turns away. “You go to her dorm,” he tells Thomas. “Jade, you and Cormac check the library. Celia, the student union. Spencer, James, Pemberly Hall.”

He sees Wozniak running up the slope toward them, Jones behind. “I had her,” Wozniak gasps. “She was in the woods. I couldn’t … I couldn’t—”

“Calm down,” Hastings says. “Tell me what happened.”

But Wozniak can’t calm down. Her eyes are wild, her words clipped and frantic. “She’s really going to do it, sir. She dumped the gas on herself and told me if I came close she’d light herself. I couldn’t … I didn’t know what—”

“Where did you see her last?” Hastings asks.

“I followed her as soon as I thought it was safe.” Wozniak gulps for air. “But by the time I broke out of the woods in the northeast quadrant, I didn’t have a visual on her anymore. I lost her.”

“Okay, northeast quadrant,” Hastings says. “That’s something. That’s helpful.”

When exposed to heat, the muscles in my thighs will shrink and retract along the shafts of my femur…

He can still remember every line he read in Emma’s essay. She’s really going to do it.

He pulls his phone from his pocket and dials 911.

CHAPTER 47

EMMA’S GAZE INTO the camera lens is steady. “I’m seventeen years old, and I’ve already buried my mother and my sister,” she says. “The sickness that took my mother’s life was breast cancer. The sickness that stole my sister, though, is totally different. It never shows up in an X-ray. It tries to hide itself. But it’s spreading.”

32,987

holy shit are we in for another pandemic

wtf is she talkin about

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