“The door must’ve locked right after the employee contacted security,” Clarissa mused.

“You don’t seem very concerned,” Leah said.

Noah smiled mischievously. “I bet she’s thinking the same thing I am.”

Clarissa grinned. “Yeah?”

He pointed towards the corpse at the back of the room. “We can take her earpiece and impersonate her voice to convince security that it was all a false alarm.”

His enthusiastic words were met only by silence, and he slowly deflated. “What? What is it?”

Clarissa could only gape at him. “That’s… quite possibly the worst plan I’ve ever heard in my twenty years of life on this planet. A child wouldn't fall for that.”

“Oh yeah? Enlighten us on your superior thoughts, then,” Noah said peevishly.

“I should’ve thought they were obvious,” she smirked, reaching into her coat and procuring her hatchet. She took a stance in front of the door with it poised over her shoulder. “We’ll be out of this room in no time.”

“You’re right. I should’ve known,” Noah sighed. “I still think my idea would make a good backup plan, though.”

“Noah, I hate to break it to you, but your plan is stupid,” Brian said.

“I’m carrying you around,” Noah muttered. “The least you could do is take my side.”

Clarissa glanced at them. “A good friend isn’t afraid to hit you with the ugly truth.”

“Are you going to break the door down or what?” Leah prodded.

Clarissa shuffled her feet slightly. “As much as I’ve fantasized about it, I’ve never actually demolished a door before.”

“Use the pendant,” Brian suggested. “Elias, can you grab it?”

Elias took it off Brian’s head and held it out to Clarissa.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of dust left inside, but it should be enough to at least speed up the process,” Brian said, still staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.

Clarissa reached for it, then hesitated. “Will it end up having the same effect on me as if I were injured? I don’t want to use it if it’ll make me end up like you guys.”

“Probably,” Noah said lightly.

“You do it, then. I’m not touching that thing.”

“You sure? I’d hate to steal a lifelong dream right out from under your nose.”

Clarissa waved her hand. “There are plenty of doors in this world. I’ll destroy another one.”

Noah reluctantly accepted the pendant from Elias. “This is going to suck, isn’t it.”

If anything, the revulsion he had felt earlier towards allowing the dust to flood into his lungs had only multiplied now that he had been recently sated.

“You’ll feel like crap afterwards, too,” Brian said. “As in, weaker than a soggy piece of bread. And hungry.”

Noah struggled to strengthen his resolve. “Well, I guess one of us has to do it.” Fighting past every instinct in his infected body screaming at him to stop, he pressed the metal square to his lips and released the clasp.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. In fact, as energy exploded into him, he realized it was something like a watered-down version of the rejuvenating sensation he enjoyed while consuming flesh.

However, there was simply so much dust within the pendant that it very quickly surpassed any burst of energy he’d previously received. There was so much- almost too much.

Noah didn’t pull the pendant away until it had emptied itself into his lungs. With a shuddering jerk, he brought it away from his mouth and snapped it shut. He tried to give it back to Elias, but it fell from his grasp before the boy could take it. May bent down to pick it up instead.

“The hatchet,” Noah gasped. He hardly recognized his own voice, but he couldn’t keep it steady.

Clarissa quickly handed it over to him before backing up, retreating with the others to the rear of the room. Noah watched them come to a halt a respectable distance from the corpse, then turned his attention to the hatchet in his hands.

Noah had never held a hatchet before in his life, let alone attempt to break down a door with one. There was probably a proper way to go about it, to maximize the effort to result ratio.

Rather than overthink it, he struck out with abandon, letting the blade shoot forward as if released from a slingshot. It bit through the door with an awful creaking scream of snapping wood.

Noah pulled the hatchet back to himself and gave the door an appraising look. It had given way with almost no resistance. If his stance had been unstable, he could easily have overextended and lost his balance. He wondered if Insight had skimped on the material.

“What are you waiting for? Keep going,” Leah urged from behind him.

Noah glanced back at her with an odd light in his eyes, then let the hatchet drop to the floor. His friends watched in surprise as he proceeded to turn and press his fingers through the door as if it were made of soft clay. There was some resistance at first, but he narrowed his eyes and increased the pressure, and his hands punched through without much difficulty. The sound this action produced was horrendous.

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Noah then pulled the entire fine piece of carpentry clean off the wall and looked falteringly around, clutching it between his hands, before settling on placing it carefully to the ground beside the newly opened doorway.

“It’s done,” he announced, as if they hadn’t watched the entire process.

“And so are my eardrums,” Brian complained. “Seriously, what did you do to that poor door?”

“It doesn’t matter. We can leave,” Clarissa said, coming forward to pick up her hatchet from the ground and tuck it safely back into her coat.

“Your worry about there not being much dust left was entirely unfounded,” Noah informed Brian in that same strange voice. “Although there’s none left now.”

“I must have left more dust inside it than I thought,” Brian said. “The amount we got from Penelope was pretty pathetic, so I don’t see how else the pendant would be very full.”

They left the room. May took over the duty of helping Elias carry Brian, because Noah was afraid he would accidentally crush his friend’s ankles. Neither of them would realize it had happened until it was too late.

The hallway outside was anticlimactically empty and quiet. Looking down the barren corridor, Noah could almost convince himself that Insight wasn’t going to bother responding to the dead employee’s plea for help. Perhaps they had decided the best course of action was to simply cut their losses and leave everyone locked up until they felt like dealing with the problem.

Then again, the building was huge. Perhaps there was currently a response team racing towards them, and they hadn’t arrived yet because they were two miles worth of hallways away.

“Alright,” Leah said, striding forward. “I know it’s a risk, but we can still destroy the dust in the vats. All it takes is a match to incinerate the stuff; it won’t take long and we can rest assured we won’t be leaving any behind. I think we should do it.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” May said.

The others nodded.

“We’re doing this,” Brian said firmly.

“Oh, shut up. You just have to sit there and let yourself be carried around,” Noah said, grinning.

“I’m in as much danger as any of you,” he protested. “More, probably.”

They crossed the hall to the vat room. As they crossed through the doorway, Noah felt the power from the dust ever so slowly beginning to recede. He grimaced. Based on Brian’s precedent, he wouldn’t end up completely incapacitated, but the sensation was akin to being injured. He felt every scrap of energy that left him like the departure of a good friend; the tighter he clung to the dissipating strength, the worse the emptiness was when it disappeared. Though he still possessed greatly elevated strength to his usual standard, it wouldn’t be long before that energy abandoned him.

He picked up the shirt he had used to mark the door. Security would be coming to investigate the location to which they had been summoned; with any luck, they wouldn’t think to check any of the other rooms until Noah and his friends were long gone. The final moments of their escape would likely turn into a chase.

“Quickly, now,” Clarissa said. “Someone start opening the vats. I’ll get the matches ready.”

Noah went to the first vat. He still had more energy left than he knew what to do with, so he stuck a single finger into the wheel and spun it open in less than a second, his arm whirring round and round. He grabbed the cylindrical hunk of metal before gravity could send it to the floor and gently lowered it down, then stepped back. Dust began to billow up from the mouth of the vat.

“Jeez, speedster, give me a moment,” she muttered, fumbling with a match. She couldn’t seem to get it to light.

“We could just use the pendant,” Elias suggested. May was standing close enough that the dust was already beginning to swirl towards the necklace draped around her shoulders.

“No,” Clarissa snapped. “We’re not here to steal the dust, we’re here to destroy it.” She glared down at the tiny slip of cardboard that was her match. “I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble with this.”

“You’re numb,” Leah said simply.

“I’m aware, but I still don’t understand why it would be this difficult.” She spoke slowly, her concentration on her hands rather than her words. After another moment the match finally let out a soft whoomph as it caught fire. Almost in the same instant, a deafening crack boomed and a flash of orange light filled the room as the dust in the air immediately combusted.

Everyone froze, startled.

“We’re lucky the explosion is harmless,” Elias finally murmured.

“Open the next one,” Clarissa demanded, pulling out another match.

Noah tried to open the second vat in the same manner as the first, but with his strength draining out of him, he couldn’t make the wheel turn with anything less than both hands. As he stepped away, the lid slipped from his grasp to fall heavily to the ground. The heavy metal plug barely missed his toes.

Clarissa had the next match ready, and she tossed it into the vat before dust could begin to pour out in great clouds. There was a flash of sound and light from the hole, and then it darkened, leaving the container empty.

“I can’t do any more,” Noah said shortly.

May came forward to open the next vat. As she worked to unscrew the lid, they began to hear shouts from the hallway. Even with the significant noise-cancelling properties of Insight’s walls, the racket of a large group of people stomping around and barking orders at each other just outside the door was impossible to miss. The guards had arrived. By the sound of it they had noticed that the door, which was supposed to be locked and closed, had been torn off its hinges. They didn’t seem pleased about it.

The students glanced nervously at each other. Noah had no idea how they’d get past security, but they’d have to find a way. They didn’t have any other option.

May kept working through the noise, and now she slid the third lid free, revealing dust boiling up from within. Only the first two vats had been filled when Noah had visited the room yesterday; Insight had clearly been busy. Clarissa threw in the match and they moved on to the fourth vat.

They were producing quite the loud bang with each explosion they set off, but there was nothing they could do about the noise. Hopefully all the clamor outside would mask their activity.

As May began working to remove the fifth lid, Noah pulled out his phone and sent his dad a message: We’ll be out soon. Sorry for the delay. He started to put the phone away, but then he received a response:

1. Which entrance?

We’re on the third floor. Does that help?

Yes. On my way.

Noah hesitated before sending one more text: If we’re not there in less than twenty minutes, get out of here.

He pocketed the phone, uninterested in whatever reply would inevitably come. By now the fifth vat was open, though Clarissa was having trouble igniting the match again. The air was still clear due to May standing so close that the particles were immediately pulled into the pendant before they could escape into the wider room.

“Got it,” Clarissa whispered, and held the flame to the opening of the vat. Boom.

“Not much point in whispering when you turn around and set off an explosion,” Leah commented.

“Shh,” Clarissa whispered.

Leah rolled her eyes and shut up.

May stepped to the sixth and final vat. Noah gave the container a nervous look. A corpse was hidden within. His friends knew he’d killed the doctor, but they didn’t know where he’d left the body. There’s no reason to be furtive about it. I should just tell them.

He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, the muffled sounds of commotion outside in the hall suddenly got a lot louder and clearer.

He whirled around to see the door open, a startled guard staring in at them.