The doorway went white and broke.
Heat dragged its tongue along the awning and the roll-up door stuttered, then rattled upward in strips like tin being unzipped. Concrete spit chips. The bus climbed the lip with a groan and shoved its way into the dark beyond—tires bouncing, glass tinkling down the aisle in a polite rain.
Inside smelled of pallet wood and old oil. A forklift slept nose-in beside yellow bollards. Racks of shrink-wrapped boxes made canyons. Red exit signs glowed like wounds in the gloom. The beam outside raked past the opening and smeared the floor with a hot, glassy skid that went from door to paint-boiled wall and kept going until the physics gave up.
"Down!" Hawke barked, already halfway through the hatch. He dropped to the aisle, knees absorbing the bus's next bounce, and dragged the hatch shut with the meat of his forearms. Plastic squealed. Air turned to steam a hand's breadth above his head and then the heat skated away as the driver knifed them deeper under the warehouse roof.
Sprinklers woke in a clicking chain reaction, one after another, starting over the door and running like dominoes across the bay. Water came hard and sideways, hit hot floor, fogged into a new weather system. Kids coughed. Someone laughed because the body needed to end a sound somewhere.
"Stay low! Hands in!" Flash had his arms like bridge beams over two little kids, his voice stripped down to usefulness.
Peter shouldered along the seats, counting heads fast, then faster. "Driver—watch the pillar!"
The driver saw it in time, took half a lane left, and shouldered the bus past a concrete post that had never expected to be on speaking terms with a school vehicle. Side windows hissed under sprinkler spray, starred where heat had touched them, but held. The bus's right front rode the rim, the rubber long gone; sparks hissed out in the water and died.
"It's still there," Peter said, eyes cut toward the door.
The big craft's light strobed in the metal gape like lightning in a ruined mouth. A smaller shadow unhooked from it and nosed into the opening—seedlet, slimmer model, iris already beginning to open because learning traveled fast.
Hawke was moving before the thought finished forming. "Brake!"
"That word again," the driver muttered, but his foot obeyed. The nose dipped. The bus's weight rolled forward, compressing springs, buying Hawke a fraction of mechanical time.
He cleared the last two seatbacks in three strides, shouldered the folding front door, and dropped to the wet concrete. Water clattered off him in coins. The beam mouth brightened in the gap.
He didn't try to meet light with bone. He sprinted right, past the forklift's back tires, and found the red chain dangling beside the roll-up track—the fire door release, big as a promise, padlocked open by someone's convenience. Bolt cutters hung from a hook like guilt.
He snatched the cutters and bit the lock once. Steel lied to him—too hard. He re-set the jaws, put shoulders behind it, and made the lock remember its age. It snapped. The chain went slack enough to yank.
"Hawke!" Peter's voice came thin through water and echo.
"Keep them down!" Hawke planted both feet and hauled. The counterweight took a breath and the fire curtain answered—heavy slab, layered metal, dropping from its hiding place in the ceiling like a patient guillotine.
The seedlet saw the motion the way predators see a trap. It knifed under the lintel, beam line tight, belly mouth open. The fire curtain met its back half on the way in. The edge bit. Sparks sprinted. The craft shoved, furious, and bought itself a jag of space as the curtain chewed on its chassis.
Hawke didn't let go of the chain. He wrapped it over his forearms, set his heels, and dragged. The curtain dropped another foot. The seedlet shrieked in metal and wrong color and tried to spit itself free; the beam licked the floor, skated up the forklift's counterweight, and carved a hot grin across yellow paint.
"Bus forward!" Hawke shouted over his shoulder, voice flat and aimed. The driver eased the bus two feet, the left bumper nudging the curtain's bottom edge and giving weight to gravity. The slab came down an inch. The seedlet lost an inch. It hated the inch.
Flash appeared at the bus door with a look that had misplaced sarcasm on purpose. "Tell me where to push."
"Forklift," Hawke said, nodding at it. "Keys."
"Middle shelf," Peter yelled from inside, lunging to point. "Hook board. Orange tag."
Flash vanished and reappeared with a ring of keys like a dare. He slid into the forklift's seat, hands clumsy for one second and then not—boys who lived for show learned machines fast when the audience changed. He twisted a key, got a cough, the wrong key, the right key; the forklift shook itself awake. He stabbed the direction lever. The beeper complained. The forks jerked, then eased up as he found the pedal that wasn't a pedal but wanted to be.
"Bars," Hawke said. "Low, right there—pin it."
Flash swallowed—yes—and rolled forward in a straight line that would have embarrassed him yesterday with its lack of flourish. The forks kissed the seedlet's lowest seam through the gap and then he gave it pressure. Metal moaned. The curtain dropped another handspan, water hammering down the whole while, turning everything slippery and electric.
The seedlet decided that staying meant dying. It tried the obvious: fire and reverse. The beam mouth bloomed. Wrong light chewed at the curtain edge where the forks weren't. The slab glowed and held. Somewhere in its bones the school's fire system found the backbone of 1987 and refused to be instructed by aliens.
"Hold," Hawke said through teeth.
Flash held. The forklift's tires chirped on wet floor and dug in because they had no better ideas. His eyes were wide and human and furious at being there and alive inside that fury.
On the bus, the driver's face in the mirror was a geography of lines. He judged, tapped the accelerator, nudged the curtain with the bumper another inch. The slab answered with a clatter, then a settle. The seedlet screamed—sound less from a throat than from seams giving way.
"Another push," Hawke told Flash.
"Forks are at max," Flash said, breath gone ragged now. "I can give you weight."
"Give me weight."
Flash rolled the forks down, shoved the craft's nose to the floor, and eased the mast forward so the steel didn't bounce. The seedlet's iris convulsed; light guttered to a pulse; smoke came, bitter as old coins.
Hawke let the chain take him down with the curtain, hand over hand as the slab finished its fall. It hit the concrete with a seismic thud and pinched the seedlet flat between floor and metal lip. The beam died. The wrong light inside it ran out of verbs.
The warehouse exhaled. Sprinklers hissed. The fire alarm found its voice at last and began to yelp in a tempo that suggested optimism. Beyond the sealed curtain, the big craft's glow moved, looking for lines that were now walls.
"Inside," Hawke said, and Peter was already herding, already counting, already cutting questions off at the knees.
Flash killed the forklift, chest jumping big, and looked around like an actor who'd lost his script and discovered he could improvise. He met Hawke's eyes and didn't try a joke. "Okay," he said. Just that.
Hawke hooked the chain across the release cleat so the curtain couldn't ratchet itself up on a whim, then scanned the bay for everything that could betray them: side doors, high windows, skylights, vents. The fire system had woken half the building; the sprinklers over the racks were going off in sections, making paths of rain between aisles. The roll-up beside the curtain had a padlock he could break if moving became smarter than staying.
"Driver," Hawke said, pointing. "Back it into the shadows. Kill the lights."
The driver did, tucking the bus under a mezzanine, leaving just enough angle to shoot the aisle if they had to. His hands shook on the stalk when he flipped the light switch. He put them back on the wheel and looked at them like strangers.
Peter arrived at Hawke's side with a first-aid kit stolen from under a seat. "You're burned," he said, clinical. "You keep ignoring me when I say that."
"I hear you," Hawke said.
"Do you know you're ignoring me?"
"Yes."
Peter blew air out of puffed cheeks, then popped the kit and tore a packet with his teeth. "Hold still." He didn't ask permission because time had opinions. He wrapped Hawke's right hand in a wet dressing that smelled like hospital and peppermint, then taped it with fast, neat loops that would have satisfied a nurse and a coach.
"You done?" Hawke said.
"Not with the lectures," Peter said, softer now. "But with the hand, yeah."
Flash drifted over, clothes plastered to him, hair in his eyes. He looked at Hawke's bandage, then at the curtain, then at the crushed thing under it he refused to get close to. "We gonna be okay?"
Hawke let the body answer because it had always told the truth. His internal bead slid once—position, not prize—and settled like a level finding its bubble. "We're going to be quieter," he said. "That's the plan I can promise."
Something hit the roof of the warehouse. Not the big beam—weight. A thud that translated down the steel ribs and across the racks into the soles of shoes. Then another. Then the quick skittering of feet that didn't care about ladders.
Peter's eyes lifted to the ceiling where sprinkler spray haloed trusses. "That's not rain."
Hawke had already picked the aisle that gave them a line on the mezzanine stairs and a blind from the racks. "Move them," he told Flash. "Back two rows. Keep them on the floor, behind the pallets."
"What about you?" Flash asked, like the script required the line even if he didn't love it.
"Stairs," Hawke said.
Peter lifted the emergency hammer he'd rescued like a toy he refused to be embarrassed by. "I'll—uh—carry this and look useful."
"You already are," Hawke said, and meant it.
They split: Flash correcting the bus's human cargo with a voice he didn't recognize as his yet; Peter trotting at Hawke's elbow, eyebrows up to keep water out of his eyes; Hawke angling through the wet maze toward the stair under the mezzanine.
Above, shadows moved in the overhead light like hands behind a thin sheet. Something scraped metal on metal. A panel popped. Then a figure dropped through a cut in the roof skin and landed in a crouch on the catwalk that ran the mezzanine's edge—a figure that was not a person in any common way.
It unfolded wrong. Too long in the forearms, too short in the torso, head fixed to shoulders by armor that grew out of itself. Its mask blinked in three diagonals. It held a blade that wasn't a blade, a rigid ribbon of the wrong light.
Two more came down behind it, fast, practiced. The catwalk thrummed under their weight.
Peter's mouth made a shape. No word came.
Hawke set his foot on the first stair and let his elbows live close to his ribs. He felt the roof's vibration, the stair's give, the water's skin, the weight of thirty watching breaths somewhere behind him. He let his burned hand accept the bandage like a new wrap and made his body a line.
The lead thing cocked its head in an angle that suggested curiosity as much as murder. It lifted its ribbon and the light along it thickened, hungry for a reason.
A bell on the far wall clanged to life—old school, brass, wired to a pull handle—because the fire system had decided its job description included being loud at everything. The sound smashed the air flat and made the figures' masks blink, not in fear, but in error.
Hawke didn't wait for them to fix the thought. He took the next stair, and the next. He kept his eyes on the line where catwalk met the first landing, measured it, and moved to meet it.
Above, on the roof, more feet found steel. The building gathered the noise and passed it down, a drum with bones for braces.
Hawke lifted his hands. He didn't think about the big craft or the seam or any sky beyond the metal skin. He put his weight on the ball of his left foot and cut his right forward just enough to own the step.
The lead mask finished deciding and drew back to strike.
Hawke stepped into the landing.