The patrol vehicle followed us without using its siren.
That made it worse.
The bus turned east through streets that no longer looked connected to the city we knew. Traffic lights remained dark. Store shutters were closed in the middle of the morning. Abandoned cars stood with their doors open, and white protest flowers had been crushed into the gutters by military tires.
Above us, the sky lowered.
Clouds gathered over Yandong in layers too dark for the hour. They did not move with the wind. They appeared to spread outward from the northern industrial district, swallowing one neighborhood after another until the distant towers disappeared.
Thunder rolled across the roofs.
The patrol vehicle remained two turns behind us.
"Maybe they are going somewhere else," Bunny said.
Cherry watched through the rear window.
"They have followed three illegal turns. Either they want us or they are terrible at directions."
"Can this bus go faster?" KM asked.
The driver looked at the injured people in his mirror.
"It can. They cannot."
Nobody asked him again.
The first drop struck the windshield at 10:51.
Then another landed beside it.
The rain began lightly, leaving thin paths across the dust on the glass. The driver activated the wipers. Instead of clearing the windshield, they spread a dirty film from one side to the other.
A sharp smell entered through the bus vents.
It reminded me of burned matches and wet metal.
Kitty rubbed one eye.
"Does the air hurt?"
June looked up from the blood drying on her shirt.
"My throat does."
The bus driver closed the outside vents. Passengers pulled the sliding windows shut, but several no longer sealed properly. Fine rain blew through the gaps and settled across faces and bare arms.
It did not burn holes through anyone's clothes.
It did not melt skin.
It stung.
Fresh cuts hurt first. NS hissed when rain reached the graze beneath his torn sleeve. My wrapped knuckles began throbbing again. A little girl near the front coughed until her father covered her mouth and nose with the clean inside of his shirt.
Mr. Kim moved through the aisle.
"Do not rub your eyes. Use clean water if you have it. Small amounts."
"We barely have drinking water," a woman said.
He looked at her son's reddening eyes.
"Then use it on him first."
The woman poured a little water onto a folded cloth.
Around her, everyone else tightened the caps on what remained.
The city had entered a time when even washing rain from a child's face required a decision.
Thirty-two kilometers north of the bus, MALT's hidden reactor reached full operational output.
The nuclear core did not create the acid falling over Yandong by itself.
The secret complex built around it did.
Sulfur-heavy backup boilers powered the extraction buildings. Chemical lines processed fuel materials in structures that had never passed a civilian inspection. At full output, the ventilation scrubbers should have removed most of the sulfur dioxide and acidic aerosols before they reached the atmosphere.
The scrubbers consumed power.
MALT wanted that power sent elsewhere.
Inside the control room, a technician watched three environmental warnings turn red.
STACK THREE SCRUBBER BYPASS
SULFUR DIOXIDE LIMIT EXCEEDED
ACID DEPOSITION EVENT LIKELY
"The storm is moving toward the capital," he said.
The MALT officer behind him did not look away from the reactor output.
"Maintain one hundred percent."
"The plume is already inside Yandong."
"Yandong is under containment."
"That does not stop the weather."
The officer rested one hand on the pistol at his waist.
"Maintain output."
The technician turned back to his controls.
Above the hidden complex, sulfur dioxide entered the storm clouds. Water and oxidants changed part of it into dilute sulfuric acid. The wind carried the mixture south.
The reactor remained at one hundred percent.
Yandong received what the filters had been ordered not to keep.
Lightning covered the inside of the bus in white.
For one second, the cracked windows became another set of windows.
They were upside down.
Rain moved across broken glass above my face. A seat belt cut into my chest. Somewhere beyond the metal, a phone continued ringing with a name I could not turn my head far enough to read.
A hand struck the glass from outside.
Once.
Twice.
Then a voice said something about being too late.
The bus returned around me.
I was standing in the aisle with my good hand pressed against the ceiling.
Kitty held my sleeve.
"XH."
"I'm here."
"I know. Where did you go?"
I looked at the window.
The rain ran downward.
"Nowhere."
Her fingers remained on my sleeve.
"That was not nowhere."
I tried to find the ringing phone inside my head.
The harder I searched, the less remained.
"I saw glass."
"From the square?"
"I don't know."
Another flash crossed the sky.
This time, I saw only the bus.
Kitty guided me back into the seat without asking another question. She kept one hand around my wrist until my breathing matched the movement of the wipers.
Across the aisle, June had seen everything.
She looked away before I could read her face.
At Yandong General Hospital, HS placed an environmental test strip into a cup of rainwater.
The indicator changed color.
He compared it with the scale twice.
"Three point seven," he said.
His Public Health supervisor took the cup from him.
Normal rain was already slightly acidic. At pH 3.7, this sample was roughly eighty times as acidic as ordinary clean rainfall. It was still weak enough that brief skin contact would not dissolve tissue, but prolonged exposure could irritate the eyes, inflame damaged skin, worsen asthma, and carry sulfate particles deep into already stressed lungs.
The emergency department had begun seeing all four.
Children coughed beside people with gunshot wounds. Protesters complained that their eyes felt full of sand. Nurses rinsed blood and contaminated rain from open injuries with a water supply already weakened by MALT's earlier diversions.
HS typed one message to every number he still had for our group.
RAINWATER PH 3.7. POSSIBLE SULFATE CONTAMINATION. DO NOT DRINK IT. COVER SKIN. RINSE EYES AND WOUNDS WITH CLEAN WATER. GET INDOORS.
The message remained pending.
He tried again.
Still pending.
On the television above him, the state broadcaster described the thunderstorm as ordinary seasonal weather.
HS looked at the test strip in his hand.
"Of course it is," he whispered.
Then the hospital lights failed.
Emergency lamps turned the corridor red.
The patrol vehicle overtook us beneath the University Avenue overpass.
It moved alongside the driver's window. A soldier pointed toward the curb while another raised his rifle where the driver could see it.
The bus slowed.
"Do not stop," KM said.
"They will shoot the engine," Shinso answered.
"They might shoot it anyway."
"There are children on this bus."
The driver pulled beneath the overpass.
Rain hammered the concrete above us. Water poured from its edges in gray sheets. The patrol vehicle stopped across the lane in front of the bus.
Four soldiers climbed out.
Gray-green uniforms.
Black helmets.
Medical masks.
Red cloth around their arms.
Mr. Kim stood near the front doors.
"Everyone remain seated. Do not argue. Let me speak."
The doors folded open.
The first soldier entered with his rifle aimed at the floor. The second carried a plastic evidence bag filled with confiscated phones. Two more remained outside.
"Identity inspection," the first soldier announced. "All devices in the aisle. Anyone returning from Congress Square will be detained."
Nobody moved.
The soldier looked at the blood on June's shirt.
"You. Stand."
June's hands began shaking again.
She closed them into fists.
"She treated an injured police officer," Mr. Kim said.
The soldier struck him across the mouth with the back of one hand.
Mr. Kim fell against the fare box.
Every student rose.
"Sit down!" he shouted at us before the soldier could. Blood ran from his lip. "All of you, sit down."
The rifle lifted.
We sat.
The soldier seized June's wrist and pulled her into the aisle.
NS moved beside me.
I caught the back of his shirt.
"Wait."
His arm shook beneath my hand.
"He is touching her."
"There are four rifles."
"I can count."
The second soldier walked farther down the aisle, collecting phones. When he reached Kitty, he stopped.
"Stand up."
Kitty did not.
"I said stand."
He caught her beneath the chin and forced her face upward.
She trembled so hard that the seat shook beneath her.
The soldier seemed to enjoy noticing it.
"Congress girls act brave until no camera is watching."
His hand moved from her chin to the collar of her wet shirt.
Something inside my chest went silent.
June drove her heel down onto the first soldier's boot.
He cursed and twisted her wrist.
NS tore free from my hand.
He struck the soldier before either of us could pretend we had another plan.
The narrow aisle saved him. The rifle caught against a seatback as the soldier tried to raise it. NS drove his wounded shoulder into the man's chest and both of them crashed against the fare box.
The second soldier released Kitty and reached for his weapon.
I hit him low around the waist.
My injured ribs folded on impact. Pain took my breath, but momentum carried us across two seats. His helmet struck the window. Kitty pulled herself away as his rifle sling tangled around the armrest.
"Gun!" someone screamed.
One of the soldiers outside climbed onto the first step and aimed past Mr. Kim.
The barrel found NS.
Shinso threw his body into the soldier's knees.
The rifle fired into the ceiling.
The sound inside the bus erased every other sound.
Pieces of the roof fell with the rain.
KM came over the seat behind Shinso and struck the soldier's helmet with the metal shelf bracket. It did not knock him unconscious. It made him turn.
That was enough.
The bus driver pulled the door lever. The folding panels closed around the soldier's rifle and trapped it against the frame.
"Now!" he shouted.
The passengers moved.
Not like trained fighters.
Like frightened people who had already watched obedience fail to save them once that morning.
The injured shopkeeper kicked the first soldier's knee. Two fathers pulled June behind them. A grandmother struck the second soldier's mask with her umbrella. Someone tore the magazine from a rifle without knowing whether another round remained in the chamber.
NS and I forced the two soldiers in the aisle toward the open doors.
Neither of us was strong enough alone.
Twenty hands joined us.
The first soldier fell backward onto the wet road. The second caught the handrail until Kitty stamped on his fingers.
He dropped beside his partner.
The soldier outside freed his rifle from the door.
Shinso kicked him in the chest with both feet.
He disappeared down the steps.
"Drive!" KM shouted.
The bus driver drove.
Rifle fire broke the rear window.
Everyone dropped.
The bus struck the patrol vehicle hard enough to turn it sideways, then scraped past the concrete support and entered the rain. Glass moved across the floor. Acidic water sprayed through the broken window and stung every exposed cut it found.
The driver took the next corner without slowing.
The patrol vehicle tried to follow, but its damaged front wheel bent beneath it.
We did not cheer.
June sat on the floor between the seats with both arms around Kitty. They were still shaking. Neither one pretended otherwise.
NS crouched in front of them, blood leaking through the white ribbon on his arm.
"Did he hurt you?" he asked June.
"No."
She looked at Kitty.
"Her?"
Kitty shook her head, then covered her face with both hands.
I wanted to touch her.
I did not know whether that would help her or help me.
So I sat close enough that she could choose.
After several seconds, her shoulder pressed against mine.
That was all.
It was enough.
Shinso directed the driver into the underground loading area beneath his family's old computing workspace.
The metal door closed behind the bus just as another thunderclap shook the street.
Inside, there were concrete floors, disconnected servers, two storage rooms, and enough bottled water for one careful rinse per person. People removed their wet outer layers and washed their eyes. Mr. Kim checked every injury while NC counted every copied phone again.
No one had been left on the road.
At 11:26, one bar appeared on Shinso's phone.
HS's warning arrived thirty-five minutes late.
RAINWATER PH 3.7. POSSIBLE SULFATE CONTAMINATION. DO NOT DRINK IT. COVER SKIN. RINSE EYES AND WOUNDS WITH CLEAN WATER. GET INDOORS.
Shinso placed the phone where everyone could read it.
Outside, the weak acid rain continued falling over Congress Square, Utopia University, the hospital, and every street between them.
MALT's broadcast called it ordinary weather.
The red-band patrol called the bus an extremist vehicle.
And beneath the thunder, the hidden reactor continued running at one hundred percent.