Eli watched Ronan's face. The man seemed almost painfully calm, but his eyes were following the remaining people with the concentration of someone who had no intention of losing even one name from the roster. Eli understood now why the club members trusted him. Ronan was not calm because he felt nothing. He was calm because every feeling had to wait its turn behind the people he was trying to protect.
Mara urged the next member through the window. Boone followed, landing badly in the mud but catching himself without injury. The count outside rose to sixty. Three club members remained inside: Ronan, Cutter, and Mara. Eli was still with them, which meant four people stood on the wrong side of the building's compromised systems.
"Your turn," Mara told Eli.
He moved toward the sill, then stopped. Through the open window, he could see headlights appearing and disappearing behind the trees at the far end of the ridge. The responding vehicles were still struggling up the road. He looked back toward the rear hallway and pictured the shadow moving toward the access hatch.
"If somebody goes down there again," he said, "they might change the sequence."
"They might," Mara answered. "That's exactly why the fire department needs to handle it."
"But they aren't here yet."
"I know."
"And there's still an active command downstairs."
Ronan stepped between them. "Eli, look at me. If you had never found that room, every person here would still be sitting at those tables. You've already changed what happens tonight. You don't have to finish every part of the job."
Eli wanted to tell him that he understood. In a way, he did. Yet the thought of leaving the machinery to complete its unknown sequence frightened him, and the possibility of a person returning to trigger something worse made that fear almost unbearable. He looked at the three adults who remained.
They were responsible for sixty-three people, an unstable building, a flooded road, and a set of systems none of them fully understood. He was responsible for one dog and a mother who did not know where he was. The difference should have made the choice easy.
It did not.
A sharp knocking sounded from the rear hallway again. Cutter turned toward it and saw the emergency lights flicker near the storage room. Ronan ordered Eli to stay with Mara and went with Cutter to check the corridor leading toward the rear access. For several seconds, Mara remained by the open window, making sure the people outside had room to receive the last evacuees.
Eli stepped away from the sill.
He later admitted that what he did next was dangerous and wrong, even though he believed it might help. He did not make the decision out of a desire to be brave or admired. He made it because a twelve-year-old's understanding of risk is not the same as an adult's and because the hidden room had become, in his mind, a question he could not bear to leave unanswered. He knew the route and thought he could reach the control station before whoever had returned to it.
He slipped into the hallway and went down the rear steps.