Chapter Fifty-Five We make guilty of our disasters
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
We make guilty of our disasters
THE CONSERVATORY WAS A SCENE of chaos when we arrived.
Bodies of students and faculty and members of the board of trustees littered the ground, one after another.
Some writhed on the floor, choking and vomiting.
Others lay still, their eyes empty, broken glass at their feet, their drinks pooling red beneath them.
Someone had set fire to the foliage, and the plumes of smoke caught quickly to the plants, making the glass building a furnace of fire and ash.
It was happening again. The fire. Death. It was just like before.
Fear paralyzed me. But even as it threatened to consume me, Jojo squeezed my hand, pulling me away from its currents.
“It happened during the dedication,” the waiter said, coughing. “Some people fainted after the toast. Others were fine.”
When I’d first come to Westfield, I’d seen a vision of the servers spitting into drinks during Rose and Ivy Houses’ orientation.
“Did someone spike the drinks?” I asked.
“No.”
“You’re lying,” I said. I grabbed his arm before he could stop me and channeled into the past. But what I saw in the kitchen as the staff prepared the drinks was a somberness and grief that had filled the campus.
The waiter yanked his arm away from me.
“None of us would do something like this. Yes, there have been some harmless pranks in the past. But nothing like this. Nothing deadly.”
Groups of survivors trekked from the growing inferno, stumbling into the grass, gasping for air.
Honey and Kasem were among them. I hurried toward them, realizing too late that Jojo and I were still holding hands. But Kasem had already seen us when we pulled apart, and I watched his heart break in front of me.
Instinctively, I whispered his name. But he looked away, recoiling from my touch when I reached for him.
“She drank the poison,” Kasem said. He carried a limp Honey in his arms and her parents stumbled behind them.
Honey’s father leaned heavily on his wife’s shoulder, both alive, but barely at that.
“Where’s Alaster?” the woman shouted. “He was supposed to be back by now.”
“Get them to Angelica,” Jojo said to Kasem. “I’ll try to stop the fire, and meet you all there.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have long until midnight. If we split up and something happens—”
“Then none of us will be able to live with ourselves,” Kasem said, cutting me off. “I’m one person, Sianna. We still have time to help everyone. Then we’ll meet in the medical ward. None of this changes our plans. Okay?”
Reluctantly, I agreed. “Just be careful.”
When they left, Jojo and I turned back to the waiter.
“There’s a sprinkler system in the conservatory,” Jojo said. “Why isn’t it working?”
“Someone shut it off. Here, let me show you.”
We covered our faces and sprinted past the poisoned guests. Some crawled to the exit, and others dragged those who were breathing and unconscious to safety. Smoke gathered at my throat, blocking my breathing, filling my eyes with ash.
The waiter led the way. Jojo and I followed.
I tried to calm myself, but the farther we ventured into the fire, the more I deteriorated.
Jojo could read the panic in me. He held my wrist, pressing a calming thumb over my hand.
I closed my eyes, steadying myself. Finally, we arrived deeper into the greenhouse, where there was a large contraption that controlled the sprinkler system.
The wires were cut, disabling it completely.
“Can you see who did it?” Jojo asked. Each sentence he spoke was interrupted with coughing. “Maybe there’s another way to stop the flames—”
I nodded, grabbing one of the wires and channeling into the past.
Images flashed through my mind until I rewound the scene to hours before.
A figure in a silver vulture mask stood above the wires, watching from a distance as another figure snipped them apart.
When the figure cutting the wires turned, I recognized him from the photo Kasem had shown me about the accident in the woodshop.
“Jay,” I whispered. “And a member of Sigma. One of the heads,” I guessed from the vulture mask he’d worn instead of the smaller crow masks.
“Do you know where they went?”
I shook my head, but then, in the vision, my gaze fell to the masked figure’s hand. I’d seen those hands before, and the rings that lined his fingers.
“We need to go to the president’s office,” I said. “He trusts you. Maybe we can use that.”
I released the vision from my mind, and focused on the wires in front of me.
Even as the beginning of a migraine formed, I channeled my powers.
My affinity drew on the time before they’d been stripped apart.
My nostrils burned and the sharp, incessant pain in my head grew stronger and stronger.
All of it, I channeled through touch, until slowly the wires reconnected, shifting backward in time to their original, untarnished state.
The waiter screamed, stumbling away. But Jojo moved quickly, activating the emergency sprinklers. All at once, a rush of water and sirens filled the greenhouse, fighting back the flames, slowly and certainly extinguishing the fire.
And then we started running, away from the greenhouse and toward Westfield’s main campus.