Inside the test chamber, the air took on a sizzly, electric quality, like the atmosphere before a storm. Sarah saw the hairs on her arm standing up. Her clothing was sticking to her body, flattened by the electric charge.

“Got a belt?” Kenner said.

“No…”

“Hairclip?”

“No.”

“Anything metal?”

“No! Damn it, no!”

Kenner flung himself against the glass wall, but just bounced off. He kicked it with his heel; nothing happened. He slammed his weight against the door, but the lock was strong.

“Ten seconds to test,” the computer voice said.

“What are we going to do?” Sarah said, panicked.

“Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“Now. Do it.” He was stripping off his shirt, ripping it off, buttons flying. “Come on, Sarah. Especially the sweater.”

She had a fluffy angora sweater, and bizarrely, she recalled it had been a present from her boyfriend, one of the first things he ever bought her. She tore it off, and the T-shirt beneath.

“Skirt,” Kenner said. He was down to his shorts, pulling off his shoes.

“What is this—”

“It’s got a zipper!”

She fumbled, getting the skirt off. She was down to her sports bra and panties. She shivered. The computer voice was counting backward. “Ten…nine…eight…”

Kenner was draping the clothes over the engine. He took her skirt, draped it over, too. He arranged the angora sweater to lie on the top.

“What are you doing?”

“Lie down,” he said. “Lie flat on the floor—make yourself as flat as you can—and don’t move.”

She pressed her body against the cold concrete. Her heart was pounding. The air was bristling. She felt a shiver down the back of her neck.

“Three…two…one…”

Kenner threw himself on the ground next to her and the first lightning bolt crashed through the room. She was shocked by the violence of it, the blast of air rushing over her body. Her hair was rising into the air, she could feel the weight of it lift off her neck. There were more bolts—the crashing sound was terrifying—blasting blue light, so bright she saw it even though she squeezed her eyes shut. She pressed herself against the ground, willing herself to be even flatter, exhaling, thinking Now is a time for prayer.

But suddenly there was another kind of light in the room, yellower, flickering, and a sharp acrid smell.

Fire.

A piece of her flaming sweater fell on her bare shoulder. She felt searing pain.

“It’s a fire—”

“Don’t move!” Kenner snarled.

The bolts were still blasting, coming faster and faster, crackling over the room, but she could see out of the corner of her eye that the clothes heaped on the engine were aflame, the room was filling with smoke.

She thought, My hair is burning. And she could feel it suddenly hot at the base of her neck, along her scalp…

And suddenly the room was filled with blasting water, and the lightning had stopped, and the sprinkler nozzles hissed overhead. She felt cold; the fires went out; the concrete was wet.

“Can I get up now?”

“Yes,” Kenner said. “You can get up now.”

He spent several more minutes trying to break the glass without success. Finally he stopped and stared, his hair matted by the sizzling water. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You can’t have a room like this without a safety mechanism to enable someone to get out.”

“They locked the door, you saw it yourself.”

“Right. Locking it from the outside with a padlock. That padlock must be there to make sure nobody can enter the room from the outside while the facility is closed. But there still has to be some way to get out from the inside.”

“If there is, I don’t see it.” She was shivering. Her shoulder hurt where she was burned. Her underwear was soaked through. She wasn’t modest, but she was cold, and he was nattering on…

“There just has to be a way,” he said, turning slowly, looking.

“You can’t break the glass…”

“No,” he said. “You can’t.” But that seemed to suggest something to him. He bent and carefully examined the glass frame, looking at the seam where the glass met the wall. Running his finger along it.

She shivered while she watched him. The sprinklers were still on, still spraying. She was standing in three inches of water. She could not understand how he could be so focused, so intent on—

“I’ll be damned,” he said. His fingers had closed on a small latch, flush with the mounting. He found another on the opposite side of the window, flicked it open. And then he pushed the window, which was hinged in the center, and rotated it open.

He stepped through into the outer room.

“Nothing to it,” he said. He extended his hand. “Can I offer you some dry clothes?”

“Thank you,” she said, and took his hand.

The LTSI washrooms weren’t anything to write home about, but Sarah and Kenner dried off with paper towels and found some warm coveralls, and Sarah began to feel better. Staring in the mirror, she saw that she’d lost two inches of hair around her left side. The ends were ragged, black, twisted.

“Could have been worse,” she said, thinking Ponytails for a while.

Kenner tended to her shoulder, which he said was just a first-degree burn with a few blisters. He put ice on it, telling her that burns were not a thermal injury but were actually a nerve response within the body, and that ice in the first ten minutes reduced the severity of the burn by numbing the nerve, and preventing the response. So, if you were going to blister, ice prevented it from happening.

She tuned out his voice. She couldn’t actually see the burned area, so she had to take his word for it. It was starting to hurt. He found a first-aid kit, brought back aspirin.

“Aspirin?” Sarah said.

“Better than nothing.” He dropped two tablets in her hand. “Actually, most people don’t know it, but aspirin’s a true wonder drug, it has more pain-killing power than morphine, and it is anti-inflammatory, anti-fever—”

“Not right now,” she said. “Please.” She just couldn’t take another of his lectures.

He said nothing. He just put on the bandage. He seemed to be good at that, too.

“Is there anything you’re not good at?” she said.

“Oh sure.”

“Like what? Dancing?”

“No, I can dance. But I’m terrible at languages.”

“That’s a relief.” She herself was good at languages. She’d spent her junior year in Italy, and was reasonably fluent in Italian and French. And she’d studied Chinese.

“And what about you?” he said. “What are you bad at?”

“Relationships,” she said. Staring in the mirror and pulling at the blackened strands of her hair.