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That’s when the sun went out.

Darkness, and then the world blazed red. I stood up as the alarm sang out, a single scream at the top of the octave. The crowds froze, faces tipped up toward the vid-screens, which all flashed the same useless message. Alert. Bio-Hazard. Alert.

The red strobe flashed, on, off, on. Glowing faces burst from the darkness, then dropped into shadow. The fountain bled pink, the rippling pool of water at its base a bottomless red.

That’s when the sun went out.

I was staring at the fountain when I realized the noise had stopped. Not the alarm, which was still singing, but the sounds beneath it, the rustling, mumbling, shrieking, crying chaos of the crowd. Gone.

Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies.

The inane rhyme whispered through my head as they began to drop. They fell silent and still, their eyes bulging and mouths convulsing, fishlike, open shut open. Soundless. The two men with their dirt-beards, the old woman. The giggle twins, their giggles silenced, their skirts askew. Down, hard and ugly, heads cracking against plastic stone, arms jutting at odd angles. Down went the little kid, fingers clawing at her pink shirt. And her mother, down without a fight, her back to the kid.

Ashes, ashes.

Someone told me once that the nursery rhyme was about the Black Plague. That the ring of roses referred to the disease’s trademark red rash; the ashes to the burning bodies of the dead. But that was a lie: I looked it up. The words were nonsense; they meant nothing.

The red light pulsed rhythmically. I tried not to count the faces, hundreds of faces. Some of them twitched, chests heaving, sucking in air and whatever poison hid inside of it, whatever bio-hazard had touched off a useless, too-late alert alert alert.

Some of them — one of the men, the girl, three women with chunky ankles and identical rings on their stubby fingers — prostrate, frozen. Askew. Their eyes open, their chests still.

Faces red, then pale, shadowy, non, then red again.

“We have to get out of here!” Riley’s voice, in my ear. Riley’s shirt, absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley’s hands on my shoulders, Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley, alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.

“Lia!” Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.

Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn’t make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.

Running without looking down, just step over them, like stones, just go Riley said, don’t stop don’t look just go.

Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium, still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The red light turned to tears, trickled down pale, still faces.

Their eyes were bleeding.

Alert! Biohazard! Alert! screamed the vidscreens, although there was no one left to warn.

“Get it together!” Riley’s hands were rough on my arm and back, pushing me forward. “We have to get out.”

What’s the hurry? I thought, a mad giggle rising in me. No bio equals no hazard. Safe and sound.

But I shook him off and I ran with him, down the dead, empty hall, the corp-town in lockdown, its residents hiding or evacuated. Or neither. Steel shutters had dropped to shield the glass walls, trapping us inside, in the dark. The biohazard protocol had locked even the glowing emergency exits, sealing the corp-town tight—no nasty micro-organisms would escape to the outside world. And no mechs.

Riley went straight for the control panel to the right of the nearest exit, and ripped off the cover. He began messing with the wires, stripping two of them with his teeth and winding them together, then touching them to a third, and before I could ask what the hell he was doing, the steel slid up toward the ceiling, and he pushed through the door. His hand gripped mine, tugged hard, and I followed.

We cut across the matted astroturf surrounded the residential cubes, ignoring the solar-powered cart that had carried us here—even if it wasn’t on lockdown with the rest of the compound, it was too slow, and too easily tracked by the secops. Alarms were blaring across the campus, and steel shutters had dropped across all the residence cubes, turning them into bunkers, a fitting accessory to the corp-cum-war zone. The air split with distant sirens and thunder shook the sky. Except it wasn’t thunder, it was a squadron of helicopters, dropping toward the glass cube, as the emergency vehicles, the fire trucks and ambulances appeared on the horizon. Next would come the secops, looking for someone to blame. I suspected we’d do.

“We didn’t have to run,” I said, my brain finally starting to work again, though I was still running, because he seemed so sure and I was so not. We passed the wastewater ponds and trampled through deserted soy fields. The workers had, presumably, all been hustled away to the underground safehouses dotting the perimeter, and only the reaping and spraying machines remained to witness us tearing through the knee high fronds of sallow green. “We could have stayed — maybe we could have helped.”

Riley sped up. “We’re helping ourselves.”