Page 68 of One Adult, Please

Joel shoves harder.

The cart squeals.

The wrong person's jaw snaps inches from my hand.

Then Beck comes through the kitchen behind them. He hits the one caught in the gap. Joel kicks it clear, slams the door, and turns the lock.

"Clear inside," Beck says.

I mark the Sunrise Grill with an X on the where picture. Purple crayon.

When we step back into the plaza, Wondie Hat has drifted closer. He's twenty feet away now, sunglasses tilted, foam face smiling over a mouth that definitely is not.

"Wondie Hat moved," I whisper.

"Toward the noise," Grant says.

"Toward us," Joel says.

We move to the next building.

The WonderSphere Emporium is the big gift shop, the one near the main entrance, the one I raided on Day One for my tote bag and my hoodie and my stabby fork, may she rest in peace.

It's two stories, which is ambitious for a gift shop, with a grand staircase connecting the floors and a huge Wondie statue in the center atrium that's still lit up because it has its own dedicated power circuit, because WonderSphere cares more about Wondie's illumination than it does about literally anything else.

The ground floor is clear. Ransacked, the shelves knocked over and the merchandise scattered, evidence of people grabbing supplies during the initial shelter chaos, but no wrong people. I feel a brief pang of something, looking at the overturned racks and the emptied cooler. This is where I started. This is where I became whatever I am now.

"Second floor," Joel says.

The staircase is wide, themed, wrapped in decorative railing designed to look like coral reef. I'm already on the stairs before anyone can argue.

"Grace, wait."

"I'm already on the stairs, Joel. The stairs are happening. You can't un-stair someone."

"You can't un-stair?"

"The stairs are happening."

I reach the top. The second floor is the premium merchandise area.

There are three wrong people up here. Two near the art gallery. One tangled in a display of plush animals, its legs caught in a rack of stuffed dolphins, shuffling in place, going nowhere, surrounded by plush marine life like the world's worst claw machine prize.

The dolphin-tangled one is almost funny. In the way that a lot of things in this world are almost funny if you let them be and almost devastating if you don't and I keep choosing funny because funny keeps me moving and moving keeps me alive.

"Beck," I whisper.

"On it." He takes the two near the art gallery. I don't watch.

The dolphin one is still tangled. It's thrashing weakly, its legs kicking against the display rack, stuffed dolphins falling off the shelf in a cascade of plush that would be adorable in any other context and is deeply horrible in this one.

Grant raises the sleepy stick and fires. The dart hits the tangled wrong person in the thigh. We wait.

The thrashing slows. The jaw stops moving. The wrong person sinks into the pile of stuffed dolphins and goes still.

Grant steps in after, clinical and quiet, and I let the dolphins block my view because they've suffered enough and so have I.

Joel locks the exterior doors and checks the fire exit. We move on after I grab a change of clothes.