The fire alarm screeches into life, and I slip into a stream of people moving calmly towards the exits. Smoke tingles my nostrils and my eyes dart around the complex. I’m half expecting to see fire racing down the drooping ferns or bursting from the restaurant, but there’s nothing. Just more and more people clogging up the foyer.

We’re all trying to move towards the doors, but no one wants to go outside. How are there so many people here? No one has opened a fire exit yet and this press of bodies is growing tighter around me, pushing against my shoulders and back. Were all these people sitting on each other’s laps in the cinema? I don’t know if my heart is beating faster because I’m stuck in the growing pressure of this crowd or because I’m about to go out into a lightning storm.

My breath catches and then vanishes.

No.

Please not now.

‘It’s the EV. It’s got to be,’ a man leaning against my shoulder mutters. ‘A crazy EV storm with the killer winds and supercharged lightning like the one that hit Salvador.’

Has an EV storm hit Nine Trees? My knuckles move in small circles, pressing into my chest. The crush is growing tighter around me, but all I can do is exhale and exhale again, hoping my lungs will fill. This can’t happen now. We can’t go out into an EV storm. We can’t stay in the complex. I can’t move. This breathlessness is how it started last time, when I knocked a pack of pasta with my bag and an aisle-full of people watched me trying to clean up the scattered fusilli. I can’t have another panic attack. I can’t hide in the loos here. There’s a solid chance they’re on fire.

I breathe out two, three, four as another flash illuminates the foyer and gasps ripple through the crowd. I exhale heavily again and focus on memories of the sea: the rise and fall of the waves, the push and pull of the tides, the storms I’ve watched pass over the horizon whilst I counted the forks of lightning from the safety of the beach. The pressure on my chest eases as the waves roll through my mind. The sea must be fierce tonight…

Continue reading the extract here…

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