Free Sir Thursday by Garth Nix Page A

making Leaf jump. As he spoke, the hospital scene vanished, and Leaf saw again only the wooden paneling of the walls and floor, and the humming clocks.
    The butler stepped in and quickly changed the hands of just three of the clocks.
    “Stand in the circle, quickly, before the clocks strike!”
    He jumped out and Leaf stepped in. A second later, the clocks all began to strike at the same time, ringing out as the room shimmered around Leaf. She felt dizzy as everything went hazy and indistinct, and then a wave of nausea hit her as a white glow began to spread across the walls, floor, and ceiling. Soon she could see nothing but white around her.
    She was just about to scream or vomit—or both—when the light receded on one side, and she could see a kind of corridor, bordered by white light but more comfortably dim in the middle.
    Leaf staggered out and along this corridor, holding her stomach. She felt totally disoriented, with the white light pressing behind her and close to the sides. She couldn’t hear her own footsteps, or her breath, or anything else.
    Then, without warning, sound came back, a kind of roaring like wind in her ears, which quickly faded and was gone. A moment later, the white light vanished. Leaf, her eyes still screwed up, took a few loud steps on a hard floor and fell over, rolling onto her back. It took her disturbed mind a while to realize that the lights she was now staring at, though white, were simply fluorescent panels in a pale blue ceiling.
    She sat up and looked around. She was in a hospital corridor. East Area Hospital. She recognized the pale blue and ghastly brown color scheme. There was no one in the corridor, but there were lots of doors all the way along.
    And there was a clock above the swing doors at the end of the corridor. According to it, the time was ten past twelve, which made her worry, because when she’d been a fly on the wall looking down at the Skinless Boy it had only been 10:25. If it remained Thursday then it was only a little more than an hour and a half lost, but still…
    She got up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and checked the nearest doors. They were all storerooms of some kind, which indicated that she was on one of thelower, nonpublic areas of the hospital. Which meant her first priority had to be to get out before she was picked up by hospital security and had to explain what she was doing there or how she’d gotten in.
    A few minutes later, leaving a shrieking exit door alarm behind her, Leaf stepped out of an elevator onto the quarantine reception floor. But it wasn’t like when she’d left it. Then, the waiting area had been full of people who’d come to see their relatives in quarantine, who were still being kept in case the Sleepy Plague wasn’t really gone. Now the waiting room was empty, and there were huge sheets of plastic draped all over the chairs, and there was the telltale smell of recently sprayed disinfectant. Worse, from Leaf’s point of view, instead of just the two usual security guards by the secure reception area, there were four hospital security guards, half a dozen police in full biohazard gear, and a couple of soldiers in camouflage biosuits.
    Before she could get back in the elevator, they all noticed her.
    “Don’t step forward!” boomed one of the hospital guards. “This whole level is Q-zoned. How did you get here?”
    “I just got in the elevator,” said Leaf, acting younger than she was and much more stupid.
    “It’s supposed to be locked off from the ground,”grumbled the guard. “Just get back in and go down to Level One.”
    “I won’t catch anything, will I?” asked Leaf.
    “Go back down!” ordered the guard.
    Leaf stepped back in and pressed the button. Clearly something had changed in the time she’d been away. The fact that this whole quarantine level had now been locked off did not sound good. But the Sleepy Plague had gone…
    The elevator doors opened on the ground floor. Leaf stepped out,