Amber stopped in the tiny corridor between the shop and the toilets. There were five doors, all with signs and text on them. Signs that she had taken care to read on a previous visit. Two with little stick figures on for 'Ladies' and 'Gentlemen', to the left and right straight ahead. One with a picture that was supposed to be a person in a wheelchair, though it looked more like half a person inside half of a hamster ball to Amber's eye. A door had a thin red rectangle of plastic on it with letters that stated: 'Colleagues only. Did you remember to lock this door? Check CMRF record'. Amber had always thought that was kind of a weird thing to put on the door; if the instructions were for people who worked here, wouldn't it make more sense to put them behind the door?

The fifth door in this tiny corridor, where there was only really room for two of them to be open at once, was swinging in the breeze. The sign on this one was in green, and was actually three different signs. One said: 'Fire Exit Only'. The others declared, in slightly smaller print, 'Push bar to open' and 'No smoking. Door is alarmed. Compliant with BS 1125' and a whole bunch more numbers that seemed to have been burned away by someone stubbing cigarettes out on the sign. Some people were so stupid, they just had to damage things to prove that they hadn't read a sign.

The door was open, anyway, giving Amber her first look at what was outside. As her Mom came up behind her, finally no longer yelling, she stared through the fire exit and tried to catch her breath after all the running. They weren't out of the woods yet, or even out of the coffee shop, but she knew she could run away better if she could breathe.

"You always see it, but you don't remember there's a door here," she said after a few gulps of almost-fresh air, and continued as she ran outside with her mother close on her heels. "If you're coming from the main bit of the shop it's over your left shoulder, and it's half hidden behind the door you just opened, so you might not notice. I know you're not allowed to use fire escapes usually, but I can smell smoke and everybody's screaming so I think it's okay today."

They were half way down the stairs now, plain metal ones with ridges on the steps to stop you slipping. The whole thing shook with every step, and rung out like a bell would if you fixed it to the wall with rubber washers that quieted the noise down almost straight away. The stairs came out of the side of the building right where the door was, and another door the same on the building next door, but that one was closed. They went down a wall that was covered in moss, and it looked like an overflowing gutter at the top had made it all damp and sticky. Nobody came out here to paint the wall every year or two and stick up wooden panels in different colours with company slogans on; this was a part of the building that they completely forgot about until they needed it.

"I hope you're not angry," Amber mumbled as she rounded a third corner and her boots touched plain concrete slabs, slightly uneven and with moss and weeds growing up along the cracks between them. There was some rubbish here, but not much else. It was a tiny courtyard, just a box with the sky at the top and a flight of steps that curled round three walls in an ugly spiral. There were a couple of windows in the dark brick walls, but they were either bricked up in colours that didn't quite match, or covered with wooden boards on the other side, hiding this little dirty space from the world. There was also an archway beneath the steps, a couple of locked-up doorways, and signs that this was where the shops threw out anything they didn't want to deal with. Someone had been sick against one of the walls, but Amber didn't stop to wonder who. She just made sure Mom was still following, and ran down the tiny alley beyond the arch. More back doors, and a couple of big bins decorated with stickers that declared some kind of tax number for whichever shop owned them. Amber had seen those before, someone had told her it was because businesses had to pay for the amount of stuff they threw out, but she'd not been interested to ask who chose the numbers for them or why they couldn't cheat by making their own stickers.

They rushed past the bins, trying not to breathe in the stink from days-old trash, and then the alley met another. This passage ended in a gate that could be easily opened from one side, but would have needed a key if they wanted to turn back. Then they were on a shopping street again, and there were still people running in panic, but they didn't seem quite as frantic as the people at the front of the coffee shop had been.

"You did good," Mom finally breathed, "I'm sorry I didn't listen. The people in the shop are probably still fighting over who gets to the door first."

"We got out though," Amber gasped. "What are we running from?"

"It will say on the news," Mom answered with more confidence than she felt. "We'll find out later, for now let's just get out of here."