The clinging burn of cigarette smoke met Jle and followed her out of the building. It covered what would have been a crisp breath of air and instead clogged her throat, prickling and scraping in a foul stroke. She quickened her pace until the hard clops of her shoes on pavement gave way to a cushion of grass. Cutting across the large lot of green saved a few seconds that would have had Jle easing her way between the standing clumps of people and isolated clouds of smoke. Moving helped to push the air behind her and keep the smell at bay after the fact.

Grass gave way to pavement again, the top landing of a set of stairs that led to a lower level parking lot. Jle stopped walking with her hand bracing against the beginning of the guardrail. She looked down the way, losing focus on the burn of smoke. There were two landings between her and the bottom, with large shallow steps that spread out and elongated the distance. Its sides were flanked with tall stone walls that followed the outer guardrails all the way down. Sometimes people walked along their flat tops, though it was a narrow way. After the steps was a path, and at the end of that were the gleaming backs of cars.

At first she took the steps gingerly, letting her body adjust to the awkward change in leverage with each descent. When she was two steps away from the first landing, she started to run.

It was fortunate that everyone was far behind her, separated by the distance of the lawn. Jle's arms had pinwheeled in her impulse to lunge forward as though they would help to lift her into the air. The stairs slipped and toppled beneath her; she had jumped at the wrong moment of her harried run. The distant bazaar of the parking lot momentarily shrank, just a fraction, and then she was coming back down.

She had cleared the first landing but only half of the following set of stairs. However benign they were, Jle felt it when the tips of her shoes skidded down the sharp edge of one step, stubbing hard on the next. Her legs bent and jammed together. Then the top half of her body swooped down to embrace the bottom stairs and second landing. The gleam of the parking lot's cars still smothered her eyes.