The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(17)
“What was that? What—”
“Baby spot. It’s a mood-lifter. In two minutes, you’ll feel a whole lot better.”
The stretcher moved again. She floated thirty feet to the edge of a parked green van.
“Wait. Wait. Where are you taking me?”
“It’s all right. I’m bringing you to folks who’ll be able to help you.”
“Who?”
“Nice people,” said Martin. “Smart people. They hired us to find you all and bring you back to safety. You’ll be okay. Trust me.”
The Salgados loaded her into the van. Once inside, Martin sat Hannah up in her stretcher and popped her arm back into its socket. All the pain fled her body in a quick and glorious instant.
“Wow. That’s . . .”
Martin smiled. “Told you.”
By the time he finished wrapping her arm in a cozy black sling, the baby spot on her neck had opened every dark curtain in her head, flooding her with sunshine. Suddenly she could see the overwhelming positives of her situation. Maybe these clients of Martin’s were as smart and nice as he said they were. Maybe they’d make perfect sense of everything. And if they could find Hannah, maybe they could also find Amanda and Mom and everyone else she knew and cared about. All the good people of Earth, gathered up like pilgrims to start a happy new society. It had the potential to be wonderful. Hannah could run the theater.
As the engine started, the actress found herself smiling for the first time today. She smiled at the people on the street. She smiled at the floating cars she couldn’t see. She smiled at the flying saucer that served brunch on weekends. She smiled at the thought of mimosas over San Diego.
Soon the van pulled a U-turn. Hannah turned her head and smiled at the bus she’d collided with. She could see through the window, to the sprawling web of cracks on the opposite glass. She was pretty sure she caused that damage, but she wasn’t remotely bothered. It was a brave new world with strange new rules, and Hannah smiled at the possibilities.
FOUR
Twelve miles east of the San Diego Harbor, and seven feet down, a writhing young figure came awake in darkness. For the first few breaths of her new existence, the girl in the bracelet lived in a near-perfect state of incomprehension, the kind she hadn’t experienced since her own messy birth, nearly fourteen years ago. She didn’t know who she was or what she was, if she was alive or dead. She didn’t even know if she had a body.
But then she smelled her own sweat, felt the cotton folds of her pajamas. Now the salient details of her life came trickling back in bullet points. She was Mia Farisi, fresh out of middle school with a 4.0 GPA and a weight of 150. She was born and raised in La Presa, where she lived in a two-story house with her father, her grandmother, and three burly brothers. A fourth one served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army. Mia made him e-mail her every day, just to let her know he was okay.
Except . . . Things were not okay. Something bad had happened right here in La Presa. Something that sounded a lot like war.
Her mind flashed back to the thunderous booms that shook the house at 4:42 this morning, when all the clocks stopped and all the planes fell to earth. Within moments, Peter Farisi burst into his daughter’s room, shirtless and panicked.
“Take Nana to the basement! Don’t come out till I tell you it’s safe!”
“Dad, what—”
“Just go!”
It was in the basement that something terrible had happened. A strange vibration on her wrist. An unexpected light. A rumble from above. And then . . .
“Nana?”
The word rolled up Mia’s throat like sandpaper. She’d screamed herself raw before fainting, but she didn’t know why. The last few moments of her memory were still a muddled blur.
She scrambled to her knees and fumbled through the darkness. The floor around her was concave and covered in dirt. No, it was dirt. She stood up and felt the wall. Also dirt, also curved. As Mia crossed to the other side, her bare foot slipped on a pair of smooth wooden planks. Her honor student brain—now working at two bars of power—processed the data and came back with a flustered guess. Loose steps from the basement. You were standing right on them.
She continued to feel the walls—perfectly curved all around, like someone had taken an eight-foot ice cream scoop to the earth and carved out a perfect sphere.
Or an egg.
Mia gasped. She remembered the egg of light now. It had encased her on the basement steps. Her grandmother had clawed at its ethereal shell, feebly trying to extricate her. Mia remembered seeing white steam in Nana’s cries. Winter breath in the third week of July, in a town ten miles north of the Mexican border.
“Nana?”
At three bars of power, Mia’s brain finally introduced her to the problem at hand.
“Oh no. No . . .”
She reached up as far as her five-foot frame would let her, feeling nothing but air. She seized a stair plank and jabbed it at the ceiling. Crumbs of dirt drizzled down on her.
“Oh no. No, no, no, no . . .”
While she continued her frantic stabs at the earth above, words of alarm scrolled along her inner news ticker. You’re buried. You’re buried. You’re buried alive. You’re buried alive and you’re gonna die.
—
“It’s nothing to get upset about,” Nana had insisted. “These things happen.”