Prologue
I wasn’t prepared for the impact. No one ever is. All it took was a matter of seconds, but to me, those seconds stretched into tiny lifetimes, each one unfolding at a different pace, like stacked panes of glass shattering in succession. Time dilated, warped, refused to move forward as it should. The first sign was the squeal of the air brakes, that shrill metallic shriek that cut through every other sound. Heads jerked up. Conversations broke mid-sentence. Someone behind me muttered, “What the hell—?” Then came the lurch.
The bus skidded sideways on black ice, twelve tires sliding without purchase, the whole machine becoming weightless in a way it was never designed to be. My stomach flipped, not with the shallow thrill of a roller coaster but with the sickening dread of knowing gravity had chosen its victim, and it was us. I pressed my palm hard against the seat in front of me, but it did nothing. I could feel helplessness spreading through every passenger like static, crackling in the air. The driver’s shout carried no authority, only fear, a man begging the machine to obey.
The sound that followed was worse: the low, tortured whine of a steel girder bending under impossible strain. It was like the groan of a wounded animal, metallic and ancient, the voice of something too big to save. And then—snap. The sound of it breaking. The front of the bus tipped, and suddenly the view out the window wasn’t the glittering snowfields anymore. It was down. Just down.
Gravity pulled everything with it: my body, my breath, the luggage packed beneath our seats. The storage doors rattled, burst open, and the suitcases became battering rams, sliding, colliding, crashing forward, each one adding weight to the nose, each one accelerating our fall. “Hold on!” someone screamed. There was nothing to hold.
Slow motion doesn’t even begin to describe it. It wasn’t cinematic. It was cruel. Every detail was magnified: the way a woman’s scarf lifted in the air like a banner before it tangled around her neck; the way a man’s glasses slipped from his face and hovered for an instant before smashing into the aisle; the way my own seatbelt bit into my chest like a hand trying to restrain me, yet still failed to stop the forward momentum. The soundscape was unbearable—metal shrieking, glass exploding, human voices splintering into animal howls.
Then—impact.
The windshield kissed the bottom of the ravine with a crack that wasn’t glass at all, but something far worse. The bus folded like an accordion, the metal shrieking as it bent at an impossible angle. Screams blurred together into a single raw note. Something heavy slammed against my shoulder, another weight drove into my side, and for an instant, I didn’t know if my bones had snapped or if the sound came from somewhere else.
And then there was silence.
Not true silence—there was still the hiss of coolant spraying, the groan of twisted steel settling into place—but the kind of silence that follows when all the voices run out of air at the same time. I opened my eyes and couldn’t understand what I was looking at. The world was sideways. Glass glittered across the floor like frost. A seat had come loose and was lodged diagonally in the aisle. The smell hit next: burned rubber, hot oil, coppery blood, all of it layered over the sharp, raw scent of snow blowing in from the shattered windows.
I was in the wreckage. Somehow, against every law of physics, I was still in one piece. Arms twisted but not broken. Legs sprawled, but when I flexed them, they answered. My chest ached like it had been caved in, but no knives of bone pierced through. I was alive. But where was she?
The thought carved through the fog instantly. Where is she?
I tried to call her name—did I speak it aloud? I couldn’t tell. My throat was raw, my voice buried under the ringing in my ears. It felt like screaming without sound, like my whole skull vibrated, but nothing carried beyond it. My head spun. My breath snagged in my lungs like it couldn’t find a way out. Panic clawed at me. If I didn’t move, I’d drown in it.
I pushed myself upright, or at least what I thought was upright, though the bus no longer had an up. The world tilted crazily, every surface broken, sharp, treacherous. My fingers brushed across shattered glass, cold air, and a fabric sleeve that wasn’t mine. I jerked back, afraid of what I might find attached, her face. I needed to see her face.
I reached again, slower this time, trying to lift debris, trying to ignore the sticky warmth that clung to my hand. Someone groaned nearby, a deep, guttural sound of pain, but it wasn’t her. I tried again to stand, legs buckling beneath me. The motion made the darkness crowd in fast, as though the world was narrowing to a pinpoint. My hands slipped on the glass, my vision blurred with gray at the edges. She has to be here. If I could just see her. If I could just—
The world folded in on itself—the noise, the wreckage, the smell of burning, the cold air rushing in. Everything funneled into a single black tunnel. And then there was nothing.
