Origins: The Fire (2 page)
My feet hit first, and then I pitch onto my hands and knees. The force knocks me forward, and my right shoulder slams hard. My temple is next.
Pain explodes before everything goes black.
I come to moments—minutes?—later. My vision clears, only to show that the gray smoke and crackling flames still rage around me. The place where I landed is safe, but for how long?
Our living-room floor is scorched, its pale stain replaced by an angry black char. This part of our house used to look big but now feels claustrophobic, dwarfed by writhing orange and billowing gray smoke.
There isn’t much time left.
Gingerly I attempt to crawl to my feet. I scream when my burned hand hits the floor and double over, fighting not to black out again. Every bit of my body hurts. I push to my feet, and my right ankle gives. While I struggle to steady myself on one foot, I realize my clothes are almost dry. The shirt I have tied around my mouth is gone. My own shirt, once white, is gray with soot.
I look to my left, then my right. No sign of my parents—just fire, both ways, devouring the remains of our furniture.
The dining table where I did my homework every night. The couch where we watched those ridiculous documentaries every weekend—a habit I’ll never complain about again, if we can all just make it out. As I stare hopelessly into the flames, I think I see a flicker of color behind them. Pale skin topped with blond hair. Mom? Is that Mom, heading for the French doors? Another flicker, of forest green. Is that Dad’s coat? Is he coming back for me?
I wave my uninjured arm. “Dad!” I try to scream, but once again my voice fails me. “Dad, over here!”
The fire’s crackle is my only reply.
Did he see me? Was he even there? Or was I hallucinating everything?
Panic pulses an ever-increasing rhythm through my body, even as my lungs protest the lack of oxygen.
Three minutes. Three minutes. Three minutes.
Then, through a break in the flames, I see his face, his brown eyes wide with panic. A relieved sob swells in my throat. He’s okay. Dad is okay.
He’s stepping toward me when, overhead, there’s a sharp clap, followed by a loud, creaking groan—a sound I’ve grown to fear in a very short time. I turn too fast and my foot slips. I collapse to my knees, hitting hard, but my eyes never leave the shimmering banister. It is tipping, tipping, slowly losing the battle with the flames. Anytime now the structure is going to collapse…and take me out with it.
I crane my neck, try to look back to where I saw Dad, but though I fight to pick him out behind the curtain of flames, he’s gone. Vanished. Or maybe it’s just the smoke growing thicker, darker. In the distance, behind the crackle and roar, sounds the high-pitched wail of a siren.
Too late.
When I push to my feet once more, I realize just how weak I am. Fatigue has turned my legs into dead weights. My lungs feel full, much too full to suck down any air.
The room is growing gray. I know realistically that the French doors can’t be far, but at the rate I’m moving, they seem a world away.
I manage to hobble one step forward, then two. But my energy is fading as fast as the fire is growing. More heaviness seeps into my limbs, a sleepiness that, somewhere in my head, a voice is screaming at me to fight.
But it’s so peaceful…and breathing is so hard.
I shake off the weariness. No, I have to move.
I make it one more step before an explosive
CRACK!
deafens me. The next moment, something strikes me across the skull, like a slap from a giant, and I go down. As my eyes fight to stay open, I’m encased in a tomb of black smoke, billowing across my face, filling my nose, blinding me completely.
“Dad?” I whisper. Why hasn’t he come for me?
My head hits the floor. Behind the curtain of black,
there’s dancing orange. With the last bit of my energy, I lift my good hand and search for the picture I stashed in my waistband, but all I find is skin.
Gone. It must have fallen out along the way. My heart twists painfully—or maybe that’s an injury. By this point, it’s impossible to tell.
My vision grows hazy as the flames flicker closer.
No, not haze—static. Buzzing. Then the room separates into four, eight, sixteen tiny boxes, all in one. Sixteen tiny flames, dancing closer to me.
The images fade in and out, interspersed with stark black…like a dead TV screen.
More static hissed through my ears. Then infinite darkness. I felt removed, detached.
No more heat, no more pain. Just red words that sifted in front of me.
Memory banks compromised…defragment.
System shutting down in five, four, three, two, one—
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Read on for an excerpt of
MILA 2.0
, the first book in a riveting
Bourne Identity
–style trilogy by Debra Driza.
B
eyond the eastern border of Greenwood Ranch, orange poured across the sky, edging the clouds like flames.
Flames.
I clenched handfuls of Bliss’s silky-thick mane and squeezed my eyes shut, searching behind them for the black haze of smoke. For the smell of burning wood and plastic, of smoldering Phillies shirts and baby photos. For sirens and screams. For anything at all that hinted at fire.
For Dad.
Beneath me, the horse snorted. I sighed, relaxed my grip, and smoothed her mane back into place. Nothing. Once again all I’d conjured up was a big fat bunch of nothing. Over four weeks since the accident that had ended my
father’s life, and the memories still resisted my every attempt to unlock them.
I opened my eyes, just as something flashed behind them.
White walls, white lights. A white lab coat. The searing aroma of bleach
.
My skin prickled. From the hospital I’d been taken to, maybe? After the fire? It was the closest I’d come to remembering anything so far.
I grasped at the images, tried to drag them into view, but they vanished as fast as they’d appeared.
Now that my eyes were open, what wouldn’t disappear was the picket fence blocking our path, its white posts stabbing upward and bisecting an unrelenting sprawl of green, green, green.
The other thing that wouldn’t disappear, as much as I dreamed otherwise? Good old Clearwater, Minnesota—my new home as of thirty days ago. Land of grass, trees, dirt, of scattered old ranch-style houses tucked between plots of farmland. Home of work trucks and the thick, earthy stench of manure. A town so tiny, it didn’t even have its own movie theater. Or a McDonald’s. A place where, according to Kaylee, the sole listing under Yelp’s Arts and Entertainment section was Mount’em Taxidermy.
Nothing said good times like a stuffed mammal.
Bliss snorted and yanked her head away from the fence, back in the direction of the stables. I couldn’t blame her.
The fields and lakes and quiet that Mom accepted so readily held nothing for me, either. They couldn’t. Not when every good memory had been created back in Philly.
At least the ones I could still remember.
I rubbed my cheek against green-and-tan flannel—Dad’s shirt collar—seeking comfort in the soft fabric. Dad had worn this shirt as he guided me through throngs of Phillies fans inside Citizens Park, his hand gentle on my elbow while the aroma of popcorn and hot dogs and overheated bodies surrounded us.
The hollow widened in my chest. How was it that some memories played so vividly behind my eyes, like DVDs complete with sounds and smells, while others, not at all?
Mom said anxiety following a traumatic death was normal, that it did odd things to our brains. A nice way of saying I wasn’t crazy, just because I could recall the exact layout of our old house and the way Dad pumped one arm in the air when he cheered for his favorite team, yet couldn’t remember something as simple as my favorite brand of jeans. Or if I liked to go on bike rides. Or if I’d ever been in love.
Mom assured me it would all come back. Eventually.
My dad never would.
I dug my nails into the leather reins and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Everything, burned to ashes along with our old house.
Everything except for one pathetic shirt.
Bliss pawed the ground, kicking up a clump of grass. She whinnied in anticipation of escape.
I knew exactly how she felt.
I steered Bliss away from the fence before nudging her into a trot, her body swaying rhythmically beneath me. A chilly breeze brushed over my face. I threw back my head and allowed the grassy-sweet gusts to grab at my hair, my shirt, the painful ache that lived where my heart should be. If only the breeze could pick me up and carry me back in time.
The ache behind my lungs grew, like it was trying to metastasize to the rest of my body.
“Let’s go!” I dug my heels into Bliss’s sides.
The mare didn’t need to be asked twice. All fifteen hundred pounds of horse surged forward at once. Power roared up from her legs and slammed into me, and I leaned lower, pressing my body as close to the mare’s as possible, relishing the snap of her mane whipping into my face.
The faster we went, the more the ache in my chest seemed to subside, as if my pounding heart and each one of Bliss’s hoof strikes hammered the pain into a smaller and smaller ball.
I urged Bliss even faster.
As we raced back for the stables, boulders rose before us, part of the decorative wall that meandered through a small portion of the twenty-five-acre property. I was already defying Mom by venturing above a speed of painfully dull.
Jumping was out of the question. Especially since I’d never done it before.
Or had I?
The rocks grew closer and closer. Either I veered away now or carried out a split-second and idiotic attempt to slam my memory back into gear.
I let the reins slip through my fingers. Idiotic it was.
The mare’s powerful muscles gathered beneath my legs, and our soar into the air felt amazing, like I was part of Bliss and the two of us were flying.
Until the stirrup gave under my right foot. Until the saddle slipped.
I lost balance, slid sideways with the loosened saddle, saw the rocks rush toward me. I pictured my head splattering open like a broken egg while my pulse pounded a terrified drumbeat in my ears.
You’re a goner
flashed through my mind.
And then my hands lashed out, quicker than I even knew I could move. I grabbed hold of Bliss’s mane, pulled myself upright with remarkable ease—just as Bliss’s front hooves crashed to the ground.
“Yes!” An exhilarated laugh exploded from my mouth. So I hadn’t conjured up my past, but I did feel more alive than I had in weeks. Like the whole world had burst into high definition.
Plus—I had wicked good reflexes. Maybe one day Mom
would tell me if sports featured prominently in those missing chunks of my life.
“Mila!”
Speaking of whom…
Busted.
I slowed Bliss to a trot. My stomach clenched as we drew closer to the willowy figure who stood near the gravel driveway.
Of course, the expression on Mom’s heart-shaped face was as poised as ever; not even a single blond hair strayed from her usual neat ponytail. The wiry arms crossed under her chest hinted at annoyance, but that was all the reaction I got. Disappointing, but hardly shocking.
Nothing fazed Nicole Daily, not one of the critically injured horses she tended or an impromptu move to a new state, and certainly not one slightly rebellious, hugely heartbroken daughter.
When I pulled the horse to a stop, Mom’s dark-blue eyes remained neutral behind the square frames of her glasses. “I’m sure I’ve told you not to ride faster than a walk. Was there a point to that?”
I dismounted and patted the blowing horse on the neck. My shoulders hitched back. “No point.”
Her eyebrows arched over her lenses, accentuating her surprise. Then her lipstick-free mouth flattened into a thin line.
The spurt of satisfaction I felt wasn’t nice.
“I see.” An abrupt shake of her head, followed by her slender fingers rubbing the spot between her brows.
With a start, I noticed her hand was shaking when she extended it toward me, palm up. An uncharacteristically pleading gesture. “No, I don’t see. Mila, please, you can’t do this sort of thing. What if you’d had an accident, and then—”
She broke off, but it didn’t matter. The flannel shirt I wore became heavier, burdened with the weight of words left unsaid.
And then—maybe I’d lose you, too.