Translucent (10 page)

Karena thought through her plan as the bus drove along. She knew that her parents were on top of
the building in some sort of restaurant
or something.
She’d have to get up there as fast as possible, and since taking the elevator wasn’t an option because of the fire, she’d have to run up
20 flights of stairs in order to reach the top. And then what? She would have to be fast, and hope that she could run down with them to the bottom before the building caught
completely on
fire, so that they could be saved. But that didn’t seem likely. She would have to find some other way of getting them out of the inferno.

The bus arrived at the proper stop, and Karena disembarked. There it was, right in front of her, the building that wo
uld be, in about 15 minutes,
a blazing furnace of heat that would topple to the ground, hitting other adjacent buildings on the way down before it was merely a pile of rubble. She’d seen the pile of rubble herself, on the way being driven to the orphanage. This time, though, there’d be a major difference. There were two options. Either her parents wouldn’t be lying within that pile of rubble
at all
, or she’d be there with them. Whichever happened,
it would be different, and it would be
better.

Karena raced over to the building, having regained her energy from the bus ride. Although her body still hurt from the collision with the glass, it had greatly lessened and she found herself running almost at the speed she’d been at earlier.

Once inside the building,
Karena looked around the lobby for a staircase.
Of course, it would be quicker to take an elevator, but there was no way she was going to do that with a fire starting in a matter of minutes.
There was a pair of elevators at the end of the room, and next to that on the wall there was a door with a
staircase symbol on it.
Bingo,
thought Karena as she ran towards the staircase and banged open the door. A man behind a desk looked at her strangely, but she paid him no heed, something she’d gotten very good at in the past
24 years of her new lives.

Karena began the climb. Her pace slowed as she reached about halfway up, finding her energy being sapped much faster going up the stairs than running straight along the ground. Nonetheless, she forced her now burning legs to push the last stretch up to the top as fast as they would carry her without her collapsing. Finally, she reached the final f
loor, which was the rooftop
restaurant
, and pushed her way out.

It was a wonderful view of the downtown area, and Karena could see why people wanted to come here to eat. Everything was lit up and peaceful as the waiters and waitresses served fancy food on even fancier platters, and it seemed like nothing could ever go wrong. But Karena knew better, and she
wasted no time before beginning to call
out her parents’ names.

“Harold!” she called at the top of her lungs. “Christi!” Instantly, there was an awkward silence, as everyone stopped
eating
, drinking, o
r whatsoever is was they were doing, and looked up at her
.
Bossa nova
music played quietly in the background, but that was the only noise in the whole restaurant. Karena was not stalled by this moment of embarrassment, however, and continued her search.

“Harold!” she called again. “Chri-”

A hand was clasped over her mouth
abruptly
. “
Excusez-moi,”
said a waiter
with, as you can probably determine by his language, a French accent.
“You are disturbing this restaurant with your obnoxious yelling. Could you
please-?
”

“There’s going to be a fire!” Karena yelled, ripping
the waiter’s hand off her mouth, much to his annoyance.
“Everyone needs to evacuate this building now!”

“Karena!” Harold suddenly stood up from the back, looking at her. “What on earth are you doing here!?”

“Dad! What I was trying to tell you guys earlier is that this building is going to catch fire, and if you don’t get off right now you’re going to-”

Her words were cut short when she saw him, standing at the back of the restaurant, face as expressionless as ever.

The Sandman had returned.

Karena gasped from the sheer shock of it, like it was a punch to her gut. What was he doing here? He only ever came just before she would be taken, so what on earth was he doing here?

And then she realized. It was because of the way she was altering events. He had already been annoyed with her last episode, and now she was changing things too much. This time, he had come to stop her.

Karena gulped, and tried to look away, but found she couldn’t. It was as if she was being
hypnotized, hypnotized by
terror. There was nothing she could do now to save them. He was entirely in control, and her parents were as good as dead.

But then, all of a sudden, she felt a sudden burst of willpower.
After a defiant glare at the Sandman, s
he tore her eyes away from him and looked at her parents, though she could still see him in her peripheral vision.
“We have to get out of here!” she called, though weaker this time, with
far
less strength. Everyone in the café, weirdly, was quiet, and they were all listening to her. “You guys have to trust me on this. We don’t have much-”

“Fire!” a man suddenly screamed, running up the staircase. “Evacuate the building! There’s a fire. Get out, get out!”

Karena looked back at the Sandman
desperately
. It was too late.
Not only were her parents, and everyone on this building, dead, but she was also dead.
The fire had begun.

Karena felt the inexplicable burst of willpower again, and managed to tear her eyes away from the Sandman. She ran to the side of the building and looked down to see smoke coming out of the bottom two stories. In no time at all the fire would get to the point that there would be nothing to support the building from falling over, and it would collapse to the ground just like last time. Even if someone called the fire department right now, it would take too long for them to get here. She’d have to find a safe way o
f
f the building by herself.

Karena’s first idea was to get as low as possible to the ground and then jump out a window, but looking at the pavement she could see that by the time they got there, the fire would be on the 5
th
or 6
th
floor, and there was nowhere safe to land. She quickly abandoned that thought and ran back into the crowd of screaming people evacuating, looking for some other
solution
.

“Karena!” Harold cried as he grabbed her arm, but Karena didn’t have a chance to respond before the building lurched under them, causing everyone to scream even louder. The roof felt very unstable, and she knew they didn’
t have much time before it collapsed, minutes at the most.

“We have to get off this building now!” Karena said.

“Then come on.
Why on earth are you just standing around?”

“We can’t go down there, we’ll die,” said Karena.
“That’s what you all tried to do last time. There has to be another way.”

“Wait a minute, what do you mean, last time?” Harold demanded. “Did we die last time?” But Karena ignored him, looking
around, trying to find another way to escape. The building was near another building, about the same height, and Karena knew that this building would crash into that one. There had to be some way to get over to the adjacent building before this one fell to the ground.

Karena ran to that side of the building, her pa
rents following behind, panicked and confused
. She tried
to ignore the Sandman who was still standing in the exact same position, with h
is hat pulled low over his face
as if nothing was going on. This time, she wouldn’t
let him win. Then again, that’s what she’d said last time…

Karena instantly changed her thoughts.
She tried to judge the distance between this building and the adjacent one. It looked to be about 40 meters, though that was a very rough estimate, as she wasn’t very good at estimating these sorts of things.
There was no way to jump it, so Karena looked for some way that they could get over there.

The building lurched again, c
ausing Karena to look down at the
street once more
. There was hardly anything supporting the building now. There wasn’t even time to get everyone across safely. That meant that the only way would be to somehow jump to the other building
while
this building was in the process of falling, something that sounded not only improbable, but impossible, especially given the fact that she was in the body of a ten-year old, which was not
at all
optimal for
base jumping.
It was a desperate, final plan, something that would almost definitely fail, but she would still do her best, anything she could, to defy the Sandman.
It didn’t matter if she died anyway, because sh
e’d just wake up again as an 11—
month old, and she’d try again.

“Okay, guys,” Karena said, turning around to her parents. She realized that in her past two lives her perspective on her parents had really changed. Before, they were more like actual parents, but now that she was an adult too, nearly the same age, it felt to
tally different talking to them, even if she was in the body of a ten-year old.
“I have a plan, but it’s pretty dangerous, like any
plan would be given the given
circumstances.”

“What is it?” Christi asked, clearly afraid.
She had a deep respect for her
daughter, even though it was sometimes strange trusting her with these sort of things given her apparent age.

“We need to jump onto that building while this one is falling down,” Karena said. “Come back here. We’ll get a running start just as the building is falling over.”

“What if it doesn’t fall that way?” Harold asked.

“It will,” said Karena, but all of a sudden she didn’t feel so sure. Could things that came down to a matter of sheer probability such as this change in different lifetimes? What if it did fall the other way? There was
no building that way, just pavement.

Karena shook the thought out of her mind when the building lurched again and she felt it leaning towards the other building. “Get ready!” she cried, running back about 15 meters to get a good speed up for the jump. Her parents followed suit.

The building started leaning forwards, and for one moment it seemed like it was going to fall the right way. And then it shifted, and it began leaning backwards, away from the adjacent building, away from their only hope. The building was going to fall the wrong way, and they would all die, just like last time.

“Karena, it’s leaning the wrong way!” Harold cried, stating the obvious, as often happens in dire circumstances when you don’t really know what else to say.

“I know,” Karena said. All the tables and chairs on the rooftop began to slide backward and Karena fought to keep her grip as the angle of the floor grew steeper. She closed her eyes, waiting for the feeling
of falling through thin air to overtake her senses
.

And then,
miraculously, the floor
leveled out. Karena opened her eyes to see the building once again tilting forward, towards the other building.
“It’s going back!” she cried in
her ecstasy, as the chairs and tables began to slide across the roof towards them. Not a single other person was left on the rood except for her, her paren
ts, and, of course, the Sandman, if he even counted as a person. Everyone else had already tried their luck on the stairs or had thrown themselves off
in a desperate and fruitless attempt to save their lives.

“Watch out!” Harold cried, yanking on Karena’s shirt and pulling her away from a clu
ster of tables and other things sliding at an incredible rate towards the front of the roof as the building tilted closer.

“When should we start running?” Christi asked.

“Not yet,” Karena said. “It’s too soon. The angle is going to
have to
be pretty steep for
us to reach the other building, so we’ll have to be careful.”

The building tilted further, and now all the tables and
various objects
were flying past them, so they had to focus partly on the building in front of them and partly on avoiding the
items sailing through the air
. Karena ducked suddenly when a sharpened knife flew out of nowhere, nearly stabbing her in the face, and she was barely able to roll to the side as a counter came sliding past.
The whole time the building was leaning over at an ever steeper angle.

She stood up again, now finding it harder than eve
r to do so without falling over, especially with nothing to hang onto.
She assessed the angle of the building and the distance to the other one. They were getting closer. Their
rate of descent
was getting faster.

“Now!” Karena suddenly yelled, and although her parents we
ren’t entirely ready, they all
sprinted across the rooftop, objects flying past them into the oblivion of the street below. It was hard to sprint when the floor was at such a steep angle, and Karena feared that they wouldn’t make it to the edge before the angle was too steep for them to run on. Had she spoken too late?

But they made it to the edge and Karena, wit
hout hesitating, leaped off
the building without even looking to see how far she was from the
adjacent
one. Her parents followed suit, and for one moment they hung, suspended in air, in a truly magical moment where they could ignore the building in the midst of collapsing behind them and enjoy the feeling of flying despite the pounding in their hearts.

And then Karena looked ahead, and she saw that there was no w
ay they were going to make it. The window of the building was still about 2 meters ahead of her, and she could feel her flight beginning to turn into a fall. Her velocity wouldn’t carry her all the way. Instead, s
he would plummet to the ground under
the falling building.

But as she began to plummet, she didn’t cease to move forward. She was still moving towards the building, and from looking at the ground she could see that she was going to reach the building before reaching the ground. But she’d reach it at a very steep angle, and it was unlikely that she’d have enough force to break the window and safely get through. There were only seconds left now before she smashed into the building, and she knew now that there was no way she could make it. Even if by some miracle she could land on the windowsill, she’d be crushed by the falling building.

And then, an object flew out of nowhere and shattered the window just milliseconds before Karena sailed through the newly created opening, getting cut a
nd scraped on the way in by
shard
s
of glass. She landed on the ground in a heap, her parents moments behind her, and instantly she felt a sharp pain in both her legs as she c
rashed to the floor. Her legs
were on fire, and for a second or two all she could focus on was the pain. But then she remembered the building. Rubble would be piling into this room in seconds.

“Get up!” she cried, and she dragged herself across the floor with her arms, her parents wearily standing up and staggering after. But she only got a few meters before all the window
s
in the room splintered inwards and bricks and chairs and burning rubble flew through them, destroying everything in it. Karena felt the building shift beneath her as the other building collided with it, but it was only a second before she felt an object hit her on the head and the world went black.