Page 129 (1/2)

17 HOURS, 48 MINUTES

BRIANNA WOKE

It took a while for her to make sense of where she was

Then the pain reminded her Pain all down her left arm, left hip, left calf, left ankle

She had been wearing a denim jacket over a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers The hoodie was burned away on her left shoulder and arone from her shorts on the same side

The skin beneath was bloody She had hit the roof at high speed The concrete had been like sandpaper

It hurt aly

She was on her back Staring up at the bogus stars Her head hurt Her palms were scraped raw but nowhere near the scraped-to-the-meat injuries on her side

Brianna picked herself up, gasping fro almost to see actual flames

It was scary bright on the roof of the power plant So she could see the wounds all too clearly The blood looked blue in the fluorescent light Her injuries weren’t life-threatening, she reassured herself, she wasn’t going to die But oh,

“Happens when you slam concrete at a couple hundred miles an hour,” she told herself “I should wear a heluys”

That thought offered a welco a sort of superhero outfit for herself Hel-bolt decals Definitely

It could have been worse, she told herself It would have been worse if she were anyone else on earth, because when she had hit the deck her body wanted to go tus and head

But she was the Breeze, not anyone else She’d had the speed to slah—barely—to turn a deadly tumble into an extremely painful skid

She lie of the roof But the way the building was constructed the edges sloped away, round-shouldered, rather than forle So she couldn’t see straight down, though she could see the gate and the parking lot, all blazing bright Beyond, the dark mountains, the darker sea