This is actually happening.
I’m dying.
She thought about Cat. She tried to call for her, but no words came out. Emme’s voice was muffled, as if someone had stuffed a heavy cloth in her mouth. She didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed, there was a darkness enveloping her that was also piercingly bright; she felt a searing heat that was also freezing cold. Her body felt as if the weight of a thousand trucks had rammed her into a pillow of freezing cotton. The cartwheeling came to an abrupt halt with a feeling that she was being slammed into something sharp, alongside a million little pieces of debris. Then everything went dark. An eerie silence reigned, while Emme realised she was slipping away.
Emme opened her eyes, not sure whether seconds, minutes or hours had passed. It couldn’t be hours. She rememberedCat telling her how humans only lasted fifteen minutes under the snow, before they died of suffocation or hypothermia.
Perhaps I’m already dead,Emme thought, although she could hear muffled, muted screams in a distant realm. The sound of a helicopter. Sounds which suggested movement. Sounds which suggested life. She tried to look around her but was surrounded by white concrete, then she realised, she could be so many metres deep. This was really happening. All her optimism from just moments ago, the empowering soaring flying, had been crushed. This was the end.
She thought about her mother, father, sister, and niece and nephew as a chilling comfort washed over her. ‘It’s OK,’ she told herself, as if she were reassuring Zara and Zack. Comforting them so they might sense she was at peace.
‘It’s OK.’
Her breathing became more laboured, the cold cloth expanding in her mouth. She tried to punch the snow around her but the weight of it pinned her arms, and she was frozen in her freefall, frozen in time.
‘It’s OK,’ she told herself, as she felt herself slipping away.
Chapter Eighty-Three
Emme woke with a start and gasped for air.Air. She could breathe. Her panicked eyes opened and the first person she saw was her father, sitting at her bedside, a book on his lap. He looked up and gave a smile of harrowed relief.
She started breathing rapidly, in panic, until machinery beeped and whirred and she realised she was alive.
Her father looked across Emme’s bedside, and she followed his gaze. Her mother was sitting on her left. She tried to move but her body ached, she felt pummelled.
‘It’s OK love, you’re OK,’ Marian said, clutching Emme’s hand.
‘We’re here,’ Geoff said.
Emme nodded.
‘I… I…’ she tried to speak.
‘Do you remember what happened, love?’ Marian asked.
Emme thought about the whiteout and the white noise, and then panicked.
‘Cat – where’s Cat?’
‘It’s OK, love,’ her mother soothed her. ‘She’s down the hall. She broke her collarbone when she hit a tree. The boy broke both his legs.’
‘You got off lightly!’ said Geoff, with some relief. Shecould tell from the sad sweep across his face that he didn’t really think it. He was so immensely relieved.
Emme smiled. She was relieved too. She thought she’d died.
‘How long have I been in here?’
‘Three days darling. You’ve been drifting in and out for three days. The poor boy was in a coma but he woke up last night,’ her mother said.
‘How long have you been in Kristalldorf?’ Emme asked.
Her parents looked at each other.
‘Oh we haven’t even got to Kristalldorf yet, we’re in the hospital in Bloch. Do you remember Bloch?’
Of course.
Emme nodded.
