"I can't—" Her hands clawed at the door handle, found it jammed. She pulled harder, panic rising in her throat like bile. "I can't get out. I can't?—"
The metal groaned. Somewhere behind them, something sparked and caught, sending orange light flickering through the smoke. The chemical smell intensified and her vision tunneled.
The truck hit them from the side. Her mother screamed. Metal crumpled. Glass exploded. Her father's hands on the wheel, knuckles white, trying to regain control but the car was spinning, flipping, and she was twelve years old and couldn't do anything but scream?—
No. She was thirty-two. In a flyer car. Underground. Delilah was hurt. Had to get to Delilah, had to help her, had to?—
But the seatbelt was cutting into her chest again even though she'd released it, and the screaming wouldn't stop. She couldn't tell if the blood on her hands was from this crash or that crash or if it even mattered because people were dying and she was surviving and that's what she did. That's all she ever did.
Survive.
While everyone else?—
"—multiple casualties?—"
"—careful—"
The voices were closer now but they didn't make sense. The words scrambled in her ears, broke apart into meaningless sounds. She pressed her hands over her face, felt blood and glass and smoke coating her skin. Her pulse hammered in her temples, at the base of her throat, everywhere at once.
Breathe. She had to breathe.
But the air tasted like burning metal and death.
Her parents had died instantly, they'd told her later. Quick. Painless. A mercy, the social worker had said, like that made it better. Like she hadn't spent three hours trapped in the wreckage waiting for help, listening to silence where her parents' voices should have been.
Three hours alone with corpses while she survived.
And now Delilah?—
She lunged for her cousin again, grabbed her shoulder, shook hard enough to hurt. "Wake up. Please wake up. You have to wake up because I can't—I can't do this again. I can't watch you die. Please."
Nothing. Just that awful, shallow breathing, too much blood and her own voice rising higher, breaking apart.
"Please. Delilah, please. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have stopped you. Should have made you stay at the office. Should have?—"
The list was endless. All the ways she'd failed. All the ways she'd let this happen.
All the ways she was responsible for another person dying while she survived.
The pattern held. It always held. Her parents, the guardians who'd raised them, and now Delilah bleeding out in a crashed flyer car because she hadn't been good enough, smart enough, strong enough to prevent this.
Cursed. She was cursed.
Everyone she loved died, but she kept living and she didn't know how to make it stop.
Her fingers found her scar again, pressed hard enough to hurt, hard enough to feel something other than the crushing weight of guilt. The fresh cuts bled over the old tissue, twenty years of trauma layered in the same small patch of skin. Evidence. Proof. She'd survived before, she'd survive this, Delilah would die and it would be her fault?—
"—got a survivor here?—"
"—female, conscious?—"
The voices broke through but she couldn't process them. Couldn't focus on anything except Delilah's too-still face and the blood and the smell of burning metal dragging her back to that intersection twenty years ago where she'd learned what it meant to be the one who lived.
The door beside her screeched. Metal on metal, the sound drilling into her skull. She flinched back, arms coming up to protect her head, and the movement sent fresh pain lancing through her ribs.
Too many voices. Too much sound. She pressed her hands over her ears, but it didn't help, nothing helped. The world was spinning, metal was crunching and people were dying. She was twelve and thirty-two and alone and?—
"Delilah." Her cousin's name came out broken. "Please. Please don't die. I can't—not again. Not you too."
