1. Impact
CHAPTER ONE
impact
Impact isn't a sound. It's a rewrite of physics.
It's the moment your body stops belonging to you and becomes just another piece of debris.
Silence follows. Absolute. Suffocating. A silence so heavy it presses against my eardrums like I'm submerged in deep water. It’s a distinct, physical weight, pushing down on my chest, filling my mouth, and then ringing.
A high, thin scream of damaged nerves, a monotonous siren wailing inside my skull.
For a long second, I think I’m dead. The darkness is total.
I can’t tell up from down, left from right.
I am floating in a void of null-sensory data.
Then pain crawls up my spine, hot and steady, a serpentine reminder of existence.
It spreads into my shoulders, my hips, throbbing in time with a heart that I’m surprised is still beating. My right hand twitches. Alive enough.
I try to inhale, but the air is wrong. It’s thick, granulated. Snow. Unbelievably cold. It’s packed into my mouth, my nose. I cough, a violent spasm that wracks my bruised ribs, and spit out ice and blood. The taste is metallic, primitive.
The weight of everything is a crushing, absolute pressure.
I’m hanging upside down. The seatbelt is a wire slicing across my chest, digging into my collarbone, and cutting off circulation.
The bus isn't a bus anymore; it's a crushed aluminum can, split open like a jaw, snow pouring through the teeth.
Breath fogs the air, thick with the chemical sting of gasoline and the copper tang of iron.
Someone’s crying. It’s small, broken, and dangerously rhythmic.
Keening. The silence after the roar is the kind of quiet I used to hate on the ice—the second before the gloves drop, where every sound is a threat, but this is worse.
This is off-ice. This is the silence of things that are broken beyond repair.
Fuck. Clara. The name fires a synapse in the dark.
I brace my palm against the bus’s ceiling interior—which is now the floor. Glass shards bite into my glove, leather giving way to skin, but I push. I find the release buckle. It takes three tries, my fingers numb and clumsy. It clicks, a tiny mechanical grace in the chaos, and I drop.
Gravity reasserts itself with a vengeance. I hit the glass and debris with a grunt—sharp pain slices above my hip, a hot burn that instantly fades into a numbing cold. I scramble to my knees, slipping on something slick that isn't ice. It's warm. It's fluid—oil or blood.
I fumble for my phone, but my pocket is empty. Gone.
"Clara?" My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s gravel and broken glass. It’s the voice of a ghost.
A faint answer, from the front—or what used to be the front. "Here… please… Rowan?"
I crawl over a seat, my boots seeking purchase.
The dim light of the emergency exit sign flickers, dying, casting a strobing red light over the horror.
The shapes of my teammates hang from the twisted metal like slaughtered cattle in a freezer.
I pass Archer. The boy who was laughing.
He’s not laughing now. His neck is at an angle that physics doesn’t allow, his eyes wide and staring at nothing, a piece of the overhead luggage rack buried in his chest. The smile is gone, replaced by a slack-jawed emptiness.
Don't look. I force myself to keep moving. Protector. I failed. They’re gone.
The math is simple: I survived, they didn't.
"Clara," I rasp again.
"I'm stuck," she sobs. "I can't move my leg. Rowan, it hurts. Oh God, it hurts."
She’s wedged near the window, her body contorted.
A bench seat—heavy, steel-framed, bolted to the floor—has sheared off and is pinning her right leg against the crushed wall.
The wind and snow hiss through a crack behind her, coating her hair in white frost. Her hands are shaking so hard they’re blurring, clawing at the upholstery. "I can’t?—"
"You can."
I assess the trap. The bench is steel and heavy foam. It’s wedged tight, held by the bus's warped frame. It shouldn't move.
"I’m going to lift it," I tell her, my voice oddly calm.—the Enforcer voice. The one who knows violence is just a tool. "When I move it, you pull your leg out. Do you understand?"
"The others—" She tries to look past me, down the aisle of ruin.
"Look at me." I grab her face—my bruised knuckles hard against the shock of her cheekbone—forcing her eyes to mine. "There are no others. Just us. Look at me."
She stares at me, her pupils blown wide, swallowing the gold. She sees the monster in my eyes, the cold thing that survives. She nods.
"On three."
I plant my shoulder against the metal frame of the bench. My boots find purchase on a patch of carpet that isn't slick with fuel. I take a breath, tasting the diesel fumes and the ozone smell of snapped wires.
"One. Two. Three."
I shove. Pain detonates behind my ribs, cold and blinding.
My bad shoulder—the one I dislocated last season—screams. The metal bites into my flesh, but I shove harder.
I channel every hit, every check, every moment of rage I’ve ever swallowed.
Move. Move, you motherfucker. The metal groans—a metallic scream that matches the one in my head—and lifts.
Just an inch. Then two. My vision spots are white.
"Now!" I roar.
Clara gasps, scrambling backward. She drags her leg free, a wet, tearing sound accompanying the movement. I let the bench crash back down. It lands with a final, heavy thud, burying my hand in snow and glass for a second before I jerk it back.
"Out," I say, gasping for air. "We have to get out."
"My leg..."
I look down. Her jeans are torn, soaked dark. Blood is pulsing—too fast.
"Hold pressure." I rip the emergency kit from the wall bracket near me—miraculously intact. I tear a sleeve from Isaac’s coat—Isaac, who is hanging upside down five feet away, his face gone—and tie it tightly around her thigh. The knot blooms dark instantly.
"Clara, hold pressure. I’m not fucking asking."
She listens, finally clamping her hands over the wound. I haul her toward the side window. The glass is gone, and the metal frame is warped and splintered—a razor-toothed mouth waiting to chew us up. I take off my coat, wrap it around the jagged metal to cover the teeth, and turn to her.
"I'm going to push you up. You have to pull."
"Rowan..."
"Go."
I hoist her. She screams as her leg bumps the frame, a raw sound that cuts through the wind.
But she scrambles out, falling into the snow.
I follow, pulling myself up—the metal slices through my shirt, cutting my skin.
I tumble out into the storm—the cold hits like a physical blow—a hammer of wind and ice.
The world is nothing but white noise and violence.
I look back at the bus. It’s half-buried, a metal coffin sinking into the white sea.
Inside, the red emergency light finally dies.
We are alone. And the mountain is watching.