Chapter 24
“Sophie. Sophie,” Rachel shouted.
Her voice vanished into the larger noise.
Near the eastern fence, a young child fell beneath the press of adult legs, and Rachel moved before she could think.
She dropped to one knee, pulled the boy upright, and held him steady against her hip.
His face was streaked with tears and dirt.
He’d stopped screaming and stared past her.
“Where’s your mother? Where’s your mom?” Rachel asked.
He pointed toward the school building. A woman pushed through the crowd twenty yards away, shouting a name Rachel couldn’t make out.
Rachel passed the child to her and watched the woman hold him close.
Then Rachel turned back to the parking lot.
Those seconds had cost her. The crowd had shifted again, and Sophie was nowhere in sight.
Rachel checked the school grounds first. She searched the building’s covered entryways, the concrete planters, and every place a frightened child might hide. She found nothing. She moved to the adjacent streets, then into a residential block lined with small houses.
The afternoon light faded toward evening, and the parking lot emptied by degrees as people carried seized food back to wherever they were sleeping.
Fights continued near the storage building.
Three men argued over a cardboard box. A woman shouted at a volunteer who had nothing left to give her.
Rachel circled the block twice, then a third time, widening her search because standing still felt too close to giving up.
Near the eastern fence, where the crowd had pressed hardest, she found a hair tie.
It was small and dark green, the kind Sophie used when the wind picked up.
It lay on the asphalt beside a crushed traffic cone.
The hair tie had come loose during the surge, or Sophie had pulled it free while running.
Maybe someone had grabbed at her and torn it from her hair.
Each possibility opened into something worse.
Hours passed. The sky went dark, and the temperature dropped with it.
Rachel checked storefronts with boarded windows, service corridors between buildings, and the sheltered alcove of a bus stop where two elderly men shared a can of beans they’d salvaged from the distribution.
Neither had seen a thirteen-year-old girl.
Rachel slipped into a service alley behind a shuttered hardware store to avoid several men arguing near the main intersection.
Their voices carried in the dark, sharp and tired, circling the same dispute over supplies and broken promises.
Rachel pressed her back against the brick wall and let the shadows cover her.
She let herself face the fear she’d been carrying since Sophie’s wrist slipped from her grip.
Sophie might be gone. Panic tightened Rachel’s chest until each breath felt short and hard-earned. Rachel had lost her.
“Do you plan to hide there all night?” Sophie asked.
Rachel turned toward the alley’s mouth. Sophie stood there with her backpack secured across both shoulders and her arms folded tight.
Dirt streaked one cheek, and a fresh scrape marked her jaw.
Her hair had come loose from its ponytail and hung around her face in tangled strands.
The bandage on her forearm was gone, and the reopened scrape had left a dark line of dried blood from wrist to elbow.
“Where were you?” Rachel asked.
“Looking for you. Obviously,” Sophie said.
“I’ve been calling for hours.”
“I heard you twice. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. There was too much noise.”
Rachel crossed the alley and stopped short of touching her. She wanted to hold on, but Sophie stepped back with one hand raised. Rachel let the distance remain.
“I went back toward the street where we came in. I figured you’d search there eventually because that’s where we entered. If I lost someone, I’d go back to the last place we were together and work outward,” Sophie said.
“How did you avoid those men by the intersection?” Rachel asked.
“I didn’t. I waited until they moved. Then I came through,” Sophie said.
They left town together in the darkness.
The remaining bicycle became difficult almost at once.
The cargo load was too unbalanced for Rachel to manage through rough ground beyond the town’s edge, and the secondary roads held too much foot traffic to ride for long.
Two miles west of town, the road finally thinned.
Rachel stopped long enough to secure the heavier supplies low against the frame so she could push the bicycle without fighting it.
Sophie walked beside her when they went on.
The county road carried them west, away from the town, the parking lot, and the hours Rachel had spent calling Sophie’s name into the dark.