doors exploded open under her hands.
Outside, she hesitated for just a second before turning left and running faster. Her only thought was to put distance between herself and the hospital as quickly as possible. She ran down Sacramento, turned right onto Fillmore, and then left, where a tilted sign indicated she was now on Clay Street.
She slowed to a walk, amazed that she didn’t even feel winded. Luc always made fun of her for being a sloth, just because she didn’t see the point of running up and down a field and kicking a ball into a net. And it was true she did fake illnesses a lot to get out of gym class. One time she’d even claimed she was coming down with whooping cough.
Since when could she run so fast?
She felt strangely alive, buzzing. Beneath the squealing of tires and occasional blaring of alarms and car horns, it was as though the air itself was speaking to her. She felt connected to everything—to the people lighting a fire in the alleyway as she passed by, to an old lady walking across the street, to the old lady’s small dog. She could feel them, could feel what they were feeling. Hunger. Loneliness. Curiosity. She could suddenly sense all of it around her, as though the whole world’s volume had been turned up.
Just across the street Jas saw Alta Plaza Park, which had not been damaged too badly by the earthquake. A longing rose up, fierce and fast, to run her fingers through the grass and inhale the moisture of the ground. The wind whispered through the trees and she imagined it was saying Jasmine. She was halfway across the street before she even realized she had moved.
“You’re supposed to block the ball, you shithead!” a voice shouted. The loud, familiar shout was followed by laughter.
Tyler, Justin, and Devon, all in their soccer uniforms, were kicking a soccer ball around the field just next to the trees. Jas ducked into the grove of trees. The last thing she wanted to do was explain to those guys what she was doing on this side of town on a Sunday.
She didn’t trust them enough not to spread it around school that her dad was in the hospital, either.
She sat down and closed her eyes. The sounds she heard brought colors to mind—the bright blue shush of the ball through the grass, yellow explosions of voices, the deep purple of the wind. It made her feel a little dizzy.
She must have hit her head on something, really hard.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, motionless, when she realized that Tyler and the others had gone. She peeked out from the trees and saw them, distantly, at the other side of the park, getting into a car she recognized as Tyler’s.
She stood up, leaning against the trunk of a tree for support. There was a faint pulsing under her fingers, through the rough bark. The air shifted. She felt as if the tree was a hand, warm and inviting; she could feel its sap like blood. A high-pitched whine started in her head, just like in her dream, and it made her pulse leap. When she inhaled, there were new aromas, exotic ones that had no place in the middle of San Francisco.
She could hear everything: not just the wind through the leaves, but the clouds floating overhead, the trees inhaling and exhaling.
And … footsteps.
Two people were with her in the grove talking in hushed tones. A boy and a girl.
“I don’t see him anywhere,” the girl said.
“He is expendable. She’s the one we’re after.” The boy sounded cold and determined.
Their whispers were as clear as if they were talking directly to Jasmine.
Jasmine felt uneasy, filled with a buzzing electricity that came from the air, from the wind, from the trees. She crouched in the cluster of trees, listening. She heard the wisp of metal against denim, knew instinctively that one had just pulled out a knife.
“There she is!” the girl shouted, pointing in Jasmine’s direction.
A shock of red hair flashed between the branches as the girl fought her way toward Jasmine. The boy, a dark figure dressed in camo pants and a black hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his face, threw himself at the thick curtain of leaves between them, slicing through them with his blade.
The tree screamed—or maybe the screaming was just in her head. Jasmine felt hurt as though it were her own body that had been cut. She