More screams from afar. More gunshots. As the crackling din grew to deafening levels, the sky above turned cold and bright.
A teary young redhead scratched at the wall of Hannah’s light cage. The actress could see lines of frost on the tip of the woman’s nose, though the air inside the enclosure was as warm as July.
“Please!” the stranger screeched. “Help me!”
“I can’t! I don’t know how!”
Suddenly the tallest buildings in the skyline began to splinter at the highest levels, as if they were being crushed from above. Metal curled. Stone cracked. Windows exploded. With a grinding howl, an ailing structure gave out at the middle, causing all floors above to topple and fall in one great piece. Hannah pressed her hands against the light as she watched the other buildings crumble. The sky wasn’t just getting brighter and louder. It was getting closer. The sky was coming down.
Shrieks and cries rose from every throat in the mob. There wasn’t an empty square inch around her egg now. More than a dozen people pounded at the wall, weeping and begging.
The skyline was gone. Now the great white sheet descended on the clockless clock tower, cracking the jagged neck of the structure and sending huge chunks of stone flying everywhere. One of them demolished a police car, along with everyone near it.
Hannah fell to the pavement—wincing, crying, desperately trying to shut out the horrible noises. In the final few seconds, the cruelest part of her mind forced her to open up and see the world one last time.
Everyone around her was at long last quiet. Frozen dead.
Then, with a shattering crunch that would haunt her for the rest of her life, the ceiling came down and smashed all the corpses into shards. It devoured the ground and just kept going.
The actress had no idea how long she existed there in the blank white void of existence, kneeling on a floating disc of concrete and sobbing at the nothingness all around her.
Soon the void swirled with smoky wisps of blue and the nothing became something. By the time Hannah’s eyes adjusted, the glow of her bracelet had faded and the eggshell of light was gone. Beneath her feet and her fallen handbag lay the same round patch of 13th Street, but it was now fused into concrete of a lighter color.
She craned her neck and saw blue sky and white clouds, the distant gleam of several tall buildings. She didn’t recognize a single one.
Her hands quaking wildly, Hannah smeared her eyes and sniffed the warm summer air. Her last few working neurons struggled to process her new state of existence but all they could tell her with any degree of confidence was that right now at this very moment, she was alive. And she was elsewhere.
TWO
It had been twenty-two years, three months, and seven days since Hannah Given last came screaming into a world. She’d emerged from her mother with little muss and zero fuss, the textbook model of a healthy childbirth. Growing up, she occasionally lorded that knowledge over her older sister, who’d formed a kneeling breach in the womb and had to be delivered by crash Caesarean. Hannah loved hurling that pebble, especially when Amanda was acting a little too cavalier in her role as the Impeccable One.
Unfortunately, there was nothing joyous or natural about Hannah’s second nativity. This time she popped into the world as a five-foot-five adult, clothed in a navy blue T-shirt and stretch jeans and saddled with a ninety-dollar hobo bag filled with clutter from the previous life. This time her arrival caused an electrical disturbance for a thousand feet in every direction. And this time, in a baffling circumstance she would lord over no one, she emerged from an egg.
She struggled to absorb the strange new environment. What was once a plane-wrecked intersection was now a clean and expansive parking lot, peppered with ficus trees and flanked on all sides by jarringly unfamiliar businesses—Peerless Spins, Sunshine Speedery, Jubel’s Juves & Shifters. Even more perplexing was the fact that every storefront was barricaded behind a smooth white wall of . . . something. At first glance, it looked like plastic. But the surface carried a faint shimmer, as if it were reflecting light from some nearby swimming pool. Protruding from the center of each barrier was a small placard that listed the store’s hours of operation, plus a digital clock that was currently as blank-faced as Hannah herself.
Only one store stood open for business: the sprawling SmartFeast that stretched across the north edge of the lot. Hannah could see people—calm, living people—bustling about inside.
She mindlessly moved toward the supermarket, staggering ten clumsy steps before a painful tremor overtook her. Her muscles burned with acid. Her extremities flared with hot needle stings, as if her limbs had all just woken up with a vengeance.
Hannah dropped to her knees between two parked sedans, then sobbed into her fists.