Twelve miles east of the San Diego Harbor, and seven feet down, a writhing young figure came awake in darkness. For the first few breaths of her new existence, the girl in the bracelet lived in a near-perfect state of incomprehension, the kind she hadn’t experienced since her own messy birth, nearly fourteen years ago. She didn’t know who she was or what she was, if she was alive or dead. She didn’t even know if she had a body.
But then she smelled her own sweat, felt the cotton folds of her pajamas. Now the salient details of her life came trickling back in bullet points. She was Mia Farisi, fresh out of middle school with a 4.0 GPA and a weight of 150. She was born and raised in La Presa, where she lived in a two-story house with her father, her grandmother, and three burly brothers. A fourth one served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army. Mia made him e-mail her every day, just to let her know he was okay.
Except . . . Things were not okay. Something bad had happened right here in La Presa. Something that sounded a lot like war.
Her mind flashed back to the thunderous booms that shook the house at 4:42 this morning, when all the clocks stopped and all the planes fell to earth. Within moments, Peter Farisi burst into his daughter’s room, shirtless and panicked.
“Take Nana to the basement! Don’t come out till I tell you it’s safe!”
“Dad, what—”
“Just go!”
It was in the basement that something terrible had happened. A strange vibration on her wrist. An unexpected light. A rumble from above. And then . . .
“Nana?”
The word rolled up Mia’s throat like sandpaper. She’d screamed herself raw before fainting, but she didn’t know why. The last few moments of her memory were still a muddled blur.
She scrambled to her knees and fumbled through the darkness. The floor around her was concave and covered in dirt. No, it was dirt. She stood up and felt the wall. Also dirt, also curved. As Mia crossed to the other side, her bare foot slipped on a pair of smooth wooden planks. Her honor student brain—now working at two bars of power—processed the data and came back with a flustered guess. Loose steps from the basement. You were standing right on them.
She continued to feel the walls—perfectly curved all around, like someone had taken an eight-foot ice cream scoop to the earth and carved out a perfect sphere.
Or an egg.
Mia gasped. She remembered the egg of light now. It had encased her on the basement steps. Her grandmother had clawed at its ethereal shell, feebly trying to extricate her. Mia remembered seeing white steam in Nana’s cries. Winter breath in the third week of July, in a town ten miles north of the Mexican border.
“Nana?”
At three bars of power, Mia’s brain finally introduced her to the problem at hand.
“Oh no. No . . .”
She reached up as far as her five-foot frame would let her, feeling nothing but air. She seized a stair plank and jabbed it at the ceiling. Crumbs of dirt drizzled down on her.
“Oh no. No, no, no, no . . .”
While she continued her frantic stabs at the earth above, words of alarm scrolled along her inner news ticker. You’re buried. You’re buried. You’re buried alive. You’re buried alive and you’re gonna die.
—
“It’s nothing to get upset about,” Nana had insisted. “These things happen.”
At ten o’clock last night, Vera Farisi entered the dimly lit kitchen and found Mia rummaging through the cabinets in busy fluster. She bounced from shelf to shelf, scanning the calorie counts of every food item and marking them in her notebook. An unfortunate encounter at the mall had left her tense and despondent.
Vera flipped on the light switch. “Sweetheart—”
“Leave it off. I can see.”
“Those girls were only teasing you because they’re insecure.”
“No, Nana, that’s . . . You just don’t understand.”
Vera flicked a spotty hand in exasperation. In her eyes, Mia was a beautiful girl with sharp hazel eyes, flawless olive skin, and a lush brown mane that any woman would kill for. Yes, the child was a little chubby, and had an unfortunate penchant for dark and frumpy clothes, but she was nothing close to the six-chinned horror she saw in the mirror.
Mia read the nutrition label on her favorite dessert snack, then croaked a surly groan. There was nothing even remotely dietetic in the house. The men in her family were all built like tanks. They could eat a plate of lard and burn it off by suppertime.
“That was just a sneak peek of what I’ll get in high school,” she insisted. “I’ll be a walking target every day.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do. And I deserve it for letting myself get this fat.”
For the thousandth time, Vera cursed the girl’s mother, a vain and selfish stronza who’d abandoned the family years ago. Mia needed female guidance. All she had was this wrinkled old crone who hadn’t been a teenager since World War II.