I sputtered up dust and curled into the fetal position when the pain caught up with me. My ankle screamed. My fingers ran over the face of Noah's watch. The metal pressed against my wrist, and my eyes squeezed shut as the ground shook below me. Noah's train was rumbling by, speeding across the tracks, further and further away.
Noah was gone. Rinley was safe.
I was enveloped in darkness.
"Sophia! Sophia!" Lily collapsed next to me. Her white hair looked like fluffy clouds against the blue sky.
I blinked. The sky should've been orange. It should've been morning. But it wasn't. The sky was as blue as the afternoon was hot.
"Oh. God. Are you okay?" Lily never stopped talking. "Please, say something."
"I'm okay," I groaned. The taste in my mouth was the worst part. Sweet like blood, but bitter. I had bitten through my lip, and the blood mixed with the mud on my face.
"You've been out for a while," she explained. I couldn't ask for how long because Miles was shouting his sister's name.
"We're okay," Lily shouted.
I arched my neck and looked backward over my forehead. The world was upside down. A truck rolled toward us. The rumbling I had felt was the truck's engine then, not the train. I had never felt the train. I had passed out.
"Is she okay?" Miles asked as the door creaked open. Two sets of feet jumped out.
"She's fine," Lily said as I drifted in and out of consciousness.
"Where's Sophia?" someone's voice came.
I woke in Lily's bony lap. A man's arms curled under me. I lifted off the ground, bouncing lightly as someone carried me across a path. I saw the forest. I was in a car, lying down in the back. I mumbled. I was asleep. I woke up.
"Sophia?" The passenger leaned over to look at me.
I opened my eyes to a gray-eyed man with salt and pepper hair. "Can you hear me, kiddo?"
"Dad?" I croaked the rarely used word. "You're home."
"I'm here, kiddo," he said, and the truck bounced over a dirt part I had never seen before. It was dark now, but the headlights weren't shining in front of us. He understood land more than I did.
"You did good, kids," he spoke to Miles or Lily, or me—all of us—and I closed my eyes to concentrate on his rough voice. "We're all going to be fine, and tomorrow, we'll be home." A home that would never be the same. Forever changed by a war we hadn't won. But we had won the battle.
We would see tomorrow.
THE END