Hunger (Gone 2)

17 HOURS, 48 MINUTES

BRIANNA WOKE.

It took a while for her to make sense of where she was.

Then the pain reminded her. Pain all down her left arm, left hip, left calf, left ankle.

She had been wearing a denim jacket over a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. The hoodie was burned away on her left shoulder and arm, a skid burn. A three-inch oval was gone from her shorts on the same side.

The skin beneath was bloody. She had hit the roof at high speed. The concrete had been like sandpaper.

It hurt amazingly.

She was on her back. Staring up at the bogus stars. Her head hurt. Her palms were scraped raw but nowhere near the scraped-to-the-meat injuries on her side.

Brianna picked herself up, gasping from the pain. It was like she was on fire. She looked, expecting almost to see actual flames.

It was scary bright on the roof of the power plant. So she could see the wounds all too clearly. The blood looked blue in the fluorescent light. Her injuries weren’t life-threatening, she reassured herself, she wasn’t going to die. But oh, man, it hurt and it was going to keep on hurting.

“Happens when you slam concrete at a couple hundred miles an hour,” she told herself. “I should wear a helmet and leathers. Like motorcycle guys.”

That thought offered a welcome distraction. She spent a few seconds contemplating a sort of superhero outfit for herself. Helmet, black leather, some lightning-bolt decals. Definitely.

It could have been worse, she told herself. It would have been worse if she were anyone else on earth, because when she had hit the deck her body wanted to go tumbling out of control. That would have broken her arms and legs and head.

But she was the Breeze, not anyone else. She’d had the speed to slam palms and feet against concrete fast enough—barely—to turn a deadly tumble into an extremely painful skid.

She limped at regular speed over toward the edge of the roof. But the way the building was constructed the edges sloped away, round-shouldered, rather than forming a nice, neat ninety-degree angle. So she couldn’t see straight down, though she could see the gate and the parking lot, all blazing bright. Beyond, the dark mountains, the darker sea.

“Well, this was a stupid idea,” Brianna admitted.

She had attempted to fly. That was the fact of it. She had tried to translate her great speed into a sort of bounding, leaping version of flight.

It had made perfect sense at the time. Sam had ordered her not to enter the power plant’s control room. But by the same token she had to try to get the lay of the land, to see where all of Caine’s people might be positioned. She’d thought: What would be better than the view from on top of the turbine building?

She’d been toying for a long time with the idea of flying. She’d worked out the basic concept, which amounted to running real fast, leaping onto something a little high, then jumping to something higher still. It wasn’t rocket science. It was no different from leaping from rock to rock while crossing a stream. Or perhaps like taking a set of stairs two at a time.

Only in this case the “stairs” had been a parked minivan, and a low administrative building, with the final “step” being the turbine structure itself.

The first two steps had worked fine. She had accelerated to perhaps three hundred miles an hour, leaped, slammed off the roof of the minivan, landed on the admin building, kept almost all of her speed, taken six blistering steps to regain whatever speed she’d lost, and made the jump to the roof of the massive concrete hulk.

And that’s when things had gone wrong.

She was just short of landing on the flat part of the roof and instead hit the shoulder. It was more like belly-flopping than it was the sort of airplane-landing-on-runway situation she was looking for.

She’d seen the concrete rushing up at her. She’d motored her feet like crazy. She’d managed to avoid sliding off and falling all the way to the ground, but her desperate lunge had ended with an out-of-control impact that had come very close to killing her.

And now, now, having reached this perch, she couldn’t actually see much of anything.

“Sam is going to kill me,” Brianna muttered.

Then, as she bent a knee, “Ow.”

The roof was a few hundred feet long, one third as wide. She trotted—slowly—from one end to the other. She found the access door easily, a steel door set in a brick superstructure. This would lead down to the turbine room and from there to the control room.

“Well, of course there would be a door,” Brianna muttered. “I guess I should pretend that was my plan right from the start.”

She tried the doork