The driver's scream shattered the silence. Mia's head snapped up. Through the windshield, the grille of an eighteen-wheeler filled the entire world, headlights blazing white and merciless. The driver wrenched the steering wheel hard to the left, tires shrieking against wet asphalt, but it was already too late. The truck struck them with the force of a collapsing building. Metal screamed. Glass exploded inward. The sedan flipped, rolling once, twice, the world spinning into a roar of grinding steel and shattering bone before everything came to rest upside down in a cathedral of silence.
"Mom... Dad... elder brother."
The words fell from her lips like prayers. Fragments of memory surfaced through the pain: her mother's perfume, her father's voice at the head of a long table, Felix pulling her onto his shoulders when she was small enough to believe the world was kind. The images played again and again like a broken record, looping through the dark behind her eyelids.