I was alone, completely.
My chest tightened before I had time to understand why, and suddenly the ridge above me stopped feeling like collapsing earth and started feeling like something familiar in the worst possible way.
I remember a space so small it seemed to reject the shape of me. I hear a door close too firmly, and the sound tells me I have been put away again, hidden until someone else is gone.
I hear my mother's voice somewhere beyond it, close enough that I know she is there, laughing softly, speaking easily, living in the rooms I am not allowed to occupy. I understand even as a child that she does not want me seen, and that silence becomes the price of staying near her at all.
I sense another presence moving through the house, footsteps, lowered voices, the shift of attention that always changes the air. No one touches me, yet everything tightens around me anyway. The walls seem to draw closer with every passing minute, as if they know I am the thing being hidden. I stay inside that shrinking space until breathing feels like asking for too much.
My breathing began to fracture. I pressed my hands into the ground instinctively, searching for something solid, but even that did not feel like support anymore. I was slipping into it before I even realized I was going.
And then, beneath the panic, something in me began to ease in a way I didn't fully understand.
July's face came first, reminding me that needing time did not mean I was failing, and that silence did not have to be filled inorder to be understood.
Then came Bramwell, his fingers lightly tapping the table...then his words:
"Just sharing the same space as you, April... it feels like something I got lucky to have. It feels like warmth I can rest in."
The words stayed with me and I let myself hold onto them.
My breath broke again, but this time I didn't chase it. I followed it downward, slower and more deliberate, gradually returning to something I could recognize as my own again.
In.
Out.
Again.
The ridge was still collapsing somewhere above me, but my body stopped following it into panic. My hands moved, pressing against the earth for protection. Not waiting for someone to find me, but preparing myself to be found.
I don't know how long I stayed like that. Then I heard Ellis's voice cutting through everything anyway.
"April. We're getting you out. Stay with us."
I could hear boots moving carefully across shifting ground above me, the team coordinating their steps as they moved through the unstable ridge. They were coming in, all of them. Ellis was still there too, close enough that I could feel him anchoring himself between me and the collapse, still holding on to what hadn't given way.
"We've got her," someone said, and the words cut through the smoke with certainty.
*******
The hospital was too white and too still. I was checked under bright lights, asked questions I answered slowly, and told I was stable. My body was bruised and exhausted, but I was not in danger.
Outside my room, voices drifted through the corridor.
"...man involved in ridge extraction sustained significant injury during secondary collapse. Name listed as Bramwell Thorne."
My breath caught. I turned my head too quickly and pain pulled through my ribs. I looked at the nurse and reached for her hand, and she seemed to understand what I was asking.
"He helped reroute the equipment off the unstable access road," she said quietly. "If they'd taken that route, the convoy would have gone down with the slope."
She paused, then lowered her voice even more. "He stayed behind longer than he should have, trying to move the slope markers when the second collapse happened. That's when he was injured."
I didn't speak.
I couldn't.
And as I lay there, still listening to the quiet movement of the hospital around me, I stayed frozen on the last thing I heardthem say, that he had been hurt while trying to hold the ridge together just a little longer.
