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“I don’t feel concussed.”
“Concussions are unpredictable, Chocolate Boy!”
“My name’s Nick.”
“Fine. I’m Allie.” Nick tried to wipe the chocolate from his face, but without soap and water it was a lost cause. They both turned to the freckled kid. “You got a name?” Allie asked.
“Yeah,” he said, looking down. “But I don’t have to tell you.”
Allie ignored him, since he was starting to become a nuisance, and turned to Nick. “We must have been thrown clear of the accident, and over the cliff. The branches broke our fall. We have to get back up to the road!”
“What would you want to go up there for?” the freckled kid asked.
“They’ll be worried about us,” Nick said. “My parents are probably searching for me right now.”
And then suddenly Allie realized something. Something she wished she hadn’t.
“Maybe they won’t,” she said. “If the accident was bad enough…”
She couldn’t say it aloud, so instead, Nick did.
“We could be the only survivors?”
Allie closed her eyes, trying to chase the very idea away. The accident had been bad, there was no question about it, but if they came through it without a scratch, then her father must have as well, right? The way they made cars nowadays, with crumple zones, and air bags everywhere. They were safer than ever.
er 1
On the Way to the Light… On a hairpin turn, above the dead forest, on no day in particular, a white Toyota crashed into a black Mercedes, for a moment blending into a blur of gray.
In the front passenger seat of the Toyota sat Alexandra, Allie to her friends.
She was arguing with her father about how loud the radio should be playing. She had just taken off her seat belt to adjust her blouse.
In the center backseat of the Mercedes, dressed for his cousin’s wedding, sat Nick, trying to eat a chocolate bar that had been sitting in his pocket for most of the day. His brother and sister, who sandwiched him on either side, kept intentionally jostling his elbows, which caused the molten chocolate to smear all over his face. As it was a car meant for four, and there were five passengers, there was no seat belt for Nick.
Also on the road was a small piece of sharp steel, dropped by a scrap metal truck that had been loaded to the brim. About a dozen cars had avoided it, but the Mercedes wasn’t so lucky. It ran over the metal, the front left tire blew, and Nick’s father lost control of the car.
As the Mercedes careened over the double yellow line, into oncoming traffic, both Allie and Nick looked up and saw the other’s car moving closer very quickly. Their lives didn’t quite flash before them; there was no time. It all happened so fast that neither of them thought or felt much of anything. The impact launched them forward, they both felt the punch of inflating air bags—but at such a high speed, and with no seat belts, the air bags did little to slow their momentum. They felt the windshields against their foreheads, then in an instant, they had each passed through.
The crash of splintering glass became the sound of a rushing wind, and the world went very dark.
Allie didn’t know what to make of all this quite yet. As the windshield fell behind her, she felt herself moving through a tunnel, picking up speed, accelerating as the wind grew stronger. There was a point of light at the end of the tunnel, getting larger and brighter as she got closer, and there came a feeling in her heart of calm amazement she could not describe.
But on the way to the light, she hit something that sent her flying off course.
She grabbed at it, it grunted, and for an instant she was aware that it was someone else she had bumped—someone about her size, and who smelled distinctly of chocolate.
Both Allie and Nick went spinning wildly, crashing out of the blacker-than-black walls of the tunnel, and as they flew off course, the light before them disappeared. They hit the ground hard, and the exhaustion of their flight overcame them.
Their sleep was dreamless, as it would be for a long, long time.
Chapter 2
Arrival in Everlost The boy had not been up to the road since forever. What was the point? The cars just came and went, came and went, never stopping, never even slowing. He didn’t care who passed by his forest on their way to other places. They didn’t care about him, so why should he?
When he heard the accident he was playing a favorite game; leaping from branch to branch, tree to tree as high from the ground as he could get. The sudden crunch of steel was so unexpected, it made him misjudge the next branch, and lose his grip. In an instant he was falling. He bounced off one limb, then another and then another, like a pinball hitting pegs. It didn’t hurt, all this banging and crashing. In fact he laughed, until he had passed through all the branches, and all that remained was a long drop to the ground.
He hit the earth hard—it was a fall that would have certainly ended his life, had circumstances been different, but instead the fall was nothing more than a quicker way to reach the forest floor.
