Her voice had just about gone, worn away by her screaming and now by the uncontrollable sobbing. She was panicking. She couldn't scream any more and was just sobbing, trying to regulate her breathing and stop the awful coughing. She managed to climb unsteadily to her feet. The ground started swooping beneath her, and she braced both arms against the walls. It was a fraction too low for her to stand fully in, so she bent her knees and kept her head low. She found herself pulling free pieces of rubble, ducking when pieces flew towards her. There was one awful moment when she had to stop and cough and the rubble teetered, like it was about to attack her. But she kept pulling, kept digging. Eventually, she broke through at a level low enough for her to pull herself through. God, I miss Australia.
She crawled through the rubble, catching her hand on a shard of something sharp and managing to catch her calf on the same shard. She didn't even know what it was, but crawled through and stood on the pile, taking a few deep breaths. The air wasn't a lot better outside. Suddenly, she remembered something about earthquakes sometimes causing a fire and swore. "Let's move to California. No, you can't live with your father and your sister. There's no risk of earthquakes in this area, it's far enough outside San Francisco." She muttered to herself, stumbling down the pile of rubble. Her mother had said all of those things and more. Sometimes she wondered if the cold, careless woman who hadn't said a word to her in the drive up to the school was the same woman that had so tenderly painted Casey's nails as a kid, who had so lovingly braided her daughter's hair, making sure she didn't tug on the strands.
She found herself stumbling towards the front entrance to the school, cursing her mother. She wondered if her father had changed in the same way that her mother had. She wondered where Angel was and if her big sister was okay. As far as she knew, her sister was still in Australia, which brought her a little comfort. She'd heard that powers were sometimes genetic, that siblings could share powers or have similar powers. Even though Angel was only a year older than Casey, she always looked after her younger sister. Angel had matured a lot faster than Casey- at least, until they'd been separated.
She hit the front lawn and looked around, looking for someone to tell her what the hell was going on and what the hell she was supposed to do. She suddenly realised that she was a lot younger than most of the other students. They looked eighteen, nineteen. And she didn't want to be treated like a kid. Especially because she was verging on the short side. People had an annoying habit of thinking she was fifteen or sometimes younger when she was just in jeans and Converse. She's passed for seventeen before, and she knew she could again.
But until then, she had a pretty good idea that they'd think she was younger than sixteen.