Skyborn The Divine

13: Casualties

It took another month of training before Athena and Clawson would even speak to Alice about participating in rescues.

"Wait for the engineer, Alice," she heard Athena's voice crackle into her earpiece. "We don't want the whole place to come down on top of them."

Alice was standing outside a partially collapsed house, the result of a thirty-three-foot-wide sinkhole. The structure was two stories high, or at least it used to be before the ground opened up underneath it and crumbled its foundation within minutes. The building was horrendously sagged and splintered, and it looked as though a giant had sat on its roof. The front door, once a beautiful design of wood and glass, hung crooked and broken with its bottom two feet underground. The garage, large enough for two vehicles, sat mysteriously unharmed.

Alice hovered twenty yards away from it, waiting for instructions while she could hear a frail, tiny voice crying from somewhere in the debris. The failing light of the day started casting deep shadows shaped into nightmarish designs by the broken house. She couldn't see who was calling for help, but she knew for certain that whoever it was wasn't having fun.

"I can hear a child," she said. "She sounds hurt." The microphone, a black, flexible strip of nylon and electronics strapped to her throat like a choker, transmitted her voice back to a control room in the command center, where Athena sat watching and listening to the whole thing. Alice was pretty certain Clawson was watching as well, wherever he was.

"Like I said, wait for the engineer," Athena repeated herself. "If you start moving stuff around it might cause the whole thing to cave in even worse.

"Ugh!" Alice hissed, frustrated. What was the point of having all these abilities if she couldn't pull someone out of a hole in the ground without a committee's decision first?

Athena's trying to make things difficult for me again.

She watched as a small team of men emerge from a black SUV that had arrived a few minutes after she did. The men were RaTS, rescue and tactics specialists, dressed in gear and body armor that made Alice think of a cross between a firefighter and a police officer in riot gear.

One of them was Levi. This time, he was no mere driver, but Meta team's designated engineer, and he set to work right away converting the sensitive equipment installed in the vehicle into a mobile, temporary command center. A complex-looking array of antennae and dishes unfolded from the SUV's roof like mushrooms growing in a time-lapse video. Alice could hear the electronic click as his headset tapped into her communication channel.

"Alright, Alice. We are all set to go," he announced into her ear piece. "Let's see about digging these people out of there."

"I can hear someone, a kid, I think," she told him. Her eyes scanned the debris for something, maybe a tiny hand poking out of the wreckage, but she saw nothing. She'd watched television shows and movies about superheroes with x-ray vision, and she wished for a moment she'd been gifted with that among her other talents.

"Don't you worry," said Levi cheerfully. "The drone will sniff out the survivors."

The word "survivors" churned Alice's stomach. To her, that word was meant to designate the people that did survive a disaster from the ones who didn't. Which meant she might find more than survivors in that heap of twisted wood and crumbled drywall. She might find the dead.

She watched as Ferguson retrieved a piece of equipment from one of several black cases in the vehicle. It was matte gray, and about the size of a beagle, only with two circular fans attached to either side of it like wings. A blunt snout made of highly sensitive detection equipment poked out like a nose with odd whiskers. He finished its assembly and activated it. The creature-like drone beeped and whirred to life, blasting its fans and bringing itself into a shaky hover above the vehicle. Then it made for the house and began to circle it like a vulture some sixty feet in the air.