Sun Catch Her (Book 1: Three Rivers Deep series) COMPLETE

Chapter One

Green?

In a matter of seconds as the pain subsided behind my eyes, I opened them and watched the world flood, not with water, but with color. After I sneezed, everything in sight shifted to green—from the parking lot to the sky beyond, even the people running into the parking lot, their hasty exit from the apartment building prompted by the wailing in the hallways—the fire alarm. It was what jerked me awake from a dead sleep on the closet floor, where a violent late night storm had driven me, in terror, from my bed around 2 a.m. The world had been the correct colors before I burst from the closet and threw open the window to stand in a wash of brilliant, nasal-tweaking morning sunshine.

The urgency of the fire alarm abruptly cut off, and I was left rubbing at my eyes, hoping it would correct the color. The effort failed. What the heck? Why am I seeing in only greens? And why won't it go away?

Sucking in a distressed breath, I leaned on the windowsill as I waited for my green-tinted vision to adjust to the sunlight bouncing off the asphalt ten stories below. It was hot outside, arid. I didn't see any signs of smoke. People continued to gather in the parking lot. Four more exited the building, their pace slow now, unconcerned. A group of teens, who looked to be about my age, stood in a laughing cluster and shoved each other around, and something inside of me eased. Would they use the fire alarm for anything other than an emergency? A fire drill perhaps? We'd only moved in earlier this week, so I didn't know. Maybe the neighbors were getting together to barbecue—a shady looking man did have an oversized spatula held dramatically high in one hand. As sunlight flashed off the cooking utensil, the guy held it with the food-flipping end pointed toward the building. He was poised there, almost waiting for some sort of signal.

"Somebody's still in there! A girl is trapped on the top floor!" A woman in the crowd yelled and pointed.

Spatula man followed her frantic gesturing and looked up at me, then he brought the spatula down, and several stories below, the building shook with a blast, blowing out windows.

Holy crap! I spun away from the window and bolted to the center of the apartment I shared with my aunt. She wasn't here. She was out for an absurdly early meeting with a client, safely at a coffee shop across the road. Lucky her. I paced in a tight circle, unsure of what to do. Clearly, evacuating the building would have been the best course of action from the start. Are the floors below even intact enough to safely escape? I stopped my frantic pacing and looked down, blinking rapidly when a stronger wash of color hit my sight. A dizzying, vertigo-inducing green. My watering eyes fixated on the green, but not green, floorboards swimming underneath me, making the solid floor seem almost translucent.

The wailing cries of distant sirens freed me from my transfixion. What should I do? Ignoring the green, I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling helpless—and then the real fun began. The apartment started to shake, furniture rattling and appliances falling off the counters. Yelping, I struggled to stay upright, fending off the mental image of something big burrowing up through the earth, searching for the surface.

The trembling subsided. I sucked in a breath, only to let out a squeal as another tremor shook the building, and a buildup of adrenaline drove me to get moving—now!

I flung the door open and took off, bare feet slapping as I ran down the green-washed hallway in my pajamas. I ran for the stairs at the far side of the building but stopped dead in my tracks when I came to the stairwell door and found it closed, locked, and entirely uncooperative. What nitwit closed this! It shouldn't be locked! The door's lone window was just above my head. Panic growing, I cried out in fear and tugged on the handle as the low, guttural groan of steel, glass, and concrete under extreme distress reverberated down the corridor. The vibrating window above me shattered and I lost my balance and fell. Scrambling on broken glass, I wedged myself into the corner as the wall across the hallway convulsed. Oh god, the building's coming apart.