Alexjcreads
June 2020 - life is loud, bright, ordinary.
Houston's Bayou City High School swim team is undefeated, a circle of girls bound by chlorine, laughter, and late-night bubble tea. Seventeen-year-old Amber Tran, fast in the water but slower at facing her fears, spends the year floating between friendship and competition - unaware that everything she loves is numbered in days.
Her best friends Denise Nguyen and Avery Holt die on Day One of the Silent Invasion in Manhattan. Amber survives - barely - and the guilt haunts her breath, her heartbeat, and every quiet street.
With the world collapsing, the remaining girls must navigate not battlefields, but silence: rustling bags that become death sentences, trembling cries they must swallow, memories they cannot speak aloud. From Houston to New York, and toward a desperate airport evacuation to Melbourne, the girls run not to live - but to outswim the grief that shadows them.