Stars Rise

II. Frost and Fog

One Week Earlier

Blood had been everywhere. On the sunlit pavement pooling, splattered like an artist's paint on her sister's face, gunking in her hair. For a moment, Malyssa flat-out panicked. Who knew a head wound could bleed so much? Then she bolted to action. It felt like Dianthea's life depended on it. Perception, thought, and memory switched speed gears to allow only flashes, only split-second choices, ones Malyssa wouldn't remember making.

Throwing her roadbike so that it smashed to the sidewalk, hitting the curb in just the right place to dent the frame. Kneeling right in the red pool in the white sneakers Auntie Sophia had bought for back to school not a month before, which she struggled until now to keep pristine in a dirty city. Placing a ring on her index finger that could get her arrested for illegal magic use, even underage as she was.

And then the hard part. The impossible. Brain surgery, skull fracture re-alignment, replacement of cerebrospinal fluid, a lumbar drain to reduce pressure, a blood transfusion, which was simpler than blood regeneration with a donor by her side who shared not just Dianthea's blood type but every strand of her DNA. Then, an antibiotics spell to cast away bacteria, and pain relief, swelling reduction.

It would take years of study before Malyssa would have the words to understand or describe what she was doing. Right now she was like an emergency responder diving into a pool to save a drowning victim with only a second-hand knowledge of how to swim.

An instinct took over and her mind went to battle, and though a little training guided her, most of her jabs, ducks and strikes were nothing but mindless nerve, action and reaction. Healing the torn meningeal artery that had been severed when Daia's head struck the pavement felt like reforming a clay riverbed with her hands to block a stream, but the brain bleed stopped.

The downhill decline was one the girls had sped down on their second-hand bikes a thousand times. Or at least a quarter of that because they grew up downhill of Bernal Heights on the south side of the working class neighborhood, and it was one of their four favorite streets to fly down the hill on. Biking home from school every day since the fourth grade, they always made the effort to climb up to the boulevard that ringed Bernal Hill for the view, as if from Mount Olympus, that captured a panoramic of San Francisco.

Starting with downtown to the north, which didn't even look very big from here, swinging down past the bay and its industrial waterfront, and looking out to the south at the dense checkerboard of a million tiny toy bungalow roofs of Portola and the Exelsior. They would steady themselves like pro skiers, then launch down the incline, streaking past picture book residences with cars parked on sideways driveways, tipped onto an angle.

Rain or shine, wet slidey streets or dry — never snow, though, in the Norcal city — the twins ended their trip to Aunt Sophia's home at the bottom of the heights, with an adrenalin rush dare devil dive off the top of the world.

Daia chose not the wear a helmet that morning because she "couldn't find it." More likely because Aaron in twelfth grade asked her to get pizza with him for lunch that day and she didn't want helmet hair. Yet neither of the sisters was a speed demon — neither was reckless or wild. They both held hands over the brake handles the whole ride. They looked well ahead to check for cars.

Today they swept down Bernal Heights Boulevard, an uninterrupted view of uncountable clay tejado roofs on their left, they reached its tail end and swung around a curve to intersect the road it had run parallel to. Gathering speed to rush through the protected intersection. In their blindspot going downhill, a car ran a stop sign and clipped Daia's bike from behind. As if weightless, her body had soared. Her skull snapped to the cement. Malyssa reached her first. No thought of the driver, there was no room for thought.