The car met the guardrail with a sound that seemed to swallow the whole street.
For a moment afterward, everything went strangely quiet the way it always does, in the half-second after something irreversible has already happened and the world hasn't caught up yet to how bad it is.
Then the cyclists were shouting, and people were running from the sidewalk, from nearby doorways, phones already lifted to call for help.
Amara was slumped against the wheel, a thin line of blood tracking down from somewhere near her hairline, unconscious.
A few feet away, on the rough shoulder of the road where she'd been thrown clear, Justina lay equally still, one arm bent beneath her at an angle that made more than one bystander look away.
"Someone call an ambulance!" a woman shouted, already kneeling beside Justina, two fingers pressed clumsily to her throat, searching for a pulse and trying, with shaking hands, not to move her at all.
