Maybe it's my query or maybe it's my first chapter? I'm worried this doesn't ring as YA voice? Thank you in advance for your help
This is the hour of long shadows.
They extend beyond our grasp. Long stretches of darkness, more fiend than human. We don’t dare take our eyes from them. Not even as the golden pinwheel of sunset tips and folds its final rays of light. To look up is defiance, a deadly challenge.
This cemetery thrums of shadows that bleed into the ground. I slip past a windswept gravestone and follow my two shadows to the edge of mourners. Heads bent, backs breaking—sorrow binds to the crook of their surrender.
Marysia’s tiny hand tugs at mine. “Ro, let me see Papi.”
Papi. For ten years I’d wanted to call him that. My own left in a cloud of glass. Marysia’s father had picked up the pieces and put me back together. She forgets we are here to bury his body.
Little Marysia has his eyes, like waxing gibbous moons that promise the best has yet to come. Only for her father there is no tomorrow. She stomps on her two shadows and looks to me for approval.
“Careful now,” I tell her, but it’s a weak attempt. She knows I don’t cower to my shadows. Another mark against me in her mother’s mind.
A mourner with chiseled gray eyes lights upon Marysia. I bite my tongue before her name escapes. María. The mother of Marysia’s father, who rebelled against her shadows a year ago and brought the rains of Hellfire. Banished by her daughter-in-law, María has returned and shakes of disorienting grief.
Impatient fingers slip from mine as Marysia squeaks with surprise. “Abuela!” Her shirt unravels in my hand, stitch by stitch, teasing me but choosing the girl.
She runs for her grandmother, ignoring her shadows.
I should call her back. Tell her, warn her. Don’t step too close, there are too many. But silence wraps around my throat. I shouldn’t be here. No one welcomes the one guilty of killing a man. This man. When I gave in to his begging, his eyes had flooded in relief, his hand trembled in mine as together we raised the vial of oily, yellow hemlock juice. By then, his aura of opal iridescence had already begun to fade. Death was coming for him. A leader among the miners of our rocky town, he will now rest forever under the ground.
The elders don’t permit the young girls to mourn the dead. They have a lifetime of grief ahead of them. But how could I not bring Marysia to her own father’s funeral? To never say good-bye is to sink in the quicksand of regret.
Her head of sheared hair is the last I see. It bobs like a thistle over her wavering shadows, as she pulls on María’s hand in search of her dead father.
Be quick. Be safe. Let this funeral end.
Then far away, a whistle hurtles toward us.
A crescendo of vibrations falls upon our eardrums—a warning too late—as the deafening scream of wind locks our minds, cements our feet. The sun is not a sun, but explodes in the blast of inferno.
We are blown, burned, and buried. Hellfire rains upon the mourners. Upon us all.
Smoke is a sly thief that robs my lungs of air. I blink, but rocky dust scores my eyes. The stone under my head is cracked and wet with blood. I’m blasted more than twenty feet away from where I stood only seconds before. Where did the sun go? Where did she go?
“Marysia!” I try to yell, my throat on fire, but no sound escapes my lips.
The ground is a blackened hole. Gravestones break into pieces and unearthed coffins crack in half. The dead pile on top of the living with the weight of Hell. Bodies are blanketed in metallic splinters. Fragments of metal flare copper-gold in the flames as smoke consumes the falling spray of dust and dirt. All of it perforates my heart.
These are silent seconds, followed by screams of the lost. My eyes blur, then bind themselves against the chaos. Don’t look. Don’t listen. My lungs scorch themselves dry before I remember to breathe. Is it too late? Have my shadows swallowed me whole?
I inhale sharply, trying to clear my vision. Shadows of smoke move, clawing into empty space. Where Marysia once stood is now a gaping hole of nothing. No earth, no people. Only space that’s scorched black.
I curse the killers. “You can’t have her!”
Marysia’s the kid sister I never had. Always trailing after me, one question and then another. I need her more than she’s ever needed me.
“Marysia, where are you?” I cry out.
The sun burns with darkness. It disorients me. Day is night and gravity has flipped its channel. My arms spasm as I drag my legs through a sludge of shock and fear.
Find her.
I grab a jagged block of stone and throw it aside. Beneath that is a mass of more stone. My hands move in a frantic fury. Faster and faster I dig. Climbing mounds of coffins and cracked tree trunks to join others just as helpless as me. Our shouts ring hollow, for the ones buried beneath us don’t answer.
We dig and dig through concrete rubble, leaden tree roots, and past the bodies buried long ago. But the pulverized rubble is several feet high. I’m only inches deep. I pull out a severed bloody arm. I save a foot. For some, this is all we will have to bury.
But where is she?
This is the longest hour.
Marysia is made of porcelain. Dusted eyelashes that roll down glassy eyes. I press her tender hand to my cheek. I find her enclosed in a tomb of heavy dirt. I wipe it from her lips. But there is still more. And more and more.
I coax her to smile. To see her defiant stance upon her shadows. But her yellow aura is gone and her skin grows cold.
I carry her—over the broken bodies—and place her in the arms of her mother, Joanne, whose aura of purple repels me. I steal away before I see my guilt reflected in her eyes.
I can’t escape my shadows—one savagely torments me from my deadly mistakes. The other relishes its reign of loss. I can’t destroy one without losing the other. They pass over the broken flowerhead of a thistle. The crumpled and torn petals fall apart in my fingers. Ash and dust. Irreplaceable.
Marysia, you are free of your shadows.
I know what those words mean, but I don't know what they mean in that order.
