A muffled thud comes from our back porch. Something, or someone, is there. I stop breathing. Flashes of the Swarm closing in on Dopney flood my head, and I pray it’s some abhorrent reporter.

“Lia,” my mom whispers from the top landing. “What’s going on?”

When I don’t move, she rushes down the stairs toward the French doors. She grabs a poker from the fireplace on the way. Pausing at the door, she looks at me one last time. She flips the poker in her hand as if finding the right grip and peels back one curtain to peek outside.

My mom looks confident, resolute. For several seconds she doesn’t move as I dig my fingernails into the couch, anticipating what she sees. Emi Vega? A camera waiting to snap a shot of me petrified like an idiot? A mob of teenagers waiting to kill me?

She unlocks the door and steps outside.

“Mom!”

She disappears.

For several agonizing seconds, I imagine her screaming, getting attacked, being murdered. My breathing grows rapid. Just as I’m about to go after her, it turns hysterical. I can’t slow it down. All the drugs I’ve inhaled today are suddenly not enough. My lungs burn and pump quickly, in short, constricted bursts. I fall back on the couch. Stretch out. Give them room to take in air until my body is so stiff I can’t move. Scenarios reel through my mind—most of them including my mom, the last of my family, dying on the back porch while I’m trapped in my own skin, completely immobilized. The pressure around my chest intensifies. It squeezes my ribs, my throat. I gasp for air, but my lungs are wearing down. I’m losing control of my breath and my body when she walks back inside the house.

“Lia!”

She runs to the kitchen. I lose sight of her as the weight of the world presses down on me. Crushing me. The junk drawer rattles. My throat constricts. Feet brush against the wood floors. There’s stabbing pain like my chest is about to collapse. Just as I think it might, my inhaler is thrust into my mouth.

Mist hits the back of my throat, and I breathe in. It trickles down to my lungs, opening them, giving relief. Air pumps in and out. My breathing slows until it finally matches my mom’s.

She crouches in front of me. Her voice is hard. “There’s nothing out there.” She looks me over, assessing the damage. “The trash can lids were knocked off. Probably an animal.”

I concentrate on the routine of my breathing and nod.

“Deep breaths,” she says. Twice, her breaths mimic mine, and then she watches me, scrutinizing the mechanics behind each inhale. “How do you feel?”

I nod again. “Better.”