MILA Origins 2.0 - The Fire

gone. My own shirt, once white, is gray with soot.
    I look to my left, then my right. No sign of my parents—just fire, both ways, devouring the remains of our furniture.The dining table where I did my homework every night. The couch where we watched those ridiculous documentaries every weekend—a habit I’ll never complain about again, if we can all just make it out. As I stare hopelessly into the flames, I think I see a flicker of color behind them. Pale skin topped with blond hair. Mom? Is that Mom, heading for the French doors? Another flicker, of forest green. Is that Dad’s coat? Is he coming back for me?
    I wave my uninjured arm. “Dad!” I try to scream, but once again my voice fails me. “Dad, over here!”
    The fire’s crackle is my only reply.
    Did he see me? Was he even there? Or was I hallucinating everything?
    Panic pulses an ever-increasing rhythm through my body, even as my lungs protest the lack of oxygen.
    Three minutes. Three minutes. Three minutes.
    Then, through a break in the flames, I see his face, his brown eyes wide with panic. A relieved sob swells in my throat. He’s okay. Dad is okay.
    He’s stepping toward me when, overhead, there’s a sharp clap, followed by a loud, creaking groan—a sound I’ve grown to fear in a very short time. I turn too fast and my foot slips. I collapse to my knees, hitting hard, but my eyes never leave the shimmering banister. It is tipping, tipping, slowly losing the battle with the flames. Anytime now the structure is going to collapse…and take me out with it.
    I crane my neck, try to look back to where I saw Dad, but though I fight to pick him out behind the curtain of flames, he’s gone. Vanished. Or maybe it’s just the smoke growing thicker, darker. In the distance, behind the crackle and roar, sounds the high-pitched wail of a siren.
    Too late.
    When I push to my feet once more, I realize just how weak I am. Fatigue has turned my legs into dead weights. My lungs feel full, much too full to suck down any air.
    The room is growing gray. I know realistically that the French doors can’t be far, but at the rate I’m moving, they seem a world away.
    I manage to hobble one step forward, then two. But my energy is fading as fast as the fire is growing. More heaviness seeps into my limbs, a sleepiness that, somewhere in my head, a voice is screaming at me to fight.
    But it’s so peaceful…and breathing is so hard.
    I shake off the weariness. No, I have to move.
    I make it one more step before an explosive CRACK! deafens me. The next moment, something strikes me across the skull, like a slap from a giant, and I go down. As my eyes fight to stay open, I’m encased in a tomb of black smoke, billowing across my face, filling my nose, blinding me completely.
    “Dad?” I whisper. Why hasn’t he come for me?
    My head hits the floor. Behind the curtain of black,there’s dancing orange. With the last bit of my energy, I lift my good hand and search for the picture I stashed in my waistband, but all I find is skin.
    Gone. It must have fallen out along the way. My heart twists painfully—or maybe that’s an injury. By this point, it’s impossible to tell.
    My vision grows hazy as the flames flicker closer.
    No, not haze—static. Buzzing. Then the room separates into four, eight, sixteen tiny boxes, all in one. Sixteen tiny flames, dancing closer to me.
    The images fade in and out, interspersed with stark black…like a dead TV screen.
    More static hissed through my ears. Then infinite darkness. I felt removed, detached.
    No more heat, no more pain. Just red words that sifted in front of me.
    Memory banks compromised…defragment.
    System shutting down in five, four, three, two, one—
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Excerpt from MILA 2.0
    Read on for an excerpt of MILA 2.0 , the first book in a riveting Bourne Identity –style trilogy by Debra Driza.

ONE
    B eyond the eastern border of Greenwood Ranch, orange poured across the sky, edging the clouds like flames.
    Flames.
    I clenched handfuls of Bliss’s silky-thick mane and squeezed my eyes shut, searching behind them for the black haze of smoke. For the smell of