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One of them was on his phone.
Leilana ran, ran from the army again, sprinting back to her motorbike in the long-term parking garage on Kuhio Street; she looked back once and saw the soldiers break into a run too.
Her only thought was to make it back to the farm and her grandparents.
There was nowhere else for her to go, nowhere to hide.
She didn’t know why she was on the run. But she was. Running harder than ever.
The sun was finally up, usually such a beautiful time of day in Hilo, one she loved watching from the beach.
Just not today.
The walls were closing in on her before the volcano did.
Leilana was very fast; she had been a sprinter at Hilo High.
She raced past the garage now, then circled back on sidestreets. When she finally reached the garage, the soldiers were nowhere in sight.
She got on her small motorized bike, eased it out onto the street, and headed out of town, making sure not to drive too fast. She drove until she ran out of gas, maybe half a mile from the farm.
She left the bike in the brush on the side of the road that was just wide enough for her grandfather’s rickety old truck.
Just before she reached the farmhouse, she stopped.
Something was wrong.
Something, she could see, was very wrong.
She stared at the small cluster of macadamia trees to the side of the ranch house, the beginning of the modest orchard that had been in her family for generations.
The trees had turned completely black—they looked like they had been drenched in ink.
Or burned in a fire.
In addition, she could see small black circles leading from the trees toward the front door, as if holes had been burned into the lawn.
Leilana Kane felt as if she could not breathe, as if a shadow had fallen on her grandparents’ beautiful, innocent world.
She moved to the other side of the house, to where she had always been able to find her grandmother’s pride and joy, the jacaranda tree whose blossoms were almost too lovely to bear at this time of year, the one that her grandmother had told Leilana had grown up with her, because she had planted it the day Leilana was born.
Now it looked as if someone had set fire to it; the remaining leaves on the tree were completely black, the trunk withered. If she walked over and touched it, Leilana thought, it would simply turn into a pile of ash.
But she was afraid to get closer to it, much less touch it.
She kept moving around the house, afraid now to go inside, hoping that her grandparents were anywhere but here.
Her grandmother’s small vegetable garden in the back, the one she grew her beloved tomatoes in, looked like soot; it had turned black along with everything else outside the house.
She took a deep breath, wondering what toxins she might be breathing, and walked back to the front of the house.
The windows were open, the curtains billowing softly, as they always did on mornings like these. Her grandmother said all the air-conditioning she needed was the breeze off the bay.
The front door was open. Her grandparents never locked the door. They had told her, for as long as she could remember, that Ku-ka‘ili-moku, the god of protection, was all they needed to watch over them and keep them safe.
She called out as she opened the door.
“Kuku?” she said.
