The ledge they were on was — she didn't know how wide. She could not see past the bus on the downhill side. The bus had stopped on something, tilted at maybe fifteen degrees toward the gorge, and the something it had stopped on was rock — she could hear it, feel it through the frame — but she did not know how much rock, how far down the slope before the rock ended and the gorge began.
The children were screaming.
Not all of them. Some of them were screaming. Some of them were silent — the silence of shock, which in children was louder than screaming in its own way, the silence of small people whose bodies had received information that their minds had not yet processed. She could see, from where she had been thrown — she had been thrown from the teacher's seat and was against the left wall of the bus — she could see the children in various states of what the impact had done to them. Several were on the floor. Several had hit the seat backs in front of them. A small girl in the middle section — Class 6, she thought, one of the youngest — had a cut on her forehead that was bleeding with the specific dramatic abundance of head wounds.
Priya got up. She did not think about getting up — her body had decided before she had, which was how bodies worked in emergencies, the decision made at a level below thinking. She moved toward the front of the bus, grabbing seat backs to keep her balance on the tilted floor, and she looked at the driver's seat.
