They moved. Not all at once, not without fear, not without the small sounds of children who were afraid and had every reason to be. But they moved. Because someone had said what to do in the specific voice that said: someone is in charge, someone knows what we are doing, follow this person. She had given them that voice with every gram of certainty she possessed.
Most of her certainty, at that moment, was fabricated. She was twenty-six years old and it was her first day of school and she had no emergency training and no signal and thirty-two children and an unconscious driver on a rock shelf above a flooding gorge.
The fabricated certainty was all they had. She made it as large as she could and gave it to all of them
