“Good lad. Now seal the wound.”

“What?”

“Or else my lung will collapse. Find something that won’t leak. Anything.”

Jack looked around, scraped around in the litter on the floor. He found a clear plastic magazine envelope. New Scientist, he saw; his mother’s subscription.

“How about this?”

“All right. Now. I’m going to breathe out. As hard as I can. Push me forward.”

The breath came out in a wheeze, and Jack pushed at his shoulders, trying to help.

Ted’s words were a gasp. “Put the patch over the wound.”

Jack slapped the plastic envelope over the hole in Ted’s chest, gratefully taking his hand away from the bloody wound.

“Good lad. Bandages. You need bandages. In strips. Quickly. The bathroom…”

Jack gently lowered Ted’s head to the floor — guiltily wiped his bloody hand on the rug — and went to the bathroom.

No bandages. He’d packed them already in the car.

He went to the front door, which had come off its hinges and was hanging drunkenly in its frame, so he had to step over it. The tarmac of the drive was cracked, but the car seemed intact. The boot was still open, and he quickly found the rolls of bandage where he’d packed them.

He looked around the street. There were no cars on the road. All the houses were — ruined. As if stomped by a giant. One of them, where Pete McAllister lived, was on fire. But he couldn’t see any fire engines.

He hurried back to the living room with his bandages.

“Good lad. All right. Around my chest — fix the patch in place—”

Jack started to wind the bandage around Ted’s chest, over the patch. Under Ted’s whispered instruction, he made sure each layer overlapped the others.

Ted watched calmly, his head resting against a tipped-up armchair. “You’re saving my life, lad,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget that. A hell of a thing to do when you’re ten years old.”

“Ten and three quarters.”

“And three quarters. Don’t forget your shoebox when we leave.”

In the lab, people were standing silently, as if hypnotized. A polystyrene coffee cup was edging its way across a bench surface, neat concentric ripples marking its surface.

It’s unnatural, Jane thought. That’s why we’re transfixed. The floor isn’t supposed to move under us.

“Those are harmonic tremors,” Henry said. “Magma moving.”

Marge Case said, “It’s consistent with what we’ve been monitoring. Swarms of shallow microquakes.” She turned to Jane. “Shallow because this isn’t some deep tectonic movement, but a movement of magma close to the surface…”

The shuddering subsided.

“If VDAP were here they would already have called a Level D alert,” Henry said. “At least. And—”

“If there is some kind of eruption,” Jane said, “what will it be like? Arthur’s Seat is old. Surely—”

“It won’t do much damage?” Henry looked glum. “Jane, we don’t know what to expect. The best guess is that the old magma, broken up by the Moonseed, will be viscous, with a lot of trapped superheated steam.”

“So very explosive,” said Case. “And—”

There was a jolt, and a sharp crack.

“The building frame,” said Henry.

“I have to get home,” Jane said. “Christ, if it’s come this far—”

She started towards the door. It was like trying to walk in a moving subway train.

“Look,” said Marge Case softly.

A wave was passing through the floor, through its substance, a neat sine wave a few inches high. The floor tiles buckled, or popped away from where they were glued. “Good God,” said Marge, and she giggled. “Floor surf.”

It happened in an instant.

The floor lurched under Jane, like a plane in turbulence, and she was thrown to her knees. She landed hard, her knees and the balls of her hands taking the impact. She felt as if she had been punched. The shock of it, the physical power, was like a violation.

And now the floor tipped, and she was sliding. Someone screamed. She looked for Henry.

Suddenly equipment was flying off the shelves on the walls, electronics boxes and tools and glass dishes, raining down. And the people were clinging to the floor, or skidding down the sudden slope, trying to stay on their feet.

She saw a heavy set of weighing scales come tumbling down in a neat parabola, and hit a lab-coated man in the back of the neck, evoking a sharp, clean snap. He fell forward, arms and legs loose, and rolled down the tilted floor.

The lights flickered. One of them exploded in its housing in the ceiling. Then they failed, and she was in darkness.

Jane was still sliding down the floor, in pitch darkness. It was a childhood nightmare, a mundane world turned monstrous, dragging her down into some pit she couldn’t even see.

Everyone seemed to be screaming now. More explosions from above. A crash, a stink she couldn’t recognize, and she found herself coughing. Christ alone knew what chemicals they kept in here; there had to be a danger of toxic fumes, fire.

She scrabbled at the broken floor; her fingers closed around the lip of a dislodged floor tile, and she hung onto that. The tile ripped her nails, but she wasn’t falling any more.

Somebody came skidding down the floor, and hit her side. The impact was huge, uncontrolled; a thick hand scrabbled at her clothes, trying to get a grip. She knew she couldn’t hold this new weight, and her own.

She should kick this guy away. She knew that’s what she should do.

He didn’t get a hold. He fell away into the dark, sparing her the decision.

Now there was a new series of deep, grinding cracks. Light from below; a throaty explosion of collapsing brickwork, the grind of tearing metal. She risked a look down. The wall beneath her had broken up, and huge chunks of it were falling away, letting in the daylight. Glimpses of the car park, maybe fifty feet below, the cars still parked in their mundane rows.

And, silhouetted before the light, people scattered like dolls, trying not to tumble any further. Marge Case was clinging to the square leg of an analysis table, bolted to the skewed floor. One hand was bloody, and flapped at her side like a broken wing; she was holding on to the table with her other hand, one set of fingers.

The whole building had tipped up, Jane realized. Like that movie. The Poseidon Adventure.

A fat man lost his grip, went rolling down the floor, and fell neatly through one of the holes in the wall. He fell screaming. Jane could see him for a couple of seconds, suspended in the air, still clawing monkey-like for a grip on something, anything, before he fell out of sight.

When he reached the car park there was a meaty punch, a sack of liquid breaking open on an unyielding surface.

“Jane! This way!”

Henry had climbed to the comparative sanctuary of the doorway, with the policewoman and others. Henry was reaching down to her.

She looked up at him, calculating. She could reach a table leg no more than inches from her, push herself up on that, then half-stand on the leg to get to Henry’s hand.

Marge Case was screaming behind her, begging for help, almost incoherently.

Perhaps Jane could reach her. But she might fail. This is ridiculous, she thought. I don’t have time for this. I have to get to Jack.

She thought about the unseen man she’d been prepared to kick away. Not yet, she thought. We haven’t come to that yet.

She turned to Henry. “Help me get to her.”

They formed a chain. Henry braced himself in the doorway and held the policewoman’s hand; she reached down and gripped Jane’s wrist, with surprising strength, Jane got a couple of footholds in the broken tiles, and reached down herself, and caught hold of Marge’s hand. Marge was sobbing, and just hung there.

Within seconds, the weight was too much for Jane.

“Marge, I can’t lift you. You’ll have to climb.”

But Marge seemed frozen, and Jane had to coax her into it, step by step. “Put your foot on that table leg. There. Now push up. Good girl. Okay, grab my waist…”