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So Marge climbed to Jane, and Jane climbed to the policewoman, and they all clambered out to the corridor with Henry, where they could rest.

There were others here, lab workers and students, mostly young, looking bewildered. Marge Case was in floods of tears, and was starting to react to the pain of an arm which looked broken. The policewoman got hold of her and started to apply some simple first aid, strapping the arm to the girl’s side.

Henry held Jane, just for a moment.

And all the way through, Jane couldn’t help herself thinking, over and over: I don’t have time for this.

Ted, as a kid, had once got his ribs bruised playing football. He hadn’t been able to get out of bed for three days.

But bed rest wasn’t an option now.

It took him an age, and excruciating pain, just to stand up.

Well, he was able to walk, if he leaned on his little helper. But it felt as if someone was grinding a sharp fist into the centre of his chest, over and over.

“We should wait for mum.”

“No. We have to go before the quakes come back. We’ll find your mum.”

That was true; if they managed to get onto any of the A-roads, there would surely be reception centres; that was police procedure in eventualities like this. It shouldn’t be impossible to find Jane and Mike.

Always assuming he could drive.

Ruth Clark’s house seemed to have taken a still worse beating than his own. It looked as if the roof had simply fallen in, leaving the outer walls standing in broken spikes, delimiting the debris.

We ought to just get in the car, he thought I have to take responsibility for the lad. And I sure as pish can’t do any heavy lifting.

But he couldn’t just leave her.

With Jack’s help, he stumbled up the drive to Ruth’s house. Her front door was a heap of match wood, blocking the hall.

He limped around to one of the intact sections of wall. There was actually a window here, still unbroken, that let into the living room. He couldn’t see anything inside. He surely wasn’t going to be able to climb in there.

There was a soft whimpering, from inside the house. Crying, like a baby’s.

He got Jack to fetch him a towel. Ted wrapped it around his arm, turned away, and smashed open the window. Then, with the towel still in place, he pushed out the remaining shards of glass

A tan brown blur hurtled out of the window. Tammie. He got a single clear view of the beast, as it looked into his eyes.

Then it dropped to the ground and was gone.

The crying had been the cat, then.

Jack said, “Should we chase Tammie?”

“No. She’ll look after herself.”

“What about Mrs Clark?”

Ted ran over what he’d seen, in his mind, in that brief confrontation.

The cat had blood all around its mouth. It had been chewing something. Eating into it

“I don’t think Mrs Clark is home, Jack. Come on.”

He leaned on Jack again, and they limped back to the car.

Somewhere, a siren wailed.

The lifts were all out, and there was no light in the corridors. But they were able to push open the doors on the uppermost side of the building, and reach the fire escape. This was a red-painted staircase, bolted to the side of the building; but it was tipped now at maybe thirty or forty degrees to the vertical. Jane had to slither down the stairs and the face of the wall.

The building continued to tilt.

The noise was immense, cracks and grinds from the frame and brickwork as they sought to relieve the impossible tensions on them. Windows popped out of their frames, sometimes intact, sometimes in a shower of shards, glittering in the bright April sun. Once a whole section of wall simply exploded outwards, a few feet from her, a brief fountain of brickwork and concrete.

It took an age to reach the ground. Henry was waiting for her; he grabbed her hand. “Let’s get out of here.” His palm was slick with blood.

They ran out of the car park and into the West Mains Road.

The road was cracked, right down the middle, as if along a neat seam. Jane could see that houses had collapsed, or fallen to pieces. Taller buildings were sometimes intact but were leaning precariously. In one place, water was gushing up from a crack in the pavement.

The pavement was broken, rippled, in some places subsided. The Moonseed was here, she realized: right here, in the bedrock, under her. The ground could give way under her any minute, dropping her into hell.

But there was nowhere else for her to go, nothing for her to do but run over this unsafe ground.

They ran east, trying to reach the main road that would take her home.

The road was packed with stationary cars, all crammed with luggage. Most of them were still occupied, drivers and families waiting patiently for a break in the jam, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. As he ran Henry shouted at them. “Get out! Get out!” But he didn’t stop running. The car passengers, many of them children, stared out bewildered at the stream of ragged and bleeding refugees running past them.

After a hundred yards, they came to a woman trapped under a fallen tree. She was screaming.

Henry and Jane hesitated. Then they bent to help.

The tree was thick, mature, immensely heavy. Impossible to move. They tried anyhow.

Jane looked back, towards the lab. It dominated the horizon of the street, as it had yesterday. But now it leaned impossibly, like a sinking tanker; for now it was still intact, though its upper levels were crumbling, its windows and fascia cracking and falling in great leaves, exposing its steel and concrete frame.

There was no fire here, she realized. They had been spared that, at least. But there was a smell of burning, a pall of smoke rising from somewhere to the east. There was no sign of the emergency services. No police, no fire brigade — nobody save for the lone police constable, running with the rest of them, trying to raise her station on her lapel radio.

And now an immense groan emanated from the falling lab building. Jane looked back. There was a crack like snapping bone, and the building exploded, lengthways, its upper levels hurling themselves forward as if trying to escape the betraying ground. But they fell, inexorably, fragmenting as they went.

The building lost coherence and collapsed, in a cloud of billowing dust. There was a fresh explosion, a sharp, almost beautiful flower of flame, at the base of the building.

The woman, still trapped under her tree, was no longer moving She was unconscious but probably still alive, Jane thought But how could they help her?

“We have to keep going,” said Henry. “When these cars start going up, there’ll be a chain reaction.”

Jane looked down at the woman. “The first we are leaving to die.”

“She won’t be the last,” Henry said grimly. “Listen, I have to go with that cop.”

That startled her, although she should have anticipated this.

His face was full of doubt and anguish. “I need to get to the authorities, somehow. Yes. That’s what I have to do. She’s my best bet—”

“No. We have to reach Jack.” She looked into his face. “You have to help me.”

His expression was complex, unreadable. “I have to do this.”

“Why?”

“Because they have to evacuate the city. And then I have to tell what I know. To someone who can do something about it, on a global scale.”

“Lake what?”

“Like find the source of this.”

She thought that over. “You mean the Moon?”

He peered up at the sky, as if seeking the Moon, then looked at her. “Listen to me,” he said. “We saw what happened to Venus. Maybe this is all somehow linked. And right now we don’t have any way to stop it, here on Earth. No way to stop it, until it goes all the way to its conclusion.”

That chilled her, more than she would have believed possible, after what she’d already gone through, what she still had to face. But the most important thing, the central realization, was unchanged.