put a name to the things she knows to be true, but she understands it now, and accepts the names he throws her way gladly, transforming them through the alchemy of her observations before she throws them back to him. They aren’t children anymore, and were never truly children together, not in the way they both know in their bones that they should have been, but in this moment, they are playing as children play, tragedy forgotten in the face of so much joy.
So very, very much joy.
The words and numbers no longer bear any resemblance to each other to the outside ear. “Perspicacity,” he says, and “Four point eight three one five,” she replies, and smiles a small and secret smile, like she’s just said something clever, which perhaps she has. Perhaps, in the language of numbers, she is Shakespeare, she is Eliot, she is Rossetti spinning tales of the Goblin Market and Baker giving life to the Up-and-Under. “Seven,” she says, and “Celestial,” he says, and his smile is as bright as hers, as matched as two peas in a pod, as two children on the improbable road, and she’s laughing, and he’s laughing, and everything is going to be all right. The smell of smoke and wet lingers, but the storm they’re making between them has all but washed it away, replacing it with the smell of ozone, crackling bright and ready to spark.
“Blue,” says Roger.
“Two,” says Dodger.
“Alienate,” says Roger.
“One,” says Dodger, and “Zero,” they say in unison, and the ground moves beneath their feet.
The earthquake begins directly below the UC Berkeley campus. Seismologists have been saying for years that the Hayward Fault, when it lets go, will rupture so as to cause an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or above. The last time it ruptured in Berkeley, in 1870, the resulting quake was severe enough to level buildings and leave citizens trapped, some for days. Many of the quake’s fatalities were secondary, caused by starvation or dehydration. The Bay Area was less populated then; the buildings, those that existed, were younger, less rigid, less primed to fall.
This quake bubbles up through earth gone static and stale over the course of decades, and it bubbles up with a fierce violence that will shock seismologists. It is the quake they’ve always known would come one day, that they have tried to prepare the people for. It is too much, too fast: there could never have been any preparation.
On her green island in the intersection, Erin holds old Bill as tightly as she dares and watches the apartment she shared with Dodger and Candace crumble. She could have saved some of her possessions, some of their most precious things, but how would she have explained it? No. Let it be enough that she saved herself, saved the cat, was not inside when everything that wasn’t nailed down fell, the mundane turning murderous. There are so many voices around her, and all of them are screaming. She can’t tell them apart. She hopes none of them belong to Candace. Let her sleep; let her die still dreaming.
In the Life Sciences Annex Roger and Dodger stand frozen, staring at one another, the air around them still electric with what they’ve done, what they didn’t know they had it in them to do. A creaking sound warns them before a section of ceiling tumbles down. Dodger doesn’t close her eyes, but Roger hears the equation in her voice as it flashes through his mind, and then she’s slamming into him, her shoulder to his sternum, knocking him back, out of the way, away from the chunk of masonry and flooring that crashes into the place where he was standing.
Still the shaking continues.
The campus dances, side to side and up and down, brought to life by the seismic forces tearing at one another beneath the surface. People are screaming, running for safety. The locals find open places to stop and put their hands over their heads, checking the sky for power lines and nervously gauging the height of nearby buildings. Most will survive. The students who come from other places fare less well. They run for shelter, for doorways and for cupboards; they freeze in terror where they stand. A girl from Wisconsin dies when a chunk of falling brick strikes her head and bears her down to the ground. Another, larger chunk lands a moment later, pinning her body in place. It will take rescue crews three hours to work her free.