The quake does not confine itself to campus, does not restrict its force to the narrow band of real estate associated with the school, but it begins there, deep beneath the Life Sciences building, and the devastation is worst around the heart of it. The walls of the library crack. The clock tower doesn’t fall, but it leans, and that’s somehow even worse; a fallen thing can be rebuilt, while a damaged, listing thing must be left until the last, until the broken glass has been swept away and the shattered foundations restored. The clock tower is the heart of campus, the landmark that leads the students home, and it is visibly broken.
Dodger scrambles to her feet, faster in a crisis than Roger has ever been; her nervous energy has become a survival skill. More pieces of ceiling are tumbling down, and the walls look as if they might cave in at any moment, turning a Nancy Drew adventure into a horror film. Roger stumbles as she pulls him up, her fingers tight on his, anchoring him, crushing flesh against bone. The pain is almost welcome. It makes the scene seem real.
“It’s moving too fast!” she shouts—and why she’s shouting, he doesn’t know; there’s no real noise beyond the low rumbling, and the sound of falling things. She could speak conversationally and still be heard. Panic changes the rules, and she’s panicking as much as he is, seemingly calm, until she speaks. “I have to close my eyes!”
Roger doesn’t understand what she’s saying at first: it doesn’t make any sense. She’s the one leading the way through the falling debris. Why would she close her eyes? But she does, she does, and she’s charging forward, eyes screwed shut, weaving around the rubble as it falls.
Roger closes his own eyes, too terrified to watch, and suddenly they’re slamming to a stop, so abrupt that his shoulder hits hers before she screams—not shouts, screams, like a victim in a horror movie that’s suddenly all too real, all too immediate, all too all around them—“Keep them open, you have to keep them open!” and he understands.
Dodger has no depth perception. She can do the math of velocity and descent in her head, dodging the debris with an accuracy any other human would be hard-pressed to match, but only if she’s starting from the correct position. She needs to see the point of descent as something three-dimensional and true, not just figures moving on a flat surface. So long as she knows the distance between them (and she does, he knows she does; the length of their arms, the difference in their heights, those are commonplace numbers for her, the sort of math she can do in her sleep, and probably does, on the nights when she needs to ward against bad dreams), she can chart their trajectory without fail. She can get them out.
He opens his eyes. Dodger starts running again, pulling him in her wake.
Later, this will seem like a dream. The earthquake rolling on and on, tearing down walls, shattering windows, and planting cracks in foundations that could have endured for another hundred years on less seismically active soil, and the two of them running through the heart of it all, a girl with her eyes closed tight, a boy following her blindly with his eyes wide open. Outside, the open spaces have become masses of pressed-together bodies, strangers holding one another and screaming, or weeping, or doing nothing at all, just staring in wordless shock at the chaos. People have taken refuge wherever they could. The air is ablaze with screams, with weeping, and with the steady roar of car alarms, which have taken this assault for larceny, and struggle to summon their owners to save them. The air is black with smoke, with dust, and with the beating wings of panicked campus pigeons, which cannot land, but circle in endless, terrified flight.
Dodger pulls Roger around the hole that was the stairs, runs past the elevators, and hits the front door with her shoulder so hard that, if it were any quieter, they’d both be able to hear the bone break. As it stands, the pain is intense enough that for a moment, Dodger is afraid she’s going to pass out. She pushes it aside as best she can, shunting it, and is somehow unsurprised when she hears Roger cry out behind her. She doesn’t need to look to know that he’s holding his shoulder. His eyes are fixed