drenching them. ‘Great,’ Nina moaned, flicking strands of wet hair from her eyes. ‘What next, an earthquake?’
The building shook.
Eddie shot her an accusing glare. ‘That was not me tempting fate!’ she protested as she retrieved the case. ‘I’m not a fate-temptress!’
Another jolt. The sound of more windows splintering came from below – followed by a deep groan of buckling metal and crumbling concrete. The sprinklers died as pipes were severed. They both felt another movement, their inner ears warning them that they were leaning over – even though they were standing still. Through the smoke, the glowing Toyko skyline slowly began to tilt. ‘The whole fucking building’s going over!’ Eddie yelled.
More noises of imminent collapse reached them as girders broke from their joints and concrete slabs sheared apart. The doors through which they had been about to leave creaked in distress as their frame warped – then they shattered, chunks of wood flying into the room. The ceiling behind the exit collapsed, ventilation hoses thrashing angrily amongst the falling rubble.
They were cut off from the stairs.
The floor of the now visibly tilting room trembled. Another deep destructive boom from below and the lights flickered, then went out. The burning carpet provided enough illumination for Eddie to see, but even with that they still had nowhere to go . . .
Nina grabbed his hand. ‘This way!’ She pulled him down the ever-steepening slope towards Takashi’s office.
‘How’s that going to help?’
‘He’s got an escape pod!’
‘He’s got a what?’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought too!’ She reached the door and tried to open it. It didn’t move. Like the set at the other end of the room, the frame was warping under the structural stress. ‘Damn it!’
Eddie solved the problem by kicking the doors open. ‘Go on!’
Nina recoiled at the sight of what was left of Takashi and Kojima in the firelight. Suppressing her nausea, she crossed the blood-splattered floor to the booth. The bright orange capsule was still inside, door raised and a light glowing within. To her dismay, the padded interior only looked big enough for one person.
‘Get in!’ Eddie barked, pushing her towards it.
‘I’m not leaving you behind!’
‘Too bloody right you’re not! I meant get in and shove over!’
She clambered through the hatch and lowered herself on to a thickly cushioned seat. Eddie followed her. He bashed the case. ‘Can’t you just dump that fucking thing?’
‘No, I – aah! – can’t,’ she grunted as he squeezed into the cramped space. ‘Okay, so how does this work?’
Eddie spotted a small control panel. It had two buttons, the top one flashing. The crash of another section of collapsing ceiling told him that there was no time to figure out what they did. Instead, he jabbed at the lit button. The clamshell door descended with a mechanical hum, pressing him even more tightly against his wife.
‘Well, not quite the reunion I’d hoped for,’ she mumbled into his butt—
Eddie pushed the second button.
Rockets set around the capsule’s door fired. More pyrotechnics on the window behind it shattered the safety glass a fraction of a second before the pod blasted through and sailed out into open air. The G-force squashed Eddie hard against the door, Nina screaming as she was jammed against him.
A moment later, the skyscraper crumbled.
A wedge-shaped chunk eight storeys high sheared away from the top of the tower, sliding diagonally down the fault line created by the exploding helicopter before plunging towards the ground in a trail of smoke and dust. Evacuees ran screaming across the lawns as it fell. The mass of steel and concrete and glass smashed down, the shock of the impact destroying every window on the bottom twenty floors and sending a choking cloud of pulverised debris across the grass after the fleeing workers. More office detritus rained down on the mangled girders and rubble.
The escape pod was also falling – but far more slowly. The rockets had burned out in seconds, their job of propelling the capsule away from the building completed. After a brief but terrifying period of freefall, a trio of parachutes deployed. Twirling gracefully like a sycamore seed, the orange sphere descended and thumped down on one of the lawns well clear of the scene of destruction.
The door opened. Eddie fell out backwards, a dizzied Nina crawling after him and flopping on to the grass. She regarded the smoking wreckage with horrified amazement as people staggered out of the billowing cloud like walking ghosts. ‘I think . . . I want my office moved to