"Talk to me, Wes. What have we got."Wes Calder didn't look up. Both hands were on the man's chest, counting, pushing hard enough to feel a rib give under his palms. Sweat dripped off his nose and landed somewhere he didn't have time to notice."Sixty-one-year-old male. Down maybe six minutes before the wife called it in." He kept the rhythm going. Push, push, push. "No pulse when we got here. Started compressions at the door."His partner, Deja, tore open the defib pads with her teeth because her gloves were slick. "AED's charging. Clear in five.""Copy."The apartment was small and hot and smelled like burnt coffee. A woman stood in the kitchen doorway with both hands pressed over her mouth, not screaming, not moving, just watching her husband's chest bounce under a stranger's hands. Wes had learned a long time ago not to look at the people standing in doorways. Looking never helped either of them."Clear."He pulled back. The man's body jerked once, small, like a hiccup."Nothing.

"Everybody, listen to me."Wes kept his voice low and even, the same tone he used on scenes where panic could get someone killed faster than whatever had put them on the ground in the first place. Ten pairs of eyes turned to him. He didn't feel like the man in charge. He just knew nobody else was going to say it, and somebody had to."That door behind you leads back the way we came. That door—" he pointed past the nurses' station, toward a gap where a wall had folded away from itself like torn paper "—we don't know where it goes, but it's away from whatever's out there. We move together. Nobody runs off on their own.""You don't get to decide that," the college kid said, already backing toward the far exit, the one Wes hadn't pointed to, the one closest to the sound."I'm not deciding it. I'm telling you what keeps the most people alive." Wes got Frank up out of the chair, one arm under his shoulder again. "Your call what you do with that."The scraping sound stopped.That was worse t

"We need to move. Now. Not in five minutes, now."Desmond was already backing toward the chamber's far exit, hands still up like the room might calm down if he asked it nicely enough. Around him the gold light kept stuttering, warm one second and gone the next, and in the gaps between, Wes could feel the old wet heat of the tunnels creeping back in through the walls, patient, unbothered, like it had never really left."Not everyone can move that fast." Wes had Frank up again, one arm braced under him, and Frank's legs were shaking in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "Give people a second.""There is no second. That's what you're not hearing." Desmond's voice cracked on the last word. "I watched a node do this once before, back on floor two. You know how long it took to go from flickering to gone? Ninety seconds. I counted."The woman with the water bottle hadn't moved. She was still crouched by the basin, still filling it, still watching it overflow, like the collapsing room ar

"Nobody move."Okafor's voice cut low and flat across the storefront, the kind of voice that didn't ask twice, and every head in the group snapped toward him instead of toward the empty space where the thin young man had been standing a second ago."His name was Dale." One of Priya's group, a woman gripping a length of pipe like it was the only solid thing left in the world, had her eyes fixed on the streetlight. "He was telling me about his kids ten minutes ago. He was right there.""I know." Priya's voice shook, just slightly, the first crack Wes had heard in it since the plaza. "I know, Marisol. I saw it too."Wes made himself breathe, made himself think instead of feel, because feeling right now would get somebody else killed. "Anybody see anything before it happened? Sound, light, anything at all?"Nobody had. That was the worst part, the thing that kept catching in Wes's chest like a fishhook. No warning. No struggle. Just a person, and then the shape of the air where a person u