Or so she intuited from the fact that she felt a sharp blow to her right shoulder and neck, followed by dazed unconsciousness, followed by an awakening to pain, nausea, and a terrifying inability to draw breath. She gasped. A little air entered her lungs, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

"Lie still." The voice was a gutteral croak. Mrs. Rebka? No, she thought it must be Sulean Moi. Diane tried to answer but couldn't. Her lungs wouldn't do anything but spasm in feeble attempts to draw air.

She tried to sit up, or at least turn to one side, in order to avoid vomiting on herself.

That was when she discovered that the left side of her body was numb, dead, useless.

"Part of the ceiling came down on you," Sulean Moi said.

Diane gagged and retched, but nothing came up, for which she was thankful. And the tremors in the earth had stopped, that was good. She tried to evaluate her own injuries but couldn't think clearly enough to do so, not when her body was pulling so hard for air. She hurt. And she was frightened. She had no particular fear of death, but this, oh, this was less bearable than death itself: this was why people elected to die, to make an end to this kind of suffering.

She thought of Jason again—why had she been thinking of Jason?—and then of Tyler, her lost husband.

Then even these thoughts became too weighty to sustain, and she passed out again.

* * * * *

Isaac could see that Diane had been badly hurt. Even in the dark it was possible to see that. Her dim glow had been nearly extinguished. Compared to Sulean Moi, Diane was a guttering candle.

It was hard to pay attention. He was mesmerized by the invisible landscape all around him. Mesmerized because he was a part of it, he was becoming it… but that could wait. Now that the new Arch had assembled itself in the west—from Hypothetical molecules, granite, magma, memory—there was a kind of pause. All around him for many miles the fresh blanket of dust began to undergo a new stage of metabolism. That would take time. Isaac could afford to be patient.

He surprised Sulean Moi and Mrs. Rebka by crawling over fallen beams, fragments of drywall, scattered foam insulation and collapsed aluminum venting to the place where Diane Dupree lay trapped beneath a heavy joist. His lungs labored and his mouth was foul with dust, but he could breathe, at least, which Diane apparently could not, not easily. And he could tell when he reached out to touch her that the falling debris had hurt her head. He meant to stroke her hair, the way Mrs. Rebka stroked his hair when he was ill, but the place above Diane's left ear yielded to his touch, and his hand came away sticky.

* * * * *