There was a tremendous groan of failing steel, along with cracks as loud as gunshots as the brackets that temporarily tied scaffolding to building began to burst, sending bolts through the air like bullets. They smashed car windows, plate glass in buildings across the street. Humans screamed, began running.

“It’s going!” someone shouted. “Get out of the way!”

The scaffolding’s lower level began to fall like dominos, bringing the upper floors of metal with it.

Someone else screamed, and I looked down, saw the vehicle’s passenger-side door open a foot. A woman reached out. “Please!” she yelled.

I didn’t have a choice.

I ran away from Rose, whom I could still feel behind me, and wrenched open the door, pulled the woman bodily out of the car—ignoring her screams and the screech of falling metal—and heaved us both to the sidewalk.

I was making a career of falling down. And that shit was beginning to hurt.

I covered her head with my torso, covered my head with an arm, and nearly lost my breath when something hit the back of my hip in the cascade of falling brick and steel. Glass added a high note, probably the building’s first-floor windows.

The crash and vibration unsettled more of the building, which was apparently in need of rehab anyway, given the scaffolding, and slabs of brick began falling, tossed down into the pile like boulders in an avalanche.

The sound was tremendous, and it was followed by a moment of equally stunning silence and thick dust that scattered the streetlights and covered everything. And then the shouting began again in earnest.

I heard a sob and pushed up—and was nearly sent to the ground again by the bolt of pain through my hip. A rod of scaffolding lay nearby, the apparent perpetrator. Tears flooded my eyes, but I sucked it in. Pain and feelings later. For now, survival.

Black offered me a hand. I took it, climbed to my feet, looked down at the woman. Tears had tracked clean lines in her dusty face, and she was scraped all to hell and would have a rainbow of bruises tomorrow. But she looked to be in one piece.

The building, on the other hand, had seen better days. The front half had all but collapsed, and the rest didn’t look especially stable.

“Slowly,” Black told the woman, and we each offered her a hand as she sat up, her movements slow and deliberate even as people swarmed around us to remove rubble, to help others. And in some cases, to fight over damaged cars or loot pulled from the building’s smashed windows.

“Just breathe,” I said. She nodded, and I could see the gratefulness in her eyes. And then she glanced back and saw the destruction she’d escaped from—and the pile of rubble that now contained her car. And would have covered her.

“You’re okay,” I said as the sobs began in earnest, and waved an arm at a nearby med tech. “She was in the car,” I told them. “She needs to be looked over.”