Still, when you thought about that, the assumed geological stability of the Washington region was kind of odd. After all you had Alaska up the coast and California to the south, both plagued by devastating quakes. Why should Washington be spared? The locals just assumed it was so, despite Rainier. Not here, not in Seattle…

She spent some time digging a little deeper into the online libraries. And, slowly, she began to piece together an answer.

Seattle-Tacoma was sitting on top of an area where one tectonic plate was diving under another.

An ocean floor plate called the Juan de Fuca Plate was spreading out from a centre somewhere in the Pacific. When it hit the North American Plate, a little ways offshore, it dived beneath it, back towards the mantle. Subduction, this was called.

So in the place where the plates were in contact, they rubbed over each other.

But not smoothly.

Part of the fault that separated the two plates remained locked. So the continental plate was bending, like a board bent over a table, folding under itself to follow the ocean plate.

The continent could bend so far, as if it was made of rubber. But eventually it would snap back into place. And then—

Well, the technical journals were a little light on detail on what would happen at this point.

There were few severe earthquakes in the area’s historical record, she found. But then it was only two hundred years since the first Europeans, including Captain Cook, visited the region, and “history” began. And there were plenty of earlier disasters reported in the oral histories of the region’s original inhabitants. Such as the big quake that struck Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one winter night: in the morning the village at the head of the bay had gone…

After a couple of days, the work even started to get to be fun, as her mix of 3-D video clips, sound and prose scraps started to assemble itself into something resembling content.

But every time she called somebody, even internally, to discuss the project, she had to sign a non-disclosure form. After a week, Joely was seriously wondering how long she was going to survive here.

Still, she found herself a nice apartment in Bellevue, with a fine, if distant, view of the Sound, and she had the eighteen-wheeler unload the rest of her stuff.

After her first week, though, there was another quake, and a childhood memento — a snowscape of Disneyland that had survived three decades in LA — fell off a shelf and smashed, spilling plastic snowflakes all over the carpet.

It was irritating. If the big quake hit before she filed her feature, she would lose her angle, and probably her job…

She worked faster.

8

Henry called Jane.