She made her way to the wall, and grabbed onto the window frame. A shard of glass stabbed her arm, but she ignored that. She stood, the floor still trembling beneath her feet. She looked out.

The campus was demolished. Most of the buildings had simply fallen apart, she saw, like card houses, their prefabricated walls lying smashed on the neat patches of grass. One other building, still intact, had tipped over.

She wondered if the ground had dipped already, the way the scientists” models said it would. Was she below sea level yet?

The horizon was just a blur of smoke and fires and electrical sparking, against a continual crackling noise. There was a kind of dome of a greenish luminosity, she saw, gathering in the air above the cloud.

There were wide ravines, scratched at random across the ground. From a couple of them, fire was spurting. Gas mains, maybe. One of the fissures was closing again; and somehow that was more disturbing than anything else.

She couldn’t even tell where the level was, so broken up was the ground.

She could see nobody moving. There were a few splashes of colour that might have been people, or might not. No sign of rescue, not so much as a TV news heli.

And the quake wasn’t done; she could see a wave, maybe twenty feet high, passing through the ground itself, its crest sending chunks of shattered tarmac feet into the air.

But the shuddering of the building seemed to be subsiding.

My God, she thought. I might live through this yet. What a story I’ll have. Book deals, syndication, TV movies flashed through her imagination. She wondered if there was a webcam in the office.

The dominant noise changed, to a whooshing like a wind blowing through trees.

And now there was something emerging out of the smoke bank, to the east. Like a new cloud, wide and dark and rolling, laced with fire.

Oh.

It was water. A wave, surging out of the Sound, as if Puget was no more than a tipped-up bathtub. Burning oil had spilled over its surface, probably from the storage tanks at the docks. Earthquake cocktail, she thought.

The wave had to be a hundred feet high.

Waves like that could travel a hundred miles an hour; she could never outrun it. Not even in Cecilia’s Toyota.

Blood dripped into her eye from a wound she hadn’t noticed. She was lucky as hell to have survived this far, she thought, and then she laughed at herself. Lucky? She was the girl from LA who had to move to Seattle in time for the Big One.