The floor started to move again. She clung to the window frame, trying to stay on her feet. This was an up-and-down whip-lashing that no building was going to be able to withstand. More cracking sounds, as the walls broke open, letting in the daylight — a stink of sulphur — and she was thrown to the floor, which was splintering under her.

The ceiling came crashing down at her.

…But, before the ceiling debris reached her, the floor fell away.

She was falling through the storeys, arms and legs limp, pursued by a shower of debris. Maybe the building itself was falling, even as it fell to pieces all around her, as the ground flexed, giving up its stored energy.

A last moment of daylight, before a rush of heat, and a wall of water that slammed her sideways—

In Star City, Moscow, Russia, Henry Meacher watched the destruction of Washington State on CNN.

There were few pictures coming out of the area itself. Nobody left alive to send any, of course.

The best images came from the satellites and the Space Station: the band of smoke and flame laced along the western seaboard, the sea churned to mud and froth for hundreds of miles from the coast. You could pick out the cities by their dull burning glow, Seattle and Tacoma and Olympia and Vancouver, as far south as Portland. The experts said it was a series of firestorms that would not burn themselves out for many hours.

It would be a spectacular sight at night. Keep tuned, folks.

The economists speculated about the impact on the world’s economy of the loss of the Seattle region, Boeing and Microsoft and… The tame scientists, gabbling at each other, blamed the explosion of Mount Rainier for setting off an earthquake which had been overdue anyhow. And the wilder ones blamed Rainier itself on the bizarre infection the commentators were calling Moonseed.

Evidently, the whole of the locked subduction zone had given way.

There seemed to have been sympathetic earthquakes in Chile, causing severe damage there. The rest of North America seemed to have been spared, but unusual wave motions had been observed on the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water, in some places violent enough to tear boats from their moorings.

And in Alaska, hit by two earthquakes, the Yakutat glacier had changed its direction and was spilling ice slabs into the sea.

Henry wondered how much longer news like this would remain free and uncensored.

Henry pulled out his laptop, and checked the data against his predictions. The spread rate of the Moonseed, from both primary and secondary infection sites, had reduced drastically as the Moonseed had sunk into the crust. Nevertheless events were unfolding much as he’d expected.

It had taken some thirty days for the ocean crust to be breached, around seventy for the first deep breaches at the continental margins to be achieved, like the one which had caused the Seattle event.