He would always remember whipping his head around toward Rosetta and his daughter, Tasheya, thinking he had to get them off the stage, get them away from there, and then his fingers had tightened around his wife’s hand and he’d risen off his chair, pulling at her arm with wild urgency, and she had given him a surprised, questioning look, she had mouthed the words “What’s wrong?”—but before he could give her an answer everything had dissolved into a blinding flash of nova brilliance, and he’d felt a blast of superheated air smack his body, felt the ground rattle and tremble, felt himself being hurled off his feet, tumbling helplessly in that hellish, searing bright light, and he’d held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand—

Then suddenly the enveloping brightness peeled apart, and the heat, though high, was no longer a solid thing. Harrison became aware that he was still on the stand, sprawled on his side, his left cheek mashed into a rough, splintery nest of debris. His face felt wet, sticky, and the world seemed to have gone into a sickening tilt. Somehow his feet were higher up than his head.

There was fire and smoke all around him. Broken glass was hailing down from above. Sirens shrilled into the night and there were people everywhere, many of them bloody and motionless, others running, crawling, screaming, wailing, crying out to one another. Everywhere.

Harrison heard loud crashes from somewhere, heard the groan of buckling metal above him. He realized dimly that the platform had collapsed near the middle, its ends pitching downward and inward, accounting for his weird, dizzy angle. It was as if he were lying on a slantboard. Flames were crackling and spitting up through the planks, and the once-neat rows of folding chairs had been thrown about and upended, scattered like the pieces in a game of jacks. Huge blocks of concrete stretched endlessly across a zone of devastation that looked more like a moonscape than Times Square.

Harrison saw a gigantic toadstool of fire throbbing and churning somewhere off to his right, realized it was swelling out of a huge crater, an actual crater, and instantly decided that must have been where the vender’s booth had been, where that cop and his dogs had been standing, where the detonation had occurred ...

Somehow that thought jerked his mind out of the hazy suspension of shock in which it had drifted for the first seconds after the blast, and an incredible realization descended upon him with anvil force—he had not yet checked on Rosie or Tasheya.

Until now only half-conscious of the position in which he’d landed, Harrison realized that his left hand was stretched out behind him, and that it was still gripping his wife’s smaller, far softer hand.

“Rosie?” he groaned weakly.

There was no answer.

“Rosie... ?”

Still no answer.