I call for Kat as I run, but my voice is lost in the deep groanings of the earth. And then as quick as it started, the roaring stops. The quaking ceases, but everything within me senses that the beast has not yawned and gone back to sleep. The air around me crackles with foreboding.

I see Kat and Belinda at the top of the stairs. Belinda has her arm across her abdomen and another protectively around Kat, whose eyes are wide in terror. Plaster has rained down on them like confetti.

“Come to me!” I shout as I reach for the banister to rush to meet them. Belinda and Kat start down the stairs as I start up. We are halfway to meeting each other when the roaring and pitching and violent twisting start up again, worse this time. The beast tosses us to the wall and I scream for Belinda and Kat to get on their bottoms and scoot as the landing above us splits and the staircase begins to sway.

I can hear dishes breaking, doorframes splitting, floorboards snapping, as Belinda, Kat, and I make our way, half crawling, down the buckling stairs. I throw open the front door and grab our travel cases and the files as Belinda and Kat stumble past me.

The earth is rocking like a ship on a furious sea as we stagger out into the amber light of daybreak. Chimneys from houses up and down the street are crumbling to the street as I pull Kat to me. Belinda cries out, and I turn to her, thinking she’s been hit by falling bricks, but she’s holding her stomach as blood and water gush to her feet.

The familiar moment returns to me.

I’ve been here before, too.

15

The world is still writhing as we stumble away from the house and into the street. I remember too late having been instructed by Martin from the very beginning to run to a sturdy inside doorframe in the event of an earthquake, and not to run outside and risk being crushed by toppling buildings. But we are already out on the rippling pavement and I am not going back inside that trembling house. I toss the travel cases down. Clutching the documents in one hand and Kat with the other, I stumble toward Belinda. We could die this way, I’m thinking, having escaped Martin only to be undone by a bigger monster.

When I felt my first temblor months ago and Martin told me it is the nature of the earth to quake from time to time, I looked up what he meant in a book at the library. I read that the world is a spinning ball on a giant dance floor and inside its core are giant slabs of stone that sometimes get too close to one another. When they touch, they must move away. They must. The ballet halts when the slabs collide and as they find their places again. In place of the usual spinning dance is the quaking and shuddering and rumbling, and then the quiet ballet resumes.