Calliope’s face heated with embarrassment. “I’m not judging. I have a friend who put herself through school dancing.” This girl reminded her of one of her undergrad anthro students, and for a moment she wanted to believe they were discussing an assignment and not the end of the world.

“A lot of dancers go to college. It’s no big deal.” She pulled a cigarette from her bra, a lighter from her back pocket, lit, and took a deep drag. Calliope didn’t mean to cough. Amy turned her face away to exhale. “Sorry, you’re preggo. Should I put this out?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

Amy nodded, took another drag. “So I was at this guy’s place, near campus, and everything was normal. I finished and was in his bathroom changing into my street clothes so I could walk back to the dorms, when there was this, I don’t know, earthquake, I guess. I came out to see what was going on, but he’d left. I figured he was trying to stiff me ’cause he hadn’t paid me yet. That wasn’t like him, though. I’ve danced for him a few times, no problems. But you never know people for real, so I was pissed and tried calling my friend to come get me. I was too mad to walk. But my phone was dead. I tried using his landline, but that was dead too. No dial signal or anything. Outside the apartment building, it was like this.” She nodded toward the chaos surrounding them, the accidents and grayness and ash. Calliope recalled what Eunjoo had described, her parents fighting, then an earthquake and they were gone.

“And the dorms?”

“Only one other person. Some girl screaming her head off, screaming bloody murder. I kept telling her to shut the hell up, but she wouldn’t. Like she was catatonic, only screaming.”

Calliope’s chest hurt. “Wasn’t there anyone else coherent like you and me?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t stick around to check. I grabbed my roommate’s keys and took off with her scooter. It took me all night to get this far, fucking thing won’t go faster than forty and keeps stalling out. Now it’s outta gas too, but I’m not going back to a gas station alone, no fucking way.”

“What happened at the gas station?”

“The pumps didn’t work. And then some lunatic tried to grab me, so I took off.”

Calliope shuddered involuntarily. A lunatic? Why were they abandoned to a world of the mentally unstable? She cleared her throat, tried focusing on the solvable issue at hand. “The pumps didn’t work?”

“Nope. Fucking everything’s a wreck.”

“Where I just came from, the Westside, my neighborhood burned to a crisp.”