Marcus was getting ready to meet Sara, wondering whether to put his Vision in his eyes and ear to help him decide what to wear. There was still an hour before he was due to meet Sara at the bar, so he could take his time. He shook his head. “This time, I’ll decide for myself. I’ll take green to contrast with her red hair.” More than anything, he could not wait to see Sara’s smile. She was the one he had been waiting for his entire life. She was saving him from a dreary evening just like he would save her; two thieves stealing each other back from the same sliver of providence.

The earthquake hit at 18:14. Later, when people asked Marcus what it felt like, he would say that for eleven seconds, the building forgot it was a building, the concrete remembered it was stone, the stone it was earth, the earth that it owed nothing to anything standing over it. Eleven seconds that felt like a season.

He had just finish dressing and stood at the window of his hotel room on the fourteenth floor, watching the city below. Street vendors, delivery trucks, the organized chaos of a place that has never fully stopped. His eyes returned to the room to look at his Portuguese slippers, below the bed, with Barcelos roosters embroidered. Then the floor moved. The window cracked in a line so precise it looked deliberate. The light on his old ebony desk went out. Something deep in the building made a sound that Marcus would spend years trying to describe and never quite manage, a sound below sound, a vibration in the sternum rather than the ear. A deep guttural structural sound.

Lying on the floor in the dark, his hand swept across the carpet until it found the edge of the nightstand.........

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