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The phone's clock told her it was nearly one pm – maybefifteen minutes since she'd arrived at St James – and the signal was strong,but she couldn't get through to her parents. It wasn't till she called triple zero that she had any kind of response,and that was a ca
Trying to reach her voicemail messages didn't work, so shegave up and texted: "Can't get through – will talk later".
Without knowing more about what happened, she couldn't besure whether it was more sensible to wait for rescue, or try to make her ownway. Shifting about could trigger aslide or collapse.
Out in the dark someone else's phone rang – one of those jokering tones, growing louder until the phone was shrieking. No-one picked up. How many people were in the station, lying inthe dusty dark? Calling out brought noresponse, but the ringing told her there must be someone.
Tucking her phone into her bra, Madeleine explored behind heragain, cautious toes still finding only dust turning to mud, and wetconcrete. An inch back, andnothing. Another inch, and the groundshifted as it had before, but this time Madeleine didn't freeze against thesee-saw's tilt, and almost immediately it settled. The settling didn't surprise her – resting onrubble on a stairway, her raft was hardly going to tip upright – but thesensation of it was strange, not as firmly solid as she would expect fromconcrete stairs.
Feeling a sudden urgency, she wriggled several inches, herfeet pelted by liquid as she moved closer to the falling water. And then her questing toes found the farborder of her raft, another rough edge. She slowed down, backing inch by inch, until she was half out of hermetal tube, part-lying and part-kneeling, then reached with her foot hoping tofind the straight edge of a step, or at least firmly packed rubble.
Tickling softness.
She jerked her foot away, gasping and then coughing. Brief and strange as that contact was, she'drecognised instantly what her foot had touched. Hair.
It was a person, and all around her was the scent of theirblood, and whoever it was had not moved, or spoken, or reacted at all toMadeleine's foot in their face. She andher raft were on top of someone's body.
The chance that this was not so, that she was crushingsomeone too badly injured to react, made it impossible for Madeleine to stay,to quiver or quibble or spend one moment longer where she was. She stretched out her other leg, trying toreach as far as possible, and this time met cloth, and a warm and yieldingwetness, and though this left Madeleine in no doubt that the person beneath herwas not alive, it gave her even less reason to slow down, as her foot foundsomething solid beyond and she thrust herself up and back, with a temporaryagility worthy of a gymnast, onto something which was step and only step, witha railing she could clutch while she sobbed and gulped to keep down thescalding liquid which rose in her throat.
Her foot, the whole lower part of her leg, was sticky-wet,and when she could move at all the first thing she did was hold it out, backtowards her raft, and the water which fell so steadily. She wanted to stand in the narrow stream, tobe certain nothing remained, and to be free of her thick coating of dust. But she couldn't bring herself to cross overthe crushed, mangled thing lying invisible in the dark, any more than she couldturn her phone on it and capture a sight to burn her mind.
Still clutching her railing, Madeleine looked about for thesource of light which made the darkness not quite complete. There were no sturdy exit signs or miraculouslyenduring fluorescents: instead a field, a wall, of luminous motes, shining andglittering.
It made her dizzy, for it was the sky, the sky at night withmuted stars and yet it was here and to her right, not above, despite thedirection gravity proclaimed to be down.
These wrong-way stars did not produce nearly enoughillumination to truly see through the thin mist of settling dust, but she couldmake out shapes, black against coal grey. The ticket barriers. Therailing. The stair which had been severedabove the wide mid-flight step where she stood.
The glimmer was not enough to reveal any details of theplatform below, so Madeleine had to resort to her phone, to gauge theeight-foot drop and then decide to work her way along the outside of the railing,keeping her head turned away from what lay upon the stair. She looked for the reflective strip whichlined the edge of the platform instead, but couldn't make it out through thepowdery white mounded everywhere.
The climb down was relatively easy, the severed railing firmdespite the absence of the upper half of the stair, and then she was on theflat expanse of the platform, a treacherous landscape of concrete andprojecting rods of metal beneath concealing dust. Ridiculous amounts of it, some piles higherthan she stood, and even the gullies between those mountains were knee-deep.
Madeleine guessed the entire ticket level had fallen down,but that did not explain what looked like an explosion in a chalk factory. Nor the stars. They drew her, a moth to the moon, her freehand held over her mouth and nose to keep out the fine haze of floatingparticles. Up close, unobscured, thestars blazed in a wall of black: galaxies and nebulae and fiery novae,stretching up and to either side of her in a faintly curving wall whichbisected the broad lower expanse of the station and disappeared through thecracked and buckled cement at her feet.
Tucking her phone away again, Madeleine lifted both hands andbrushed cautious fingertips against the surface. She expected it to be cool, slick and damp,like limestone in caves, but what she touched was velvet. Astonished, she pressed her hands againstwarm, smooth stone, sensuous against her skin. It felt as solid as marble, but somehow alive, as if waiting would bringa pulse, the beat of a buried heart.
And then light flashed, and she was picked up and thrownbackward into the dark.
Chapter Two
Madeleine lay suffocating in dust and near misses. Broken leg. Steel bar through her back. Broken neck. So many things shecould have done to herself. Worse wasmeasuring what damage she had actually done. She'd landed flat on her back, fortunately square on one of the deeperpiles of dust, which had erupted like a geyser around her. Her already-painful skull was screamingprotest at new abuse. But it was areluctance in her arms and legs, a disco
Pins and needles. Theyarrived in force, swept through her, the whole of her body jolting with ahornet swarm's stinging assault, but her spasmodic curl in reaction showed herthat she could move, even though the most she could manage at first was to curlfurther, to clutch knees, elbows, and try to breathe through lungs which buzzedand burned, while somehow not inhaling powder. It smelled like an approaching rainstorm.
Madeleine did not quite lose consciousness, but when thestinging receded she lay numb while a new layer of dust sifted down. She'd nearly killed herself. Thrown away the unspeakable good fortunewhich had given her a protective cocoon of metal when however many others atthe station had nothing to shield them. She had too much to do, too many images in her head which deservedrelease, and she had almost denied herself that. Sabotaged her own future just because ofsomething strange and beautiful, velvet beneath her touch.
Her phone, still tucked behind the padding of her bra, litup. The singer's crooning murmur was farfrom a spur to action, but Madeleine did manage to pluck the device from herchest and tell it hello.
Her mother's crisp voice, crackling with static. "Finally! Maddie, I'm on myway to the school. Stay inside. They say the cloud's heading our way, but weshould have time to get you home and seal the doors. Don't hang up – I'll let you know when I'mthere."