The girl's footsteps reached the street and stopped.
I heard her brother shout her name. I heard her answer.
Then I let go.
I didn't have the strength to do anything clever. I just rolled sideways off the beam, out from under it, with whatever my legs had left, and the momentum carried me exactly far enough. The building came down behind me in a long, grinding roar, and dust swallowed everything, and I lay on my back on the wet concrete with rain falling into my open mouth.
Everything hurt. None of it was real. It didn't seem to make much difference.
When the dust thinned, the two children were standing at the edge of the rubble, holding hands, looking at me. Their faces went from terror to wonder, and from wonder to something I didn't have a name for—and then the rain and the street and the children all thinned out together into mist, and I was lying on a cold mirrored floor, and the first mirror had gone dark.
I stayed down for a while.
